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> Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memo

> Recently I bought a router with the firm intent of installing OpenWRT, but I received a newer revision that had a different CPU, less RAM, and less flash memory. This also happened many years ago with Linksys (prior to Cisco). It’s not that uncommon for manufacturers to release new revisions of hardware without necessarily making it clear to the purchaser. If their purpose is to deliver a router and they can shave a few cents off the BOM with less RAM, but it still works with their software, why would they care. And once new revisions have been released into the supply chain, it can be hard to know exactly what version you are buying. In the Linksys case, IIRC they eventually re-released the first revision WRT54G as the WRT54GL (for Linux), so that people who wanted different firmware could get the exact hardware they wanted.

myself248 1y ago
Wouldn't it be nice if that was illegal? Sell whatever, but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label in the listing or something. We see this all the time with SSDs, where a high-spec model is released to reviewers, then a low-spec model is mass-produced and sold under the same model number. That's fraud, isn't it? Shouldn't it be?
- cesarb 1y ago
  > but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label In my experience, TP-Link always has the hardware revision on a label on the outside of the box.
  - forinti 1y ago
    It's small text on a small label that online vendors don't bother to check.
    - tremon 1y ago
      Then don't buy online, if you can't trust the vendor?
- tpmoney 1y ago
  It’s only fraud if they sold you or marketed to you on those specs. But at least for things like reflashing your router, short of a few explicit opener vendors (like glinet) and Linksys AFTER releasing the WRTGL version, router manufacturers aren’t usually advertising on how much ram or flash memory space they have, any more than car manufacturers are advertising how much flash memory is in their ECUs. It’s not an intended or marketed purpose, so they’re not going to be changing model numbers just because they made an internal update.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Changing the flash in a router is pretty understandable. Changing a router's CPU is going to affect core performance, and so does changing parts in an SSD, and core performance should totally count as being used to sell the product.
    - necovek 1y ago
      But you can optimize software and use slower hardware to maintain the same performance, as an example.
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        In theory. It doesn't happen often past initial launch of a product.
        necovek 1y ago
        If you can build a plausible case that you did this (eg. simply making your fw image smaller justifies using a smaller eMMC chip), and provide a few benchmarks that demonstrate equivalent performance in those scenarios, you'd be of the hook in any legal mandate to keep the performance the same even if your new hw revision ships with weaker hardware. This is even a common product development strategy: ship to market asap, optimize the margins later.
    - tpmoney 1y ago

myself248 1y ago

Wouldn't it be nice if that was illegal? Sell whatever, but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label in the listing or something. We see this all the time with SSDs, where a high-spec model is released to reviewers, then a low-spec model is mass-produced and sold under the same model number. That's fraud, isn't it? Shouldn't it be?

cesarb 1y ago
> but label it accurately, it's different hardware so it needs to have a different version label In my experience, TP-Link always has the hardware revision on a label on the outside of the box.
- forinti 1y ago
  It's small text on a small label that online vendors don't bother to check.
  - tremon 1y ago
    Then don't buy online, if you can't trust the vendor?
tpmoney 1y ago
It’s only fraud if they sold you or marketed to you on those specs. But at least for things like reflashing your router, short of a few explicit opener vendors (like glinet) and Linksys AFTER releasing the WRTGL version, router manufacturers aren’t usually advertising on how much ram or flash memory space they have, any more than car manufacturers are advertising how much flash memory is in their ECUs. It’s not an intended or marketed purpose, so they’re not going to be changing model numbers just because they made an internal update.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Changing the flash in a router is pretty understandable. Changing a router's CPU is going to affect core performance, and so does changing parts in an SSD, and core performance should totally count as being used to sell the product.
  - necovek 1y ago
    But you can optimize software and use slower hardware to maintain the same performance, as an example.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      In theory. It doesn't happen often past initial launch of a product.
      - necovek 1y ago
        If you can build a plausible case that you did this (eg. simply making your fw image smaller justifies using a smaller eMMC chip), and provide a few benchmarks that demonstrate equivalent performance in those scenarios, you'd be of the hook in any legal mandate to keep the performance the same even if your new hw revision ships with weaker hardware. This is even a common product development strategy: ship to market asap, optimize the margins later.
  - tpmoney 1y ago