Raspberry Pi is intentionally blocking RAM capacity upgrades
23 days ago by empireOfLove2 to c/technology
Their excuse definitely smells like bullshit. It just seems they want to do the Apple thing of making sure they get the money for the upgrade, plus a premium. Except even Apple has a technical reason they don't allow upgrades, which Raspberry Pi doesn't.
Raspberry pi is public. They have a clear profit motive behind the upsell. Clear as day.
Nah it’s not technical reasons, it’s just greed and form over function, the new MacBook Neo proves that if Apple wanted to they can make a user repairable and even upgradable laptop, they don’t because the EU hasn’t forced them yet
How does the new MacBook prove that? The way their processors are made it’s impossible to upgrade RAM after the fact.
That was a typo I meant the new MacBook Neo laptop
They already have authorized resellers, who they link to on their website. This problem would only come from unauthorized resellers, who would not qualify for warranty service. It might not help software support requests, but I don’t know how much support they offer for software since I don’t think they’re supplied with any. Anything hardware they should be asking for a receipt from an authorized reseller, and if the customer can’t provide it then it’s not covered by the warranty. And even if the customer can provide a receipt from an authorized reseller in their name, if it comes in for repair and has the wrong RAM then it’s not a warranty repair anyway (although I’m guessing for something this inexpensive they don’t repair individual units, they probably just send a replacement, so the counterfeit parts might not get noticed).
From a consumer freedom standpoint this is shitty. And it does allow them to sell an enthusiast model at a premium without competing with an after market modder.
But two things can be true. I don't think it's entirely unreasonable for the company to want to protect the integrity of the brand if unreliable after market sellers start releasing bad product indistinguishable from your own with your logo slapped on it.
Even if you have authorized resellers entrusted with doing the upgrades and audited for quality, if you leave the door open, there will be unauthorized mods on the market too. It does hurt not only Raspberry Pi, but the entire resell market if you can't trust the product to have their expected standard of quality. It still sucks, but I at least get the justification.
A few years back, I worked in an assembly plant for a car company. One time when I was doing a quality containment, I found out that something like 30-50 cars were found to have a very slightly misaligned roof piece when it was welded, and it causes a slight, but visible warp in the roof. It was otherwise fine. Still water proof, still structurally sound, just a cosmetic defect. They were all quarantined to be stripped of any easily removable components and then the remaining parts and body would be scrapped.
I asked why? Even if they didn't want to put them out to dealers with a visible defect, they were still safe and functional. They could still offer them to employees for sale at a discount and make far more back for them than its value as scrap. The answer was that it could hurt the value of the brand as a whole if low quality cars were put on the market, even if only for resale. It was worth the loss of these 30+ cars to maintain a consumer's high expectation of quality.
I still think it may have been better to allow employees an opportunity to get a new vehicle at a great price with only a cosmetic defect. But I do get the competing concern there. You do want things you buy from a big company to have reliable quality.
Fair.
Yeah load of bullshit
I knew it was happening the second they mentioned "IPO". Company was cooked.
Are there any companies that make comparable products? I've been thinking of making a simple and small and low power media computer and I'd rather it not be a raspberry pi anymore
Orange Pi, Banana Pi, plenty of other Chinese SBC makers who products don't necessarilly have names ending in Pi. Tons of those in places like Aliexpress. You can even try a Risk-V architecture if you're daring.
The problem is that their english language support is inferior, as is the software stack, plus the ecosystem is a lot smaller so there's a lot less info on those from other people out there. That said, as far as I can tell all of them have at least one Linux distro (at the very least ARMbian), some having more distros.
Still, it would be fine if all you want is a small computer with HDMI to turn it into a media player using Linux and something like Kodi.
Alternativelly, just get a Mini-PC with a low power intel chip like the N100 - which is actually cheaper than a Raspberri Pi 5 whilst being more powerful and with better peripheral compatibility since it has a PC architecture - and put the Linux with Kodi in it. Sure, it uses more power because it's not ARM, but not actually that much more (15w vs 8w for a Pi, if I remember it correctly).
Raspberri Pi devices are maybe twice the price of other devices with equivalent hardware, which means that the low-end low-power Mini-PCs are cheaper and yet more powerful and compatible than the high end Pi.
I have a mini PC just like that at home working as a TV Media Player (which a nice remote control and everything) and I even use it as a home server and home nas (remotelly controlled via web interfaces and SSH) since it's has far more power than needed for just being a media player.
Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi's are pure ass as media servers. They're profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.
Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it's too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.
A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes 'media' activities while gently sipping at electricity.
Well, I went for an N100 myself (and recommended it) because of its low power consumption (it has a 15W TDR), which makes it a good choice for an always on device which is how I operate my Mini-PC because it's also my home NAS.
That range of CPUs was design to consumer less power and most x86 CPUs consumer significantly more power than this.
I thought media decoding was like the one thing they were decent at. But yeah, for everything else I've always ended up severely disappointed by their usability.
For a long time I was using a tegra dev kit as an HTPC. Definitely not the cheapest option but I got it for free so it worked out great. I bet you can get the old TX1 boards pretty cheap these days, and they just run Ubuntu with some Tegra mods, but apparently can also run NIXOS as well.
Also, limited support, both in community size and time. Those Chinese manufacturing companies come and go like docker containers. They spin one up to sell some product for a while, then when they're done they dissolve it. If you want any support, you're on your own.
It's hard to imagine exactly what kind of person would want to build their own Linux media server but also actually needs to contact tech support for hardware they own outright.
Half the fun anyway is getting it to work at all, the other half is tweaking and getting it to work exactly the way you want.
I'm a $50-$100 "mystery Thinkpad from eBay" kind of guy. From what I gather, there are lots of us. Exactly zero times have I thought "oh but what if I need to contact Lenovo?" LMAO
The makers of both Orange Pi and Banana Pi have been around for years, over a decade at least for Orange Pi.
In fact in my experience SBC makers tend to be quite stable, possibly because those thinks are a lot more technically complex than, say, an electric kettle.
Asus NUC with Intel N150 is what I’ve been looking at. Up-board.org has a credit card sized dev board with the proc, if form factor is a requirement.
There is also the N350 with 8 cores for more power.
look up wyse terminals or micro pcs in youtube.
This guy has a ton of videos on the subject. Entertaining and informative.
There's a lot of good options, but for media you probably just want an x86 mini PC since they are way cheaper. Intel N100 based, or similar.
There's a blob in there you will never own
First time?
/j
Srs, I don’t think I’ve ever owned a consumer device that, as the other person points out, didn’t have blobs inside from the factory. Sure, ive manually replaced the BIOS with Libreboot and switched to blobless (software) WiFi chips, but then what about the EC blobs? The keyboard and mouse? If being fully FOSS predicates ownership, I don’t think any of us own our devices
How does LibreBoot work? Was it hard to set up?
It’s a coreboot distribution (FOSS BIOS/UEFI), so technically it works on more things than advertised.
To install it it does require a little bit of preparation. There’s a lot of commands you have to run using a custom compiler toolchain to build an image for your board. The hardest part is disassembling the laptop, if you have an older one, which is mostly what Libreboot targets.
yep and I/O isn't terrible to add. A CP2112 USB <--> I2C module is like $5 on amazon (and way less on AliExpress) and gets you an I2C port and a few GPIO all controllable through Python or libusb. The FT232H or CH347 modules are similar and offer SPI as well.
EnshittyPi.
If you had read the article instead of just blindly reacting to the title you would have seen that this is actually to prevent that.
I read the article. Fuck Raspberry Pi.
Yes, they are claiming that this is to protect us, the consumers, by preventing us from buying unofficially upgraded boards that may be unreliable or use counterfeit parts on the secondhand market.
But here's the fun part: That's a lie. They just don't want you upgrading your own hardware when you could pay them more instead.
It's a hobbyist product. If you put "safeguards" in to block tinkerers, you're dead to me.
The funniest thing about this is that Apple used the same excuse to defend parts locking. And every other company that limited the user's right to repair and upgrade their purchased products.
It's all BS. A company cares only about money, and they couldn't care less about your product performing slightly less than optimally, if it ever does. Apple did it for profit, car manufacturers did it for profit, John Deere did it for profit and Raspberry Pi did it for profit.
There's a bit of a difference in that your iPhone is (used to be) more likely to be swiped for parts (since the whole phone is unuseable, but the screen e.g is still worth a couple hundred) than anyone is to sell counterfeit raspberry pis for profit - and if anyone did do that, why's that even a problem? I know someone who successfully upgraded a Macbook Air to 8 GB back when they had the 4 GB option and that was also soldered RAM. All for his personal use, but the thing continued working and it's trivial to implement a check for original config by serial number.
I read the article, their 'reasoning' is bs
I bought the hardware, I as a consumer should be able to do whatever I want with it. If they were actually worried about resellers selling bad ram, they could have just left the detection in and warn the user of the modification instead of blocking it entirely.
Nahh, their reasoning is BS IMO. It's not an iPhone or something it's a hobby product for tinkering with.
If someone modifies an asic by soldering a new ram chip on it, that's grounds to null warranty, no? So their undue support claims is BS, ditto to the reputational damage (as if they aren't doing that right now).
Or better yet, why don't they modularize this component from the rest of the device?
The behaviour is particularly interesting because physically replacing the memory on a Raspberry Pi is already well outside the scope of an ordinary upgrade.
I mean... aren't hackers the target audience for Raspberry Pis?
Yeah, if the reasoning they give isn't just straight bullshit, then I guess I don't want to see them drown in support tickets. But it also seems like this move runs pretty counter to the whole point of the Raspberry Pi.
(Plus, can't resellers buy 2GB models, redo some of the screen printing, and sell them as 8GB models without even trying to upgrade the RAM to 8GB? That seems at least as bad as getting a Raspberry Pi with a dodgy 8GB RAM chip.)
Hey man I just push the buttons to make the green text happy; I don’t build ‘em
Pis are extremely popular for home labs, they can be used in tons of different ways.
For what it’s worth the original point of the Pi was to recreate the experience of the Commodore 64 or BBC Micro where they came with huge manuals with ample examples and were more or less bare hardware for cheap. Taking that metaphor all the way is how we got the 400 and 500.
Yeah, it sure is. It's a hobbyist product and they took away my ability to upgrade it. After 14 years of buying these boards, they decided now, during a global RAM shortage, to tighten the leash...
I can solder new RAM into my MacBook or Nvidia GPU, but Raspberry Pi is the first to implement physical locks preventing RAM upgrades. What a fucking joke.
I can solder new RAM into my MacBook or Nvidia GPU
You still have to extract and modify the bios to recognize and address the new ram in those cases, you can't just "drop in" more ram.
That's what's being locked down, here. Raspberry Pi devices used to not care if you did so because the firmware was open.
I personally know someone who installed extra RAM on a Macbook Air at least, didn't require modifying any firmware IIRC. It just detected it. Not sure how GPUs are these days, though.
So if you take a macbook air with soldered-on ram, which was available in 2 configurations of 16GB and 32GB, those two configs are baked into the bios, you just need the correct density, speed, and CAS latency to go from 16 to 32.
But if you stray from what's in the firmware/bios, you'll need to figure out how to get the ram recognized so it can be used.
In a raspberry pi, the known configs are in the firmware, so resellers were taking cheap low-ram pis, replacing the ram with double-density and selling them for a big markup from their cost, but lower than a retail RPI.
The new policy would force these resellers to mod the bios to keep doing it.
I can't solder to save my life, but this still makes me take them off the list for potential future boards.
Granted, I prerfer RISC-V where posible, but a few things still need ARM.
Now I need to look around for a alternative to two Pi5s, the Pi4, and Pi Zero that were on my list.
I'm now trying to imagine what series of events would lead to you being shot because of subpar soldering skills.
This makes sense. Hear me out.
A CM5 is a device designed to be embedded into other devices. I believe most of their sales come from just that- companies that make other things, and build a CM5 into them rather than design their own control board.
As you go up through the model tiers, the price increases faster than the added price of memory. IE, if the 2gb one is $20, and the difference between a 2gb memory chip and an 8gb memory chip is $10, the 8gb unit isn't $30 it's $60. You pay RPi a premium for the high end products.
Desoldering RAM off a production PCB is something no hobbyist is going to bother with. BUT, a company buying 10,000 of these to build into their product MIGHT find it cost effective to setup a production line to do so. And they could probably resell the 2gb chips.
Point being- while I don't like this, and I don't like the ideas it represents, I also understand why they are doing it. It's not about us, the hobbyists. It's about the manufacturers that build compute modules into their products.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is governed by a Board of Trustees that is responsible for ensuring that we use our resources effectively to achieve our charitable goals.
It seems the Trustees can't be trusted
But it's a foundation, with a charitable goal....
So they are a company but also a foundation.
How?
Yeah just like cancer needs to spread and grow. It's just what cancer does. It does make sense.
But, never the less, we're still going to cut the cancer out someday.
According to the article you can still do this. It's just you can't replace a 2 GB with an 8 GB because the board will still only recognize 2GB of that chip.
This is to prevent the resellers from buying 2 GB boards for cheap, replacing them with cheap 8 GB chips, and then reselling them for just under retail of the official 8 GB boards.
The article also states that you likely can't use just any compatible chip, the part number is baked into the board, so you might not even be able to swap out a 2GB SK Hynix with a 2GB Samsung chip
What's the problem with a company doing what they want with hardware they purchased and own?
In concept nothing. But do you also recognize a legitimate business model of selling multiple products at different price points, spaced out more than the different cost of production?
And speaking hypothetically with some stupid numbers is it your argument that they should be able to purchase the $20 product, add $10 of parts, and either use it or sell it as the $200 product?
So hypothetically.
Let's say a raw memory chip, is $2 $4 and $10 for a 4gb, 8gb, and 16gb raw chip.
Let's say the RPi Compute module are $50, $70, and $100 for the 4gb, 8gb and 16gb versions. From smallest to largest that's a $50 price increase for a $8 cost increase.
Is that an 'illegitimate' business model? Honest question I'm curious where you're at.
In concept nothing. But do you also recognize a legitimate business model of selling multiple products at different price points, spaced out more than the different cost of production?
Yes of course, but if the spacing is too much then stuff like this starts to happen.
is it your argument that they should be able to purchase the $20 product, add $10 of parts, and either use it or sell it as the $200 product?
Yes, once I buy something it's mine to do with as I want. Obviously warranty may be void in some cases, but otherwise I own it.
If the market exists that is willing to buy it as a $200 product then Raspberry Pi should sell them for that price, their costs would be much lower than someone who buys a Pi at retail, buys new RAM chips, spends the time to desolder and solder on the new RAM chips, market their 'product', and deal with shipping it. If the knockoff is $200 and the same-spec legitimate Pi with warranty is $200, the knockoff won't be around for long.
Yes of course, but if the spacing is too much then stuff like this starts to happen.
agreed
If the knockoff is $200 and the same-spec legitimate Pi with warranty is $200, the knockoff won’t be around for long.
Supply and demand aren't a black and white thing, it's a sliding scalre.
More likely the knockoff will be $180 and comes with a knockoff warranty- we make it for $40 incl. parts and labor and sell it for $180, so if it breaks we'll just send you a new one and we're still ahead financially.
What if the knockoff isn't $180 but is $80? Under that condition who would buy the $200 one? If the thing sucks you could literally buy a spare and still be ahead.
shittification of technology by the ai companies much less innovation much higher cost much higher inflation caused by ai NOT deflation as elon and trump promised by ai. more gas lighting more hot air. less and less productivity.
also raspberry pi is made for the DIY community else just buy a PC delusional doesn't even know what their product is and was built for. my how the new culture are so far away from its roots after getting popular. this is why never ever let them become too big to not care about their core like all fang stonks and nvda google meta apple microsoft amazon all need to be canceled culturally. have no loyalty to any of them unless they give much better prices and product the answer is no and lower your prices.
I'm not really familiar with this industry, but as far as I know, there are quite a few pi-named alternatives from China. Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Lichee Pi, and there are probably more. Unless there's something only Raspberry Pi can offer, this looks suicide to me.
There are a lot of them but most suffer from chinese hardware support problem (e.g. they are unsopported beyond what did they ship with softwarewise, provide close to zero documentation, and have dozens models sold at any one time), rpi themselves aren't all that libre and always shipped with blobs and had bullshit excuses about it. Anyway rp2350 is the best thing that raspberry produces right now.
That's my experience too.
That said at the higher end (Raspberry Pi 5) its actually cheaper to get a Mini-PC with a low-power intel chip like the N100 than a Pi and it's more powerful, more extendable, more compatible, with a much better and well supported tech stack (because that's an actual PC) and you get the whole device already, not just a board that you have to add the box and everything else to make a computer from.
Maybe at the level of the little SBCs the rp2350 is good value, but that stuff is more towards the embedded systems side (high end, though, beyond things like ESP32) than a general consumer computer.
You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.
Google have an imei checker for their phones. Google.
You could check that it is real and active.
Raspberry pi could allow people to check their board model on their site to see if they are getting the right amount of RAM. They could devise a method to allow checking the correct RAM is attached and not a recovered stick off another board of the same size.
Ford intentionally blocking Engine Horsepower Upgrades ** --- Ford President is quoted - Who the F* is that Carol Shelby? What's he know about cars. For all we know he's buying up Mustangs and selling them with his upgraded engines!? What about the unwitting customers!???"
Radxa and orange pi are better anyway.
I have to disagree. They are better hardware with way worse software support. Pi's one big selling point is how out of the box friendly they are, meanwhile getting an orange pi flashed and booting Linux is an interesting experience using a Chinese flash writer with no English translation (back when I tried an orange pi 4).
you can also use the raspberry pi flasher, ironically.
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The solution to this decidedly rare problem is authorized resellers, not an arbitrary block on a very technically demanding upgrade.
That's assuming this is the actual problem though. If the problem is actually "We want to make more money by charging extra for 'enthusiast models'" then this is the correct tactic to ensure that you aren't undercut by cheap labor.
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