4 ms·

Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips

187 points by edandersen 11d ago

dannyw 11d ago
That's quite disappointing. Whose hardware is it anyways? Yours, when you pay for it.
- TheChaplain 11d ago
  Except that they have to deal with angry people who bought a dodgy chipped unit. Yeah it's stupid, but people doesn't know better, they'll complain loudly Raspberry PI is sh* it doesn't work and the Pi Foundation are scammers. I can understand why they don't want that.
  - pmontra 11d ago
    Replacing a part voids warranty, this is common and well understood by everybody. I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
    - alibarber 11d ago
      In the GitHub issue posted as another comment it's clear that what has happened is: - 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage - Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis - Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality) - The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void - RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked. The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.
      - ryandrake 11d ago
        It's not Pi's responsibility to police what people do with devices after the devices are sold. If bootleggers are modifying the devices and reselling fraudulent versions, that's between the buyer and the bootlegger and marketplace site where the second transaction happened.
  - functionmouse 11d ago
    this is such a lousy excuse
  - Brian_K_White 11d ago
    Why they want or don't want something doesn't matter at all. There is always a reason someone does any bad thing. There is always obviously some advantage to the perpetrator. The fact they are only reacting to some other bad actions doesn't excuse it because there are any number of ways to to react. This way is the one way they chose when they have infinity to choose from.
  - dsr_ 11d ago
    They could permanently mark the board when they install the RAM on it. Since, presumably, nobody would try to sell a board with less RAM on it than shipped, a count-down scheme instead of count-up would work. 16GB board: no holes drilled in a marked area; 8GB: one hole drilled; 4GB: two holes drilled; 2GB: three holes drilled.
    - Aurornis 11d ago
      These things don’t matter to buyers. When the board doesn’t work right or crashes a lot they don’t care which step in their personal supply chain is at fault. They demand the original manufacturer give them a new one for free, which they believe is the terms of the warranty.
    - throwaway85825 11d ago
      That would be the honest way to do it.
  - IshKebab 11d ago
    I seriously doubt that is any more than a theoretical problem, and even if it isn't, so what? People start a warranty claim, send the boards to RPi, they run diagnostics, detect the changed RAM and deny the claim.
    - jamesh98 11d ago
      [dead]
  - adolph 11d ago
    What a world we live in that hot air reworking RAM on a SBC makes any sense. I can kind of understand shanzhai GPUs to get around export restrictions, but RPis?
    - paleotrope 11d ago
      I would agree except we still live in a world where making a few dollars more a day is a perfectly valid way to make money in alot of places. A bunch of guys in some electronic sweatshop in Vietnam or Indonesia working on pis is a reality.
    - saturn8601 11d ago
      Maybe your frame of reference is wrong. It makes perfect sense when you have a society with overproduction of people with STEM skills, overcapacity in manufacturing, and has ~18-20% youth unemployment.
- sbarre 11d ago
  I find their explanation to be completely reasonable. As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization. You'd be ok with that trade? Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
  - Isamu 11d ago
    >Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own. Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks
  - VCFundedGenYer 11d ago
    The entire point of the RPi is the user can do whatever they want with it. So no, it's not reasonable at all. Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.
    - camgunz 11d ago
      No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. What you're advocating would considerably increase the price of a Raspberry Pi to pay for the additional support burden (if this is even reasonable--should they hire a bunch of people just to answer "you bought a RPi w/ bootleg RAM" over and over again?), and that defeats the point.
      - dwedge 11d ago
        > No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. This hasn't been true for 5 or 6 years and there is very little reason to buy one over a second hand 1L PC these days. They are expensive and notorious for screwing SD cards. To put it into perspective, an 8GB raspberry pi with a 32GB SD card and cable but no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse is 251GBP. 35% the price of a macbook neo.
themgt 11d ago
So they applied this gate in the rpi EEPROM, which is closed source. https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761 https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
- BlackRabbit1 11d ago
  Who invests a few tokens finding the hardcoded check? AFAIR the EEPROM mostly uses the VideoCore instruction set.
functionmouse 11d ago
Raspberry Pis, save for RP silicon like rp2040, have always been locked down proprietary black boxes.
- deleted 11d ago
  [deleted]
Aurornis 11d ago
There were sellers buying the smallest RAM units, changing the RAM chips, and then reselling them as the higher RAM SKUs. The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts. When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
- DoctorOetker 11d ago
  could it be construed as anti-competitive to block end-users or resellers from swapping RAM?
  - Aurornis 11d ago
    No. Price discrimination and locking hardware are not illegal.
    - smilespray 11d ago
      You'd be well advised to remember there is a world beyond your visible horizon.
      - Aurornis 11d ago
        I prefer to stay grounded in the reality of how the world works when responding to questions about legalities.
        smilespray 11d ago
        What you said isn't true for quite a few countries.
        iso1631 11d ago
        That's quite possible, but could you name a couple where locking a raspberry pi type of computer would be illegal?
squeegeeninja 11d ago
The real story here is that people are selling modded Pis as higher-memory versions. And this check actually caught them + is circumventable. The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud.
- locknitpicker 11d ago
  > The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud. What fraud are you speaking of?
  - petu 11d ago
    Selling modded board as official 8GB SKU with reliability/warranty expectations.
  - alibarber 11d ago
    The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.
    - horsawlarway 11d ago
      Yeah, I'm split on this because 1: I think people should be able to replace chips on an RPi as they desire, so I don't love that they're actively preventing this 2: As a buyer, I absolutely want to know if I'm buying an RPi that has had chips replaced 3: A shady seller changing the SKU to mimic a better board after changing chips is just flat out fraud. --- It's the classic "Mattress tag" case - it should be illegal to remove as a seller, and fine as the final customer. But that's really hard to functionally enforce.
      - alibarber 11d ago
        Absolutely agree. It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly. I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM. There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.
kingstnap 11d ago
I mean the Pi currently makes little to no sense to buy anyway. So locking down parts barely moves the needle. The value proposition is unbelievably bad at spending upwards of $423 CAD for a 16GB Raspberry Pi. Which is literally just the bare board. The 2026 financial report is apparently this Thursday on Sept 24. So will see how this played out for them. Their stock is all over the place anyway with low float.
- Palomides 11d ago
  you can buy a variety of pi models in the range of $50 to $15, so what?
- bluGill 11d ago
  The pi is useful because it is well supported. Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working. You need to plan on spending your time writing/maintain the drivers to keep your system working. Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
  - mschuster91 11d ago
    > Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers. Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.
  - selfhoster11 11d ago
    I have at one point faced the “should I buy x86 instead”, and decided low-power Intel CPUs make it viable. Guess I’m gonna pick the x86.
    - bluGill 11d ago
      The latest low power Intel is very nice. ARM beats it for doing nothing, but when getting things done things are more complex.
juancn 11d ago
It would be much more user friendly if there was a way to check the serial of a particular PI and see it's original hardware config, manufacture date, and so on.
- colbyaley 11d ago
  In practice, nobody will.
VCFundedGenYer 11d ago
Rich of them to claim that "users will complain" when their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers. What a terrible stance.
- _joel 11d ago
  Maybe originally, I'm sure their larger market share is now the embedded market. The whole compute module thing.
  - jamesh98 11d ago
    [dead]
- dave78 11d ago
  > their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers I don't think that's been true for a long time. Their main market is commercial users now - reference what happened with COVID shortages and RPi prioritizing nearly all of their capacity to commercial users, leaving tinkerers with little to no stock.
  - PunchyHamster 11d ago
    I'd imagine that will be for compute module, not the other SKUs ?
    - dave78 11d ago
      When there were shortages and they were rationing, they explicitly stated it was to protect their commercial customers. The shortages were across all SKUs, not limited to compute modules. I think there's actually a lot of commercial use of the regular boards as well. Plenty of products for which a Pi is sufficiently capable and for which they can use something off-the-shelf rather than developing a custom PCB.
- alibarber 11d ago
  It's tough but I'd still wager that more hobbyists and tinkers will complain when their 8GB Pi that they bought from Amazon, or anywhere really, won't actually run their project that they wanted to use 8GB for properly because that 8GB is little more than a fiction.
speedping 11d ago
Raspberry Pi is going down the way iRobot did, succumbing to pressure from chinese players like radxa or orange pi. Sad to see industry pioneers lose to players that copy them and undercut prices using cheap labor.
- 6SixTy 11d ago
  My understanding is that Raspberry Pi differentiates itself primarily with software support, which is hard to duplicate trivially like a physical device.
- jamesh98 11d ago
  [dead]
- edg5000 11d ago
  Why do you think they are going down? My impression is that their prices are actually good. Especially for CM4 compatible alternatives. They fab in China just like everybody else. Although they do some or all assembly (soldering) in UK I think.
- MrBuddyCasino 11d ago
  > undercut prices using cheap labor Its called competition. Should those „cheap labourers“ not have a job?
kmeisthax 11d ago
I think this is really dumb and stupid. Not that I don't agree with their reasoning - it's actually very reasonable - but that I have a lot of distaste from "saving the customer from themselves" type antifeatures. Practically speaking, though, this antifeature doesn't affect most people, because I don't think most people are willing to take a heat gun to a microsoldered part just to save a few bucks on RAM. If the RAM was socketed somehow - which at this scale and performance tier is not possible - then I'd probably be way angrier.
- dofm 11d ago
  This is more "from successful fraudsters" than "from themselves".
liendolucas 11d ago
Why not just paint the original chips with some special ink that says VOID IF TAMPERED over the RAM chips and the board? Pretty much like other hardware manufacturers do with seals or stickers, wouldn't this solve the issue?
- dofm 11d ago
  When your fraudsters have near OEM-level resources, perhaps not? (To be clear, I don't know either way; I'm just assuming that this was contemplated at the time because it's easier)
  - tensor 11d ago
    If they can make it not work with 3rd party chips, they can make it have a internal tamper code instead. If the Chinese sellers can somehow remove the internal tamper code then they'd also be able to bypass the current lock, which they seem they can't. This is pretty clearly just them trying to block resellers that mod their boards as that removes price pressure from them. It's end user hostile, full stop.
ChrisArchitect 11d ago
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783849
mschuster91 11d ago
> raspberrypi locked and limited conversation to collaborators Way to read the room, jfc. Hardbricking hardware is not the answer, see FTDI. I get why they are doing that... but I think there should be a way for users to flash a separate firmware, maybe tied to the hardware key similar to the old h264/mpeg license, that allows the usage of a modified board. PS: Arrest Sam Altman who caused all of this mess in the first place with his market manipulation stunt.
oxcartctl 11d ago
[dead]
throwa356262 11d ago
I think the bigger problem is that this was pushed as a firmware update, bricking previously working devices. Remember when FTDI did this and suddenly medical equipment at some hospital stopped working?
geerlingguy 11d ago
Reading through the EEPROM repo issue[1] makes me a little more sympathetic to the "feature", but I still don't like it at all. It might help in the short term to stop dodgy resellers who mod the boards with cheap upgraded RAM to make a buck or two... But the Pi itself is always taking one step forward, one step back in terms of firmware. I've been tinkering with some Qualcomm boards from Radxa and things are slightly better there, though you don't have anywhere near the ecosystem you get with Pi (or onboarding niceties). [1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761 https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
- bri3d 11d ago
  Really? I found that issue and all of the related ones really disingenuous from the Pi folks; they just stonewalled everyone with "contact your hardware seller" rather than explaining what was going on even at the glossed-over level they managed in the forum thread. I do feel for them; they're between a rock and a hard place with mis-labeled clone boards. But their implementation seems to be the most hostile and opaque possible way to achieve these goals (which I also understand from an anti-cloning standpoint, but especially anymore, it's going to get reversed anyway).
  - alibarber 11d ago
    I dunno - I think the victims in a lot of these cases aren't stupid. They can't contact the seller because they bought it from 'some guy' who's disappeared into the night. They know they've been had and are trying to get a knock-off board working at the expense of [the time of] someone completely unrelated to this. It's pretty normal for the first port of call / warranty claim for a busted item to be the dealer that sold it to you.
    - bri3d 11d ago
      I absolutely agree that engaging with these people beyond "we added checks to ensure your board has the RAM it came with, and this one failed" is a waste of time, but I think that at least providing that level of response would be much more aligned with the image they're still trying to project than just stonewalling entirely.
RandomGerm4n 11d ago
I think they should instead just introduce a clear system for verifying that a Raspberry Pi is genuine. For example, a code printed directly on the device. If you enter that code on the website, you can see exactly which model it belongs to and how often it has been used. That way, you could determine whether a Raspberry Pi is new or used and whether it has been modified. I saw that once at a thermal paste manufacturer. They used it to solve the problem of counterfeit thermal paste.You just have to get people to actually use the system and tell anyone else who asks for support but doesn't have an original copy to GTFO.This would allow them to avoid the increased support burden without limiting people's ability to upgrade their Raspberry Pi.
- kiicia 11d ago
  fun fact is that some chinese electronics manufacturers do exactly that with their products (even simple ones like led night lights), holographic qr-code on box that can be scanned and verified without opening box and second code inside box to verify box wasn't swapped
- colejohnson66 11d ago
  Chinese scammers have gotten good at abusing those "codes" by having a list of "known good" codes and printing them on multiple units. And because those holographic codes some companies used are printed in China, the scammers just use the same equipment during the night shift. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failures/ https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failure...
  - indrora 11d ago
    There are methods of doing so that identify multiple, harder to falsify things. One that I have seen is HMAC(serial||SKU) as a datamatrix/QR, laser-etched onto the top silkscreen and burned into a PROM.
jorritposthuma 11d ago
I love how we think we own our hardware, but secretly we don't. Surprised though that even a Raspberry Pi now thinks this as well. They grew big _because_ of tinkering...
- aeve890 11d ago
  Doesn't matter. At the current RPI prices is just better to buy a mini PC or any of the alternative SBC like the orange pi.
zb3 11d ago
We can't normalize this cash-grab user-hostile late stage capitalism bullshit. Their argument assumes users are idiots - we had swappable components for years, and while there were cheating actors, market has invented things like brands and trust, you know? You don't have to buy models from the sellers you don't trust, nobody forces you to.
yjftsjthsd-h 11d ago
Alright, what would it take to make a completely open source firmware for the pi? I think there was some prior effort that got discontinued...
- gunalx 11d ago
  Its a closed broadcom chip. Basically futile or heavily resource intensive to try.
mg794613 11d ago
"We do it to protect you and ensure our quality" Nah, they got big enough and now you think you can pull Apple tricks, good luck with that.
jauntywundrkind 11d ago
I like the Chromebook solution for tampering: allow people to go crazy but throw up a big scary warning on boot!
snvzz 11d ago
Raspberry Pi been scummy for a while e.g. locking codecs behind extra payments. It seems they've gone full mask off at last. Got here via Jeff Geerling coverage[0]. 0. https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ
- philpem 11d ago
  The codecs at least had a reasonable explanation - it took a few dollars off the price of the unit (licensing fees to Microsoft and the like). There was also nothing stopping you from decoding MPEG2 with ffmpeg on the CPU. Those specific codecs aren't even present on newer Pi units.
- winkelmann 11d ago
  The codec unlock is a thing of the past pretty much, they dropped the affected hardware decoders entirely in the Pi4/5 [1]. In any case, if the legends of Pis being genuinely affordable options back then are true, I'm fine with it. A lot of (probably most) use-cases don't require these codecs, so paying $1.20 and $2.40 respectively seems reasonable for those who do need it. [1] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/
varispeed 11d ago
> We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size. Get fucked. Clearly you want to make all the profit and stop people from upgrading their devices.
ChocolateGod 11d ago
They should make a form where you input the serial number and apply for a key, applying that key in config.txt disables the hardware verification checks on the bootrom.

187 points by edandersen 11d ago

dannyw 11d ago

That's quite disappointing. Whose hardware is it anyways? Yours, when you pay for it.

TheChaplain 11d ago
Except that they have to deal with angry people who bought a dodgy chipped unit. Yeah it's stupid, but people doesn't know better, they'll complain loudly Raspberry PI is sh* it doesn't work and the Pi Foundation are scammers. I can understand why they don't want that.
- pmontra 11d ago
  Replacing a part voids warranty, this is common and well understood by everybody. I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
  - alibarber 11d ago
    In the GitHub issue posted as another comment it's clear that what has happened is: - 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage - Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis - Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality) - The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void - RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked. The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.
    - ryandrake 11d ago
      It's not Pi's responsibility to police what people do with devices after the devices are sold. If bootleggers are modifying the devices and reselling fraudulent versions, that's between the buyer and the bootlegger and marketplace site where the second transaction happened.
- functionmouse 11d ago
  this is such a lousy excuse
- Brian_K_White 11d ago
  Why they want or don't want something doesn't matter at all. There is always a reason someone does any bad thing. There is always obviously some advantage to the perpetrator. The fact they are only reacting to some other bad actions doesn't excuse it because there are any number of ways to to react. This way is the one way they chose when they have infinity to choose from.
- dsr_ 11d ago
  They could permanently mark the board when they install the RAM on it. Since, presumably, nobody would try to sell a board with less RAM on it than shipped, a count-down scheme instead of count-up would work. 16GB board: no holes drilled in a marked area; 8GB: one hole drilled; 4GB: two holes drilled; 2GB: three holes drilled.
  - Aurornis 11d ago
    These things don’t matter to buyers. When the board doesn’t work right or crashes a lot they don’t care which step in their personal supply chain is at fault. They demand the original manufacturer give them a new one for free, which they believe is the terms of the warranty.
  - throwaway85825 11d ago
    That would be the honest way to do it.
- IshKebab 11d ago
  I seriously doubt that is any more than a theoretical problem, and even if it isn't, so what? People start a warranty claim, send the boards to RPi, they run diagnostics, detect the changed RAM and deny the claim.
  - jamesh98 11d ago
    [dead]
- adolph 11d ago
  What a world we live in that hot air reworking RAM on a SBC makes any sense. I can kind of understand shanzhai GPUs to get around export restrictions, but RPis?
  - paleotrope 11d ago
    I would agree except we still live in a world where making a few dollars more a day is a perfectly valid way to make money in alot of places. A bunch of guys in some electronic sweatshop in Vietnam or Indonesia working on pis is a reality.
  - saturn8601 11d ago
    Maybe your frame of reference is wrong. It makes perfect sense when you have a society with overproduction of people with STEM skills, overcapacity in manufacturing, and has ~18-20% youth unemployment.
sbarre 11d ago
I find their explanation to be completely reasonable. As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization. You'd be ok with that trade? Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
- Isamu 11d ago
  >Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own. Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks
- VCFundedGenYer 11d ago
  The entire point of the RPi is the user can do whatever they want with it. So no, it's not reasonable at all. Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.
  - camgunz 11d ago
    No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. What you're advocating would considerably increase the price of a Raspberry Pi to pay for the additional support burden (if this is even reasonable--should they hire a bunch of people just to answer "you bought a RPi w/ bootleg RAM" over and over again?), and that defeats the point.
    - dwedge 11d ago
      > No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. This hasn't been true for 5 or 6 years and there is very little reason to buy one over a second hand 1L PC these days. They are expensive and notorious for screwing SD cards. To put it into perspective, an 8GB raspberry pi with a 32GB SD card and cable but no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse is 251GBP. 35% the price of a macbook neo.

themgt 11d ago

So they applied this gate in the rpi EEPROM, which is closed source. https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761 https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761

BlackRabbit1 11d ago
Who invests a few tokens finding the hardcoded check? AFAIR the EEPROM mostly uses the VideoCore instruction set.

functionmouse 11d ago

Raspberry Pis, save for RP silicon like rp2040, have always been locked down proprietary black boxes.

deleted 11d ago
[deleted]

Aurornis 11d ago

There were sellers buying the smallest RAM units, changing the RAM chips, and then reselling them as the higher RAM SKUs. The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts. When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.

DoctorOetker 11d ago
could it be construed as anti-competitive to block end-users or resellers from swapping RAM?
- Aurornis 11d ago
  No. Price discrimination and locking hardware are not illegal.
  - smilespray 11d ago
    You'd be well advised to remember there is a world beyond your visible horizon.
    - Aurornis 11d ago
      I prefer to stay grounded in the reality of how the world works when responding to questions about legalities.
      - smilespray 11d ago
        What you said isn't true for quite a few countries.
        iso1631 11d ago
        That's quite possible, but could you name a couple where locking a raspberry pi type of computer would be illegal?

squeegeeninja 11d ago

The real story here is that people are selling modded Pis as higher-memory versions. And this check actually caught them + is circumventable. The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud.

locknitpicker 11d ago
> The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud. What fraud are you speaking of?
- petu 11d ago
  Selling modded board as official 8GB SKU with reliability/warranty expectations.
- alibarber 11d ago
  The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.
  - horsawlarway 11d ago
    Yeah, I'm split on this because 1: I think people should be able to replace chips on an RPi as they desire, so I don't love that they're actively preventing this 2: As a buyer, I absolutely want to know if I'm buying an RPi that has had chips replaced 3: A shady seller changing the SKU to mimic a better board after changing chips is just flat out fraud. --- It's the classic "Mattress tag" case - it should be illegal to remove as a seller, and fine as the final customer. But that's really hard to functionally enforce.
    - alibarber 11d ago
      Absolutely agree. It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly. I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM. There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.

kingstnap 11d ago

I mean the Pi currently makes little to no sense to buy anyway. So locking down parts barely moves the needle. The value proposition is unbelievably bad at spending upwards of $423 CAD for a 16GB Raspberry Pi. Which is literally just the bare board. The 2026 financial report is apparently this Thursday on Sept 24. So will see how this played out for them. Their stock is all over the place anyway with low float.

Palomides 11d ago
you can buy a variety of pi models in the range of $50 to $15, so what?
bluGill 11d ago
The pi is useful because it is well supported. Either buy a x86, or buy pi - anything else and good luck keeping it working. You need to plan on spending your time writing/maintain the drivers to keep your system working. Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
- mschuster91 11d ago
  > Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers. Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.
- selfhoster11 11d ago
  I have at one point faced the “should I buy x86 instead”, and decided low-power Intel CPUs make it viable. Guess I’m gonna pick the x86.
  - bluGill 11d ago
    The latest low power Intel is very nice. ARM beats it for doing nothing, but when getting things done things are more complex.

juancn 11d ago

It would be much more user friendly if there was a way to check the serial of a particular PI and see it's original hardware config, manufacture date, and so on.

colbyaley 11d ago
In practice, nobody will.

VCFundedGenYer 11d ago

Rich of them to claim that "users will complain" when their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers. What a terrible stance.

_joel 11d ago
Maybe originally, I'm sure their larger market share is now the embedded market. The whole compute module thing.
- jamesh98 11d ago
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dave78 11d ago
> their platform is built for hobbiests and tinkerers I don't think that's been true for a long time. Their main market is commercial users now - reference what happened with COVID shortages and RPi prioritizing nearly all of their capacity to commercial users, leaving tinkerers with little to no stock.
- PunchyHamster 11d ago
  I'd imagine that will be for compute module, not the other SKUs ?
  - dave78 11d ago
    When there were shortages and they were rationing, they explicitly stated it was to protect their commercial customers. The shortages were across all SKUs, not limited to compute modules. I think there's actually a lot of commercial use of the regular boards as well. Plenty of products for which a Pi is sufficiently capable and for which they can use something off-the-shelf rather than developing a custom PCB.
alibarber 11d ago
It's tough but I'd still wager that more hobbyists and tinkers will complain when their 8GB Pi that they bought from Amazon, or anywhere really, won't actually run their project that they wanted to use 8GB for properly because that 8GB is little more than a fiction.

speedping 11d ago

Raspberry Pi is going down the way iRobot did, succumbing to pressure from chinese players like radxa or orange pi. Sad to see industry pioneers lose to players that copy them and undercut prices using cheap labor.

6SixTy 11d ago
My understanding is that Raspberry Pi differentiates itself primarily with software support, which is hard to duplicate trivially like a physical device.
jamesh98 11d ago
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edg5000 11d ago
Why do you think they are going down? My impression is that their prices are actually good. Especially for CM4 compatible alternatives. They fab in China just like everybody else. Although they do some or all assembly (soldering) in UK I think.
MrBuddyCasino 11d ago
> undercut prices using cheap labor Its called competition. Should those „cheap labourers“ not have a job?

kmeisthax 11d ago

I think this is really dumb and stupid. Not that I don't agree with their reasoning - it's actually very reasonable - but that I have a lot of distaste from "saving the customer from themselves" type antifeatures. Practically speaking, though, this antifeature doesn't affect most people, because I don't think most people are willing to take a heat gun to a microsoldered part just to save a few bucks on RAM. If the RAM was socketed somehow - which at this scale and performance tier is not possible - then I'd probably be way angrier.

dofm 11d ago
This is more "from successful fraudsters" than "from themselves".

liendolucas 11d ago

Why not just paint the original chips with some special ink that says VOID IF TAMPERED over the RAM chips and the board? Pretty much like other hardware manufacturers do with seals or stickers, wouldn't this solve the issue?

dofm 11d ago
When your fraudsters have near OEM-level resources, perhaps not? (To be clear, I don't know either way; I'm just assuming that this was contemplated at the time because it's easier)
- tensor 11d ago
  If they can make it not work with 3rd party chips, they can make it have a internal tamper code instead. If the Chinese sellers can somehow remove the internal tamper code then they'd also be able to bypass the current lock, which they seem they can't. This is pretty clearly just them trying to block resellers that mod their boards as that removes price pressure from them. It's end user hostile, full stop.

ChrisArchitect 11d ago

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783849 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49783849

mschuster91 11d ago

> raspberrypi locked and limited conversation to collaborators Way to read the room, jfc. Hardbricking hardware is not the answer, see FTDI. I get why they are doing that... but I think there should be a way for users to flash a separate firmware, maybe tied to the hardware key similar to the old h264/mpeg license, that allows the usage of a modified board. PS: Arrest Sam Altman who caused all of this mess in the first place with his market manipulation stunt.

oxcartctl 11d ago

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throwa356262 11d ago

I think the bigger problem is that this was pushed as a firmware update, bricking previously working devices. Remember when FTDI did this and suddenly medical equipment at some hospital stopped working?

geerlingguy 11d ago

Reading through the EEPROM repo issue[1] makes me a little more sympathetic to the "feature", but I still don't like it at all. It might help in the short term to stop dodgy resellers who mod the boards with cheap upgraded RAM to make a buck or two... But the Pi itself is always taking one step forward, one step back in terms of firmware. I've been tinkering with some Qualcomm boards from Radxa and things are slightly better there, though you don't have anywhere near the ecosystem you get with Pi (or onboarding niceties). [1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761 https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761

bri3d 11d ago
Really? I found that issue and all of the related ones really disingenuous from the Pi folks; they just stonewalled everyone with "contact your hardware seller" rather than explaining what was going on even at the glossed-over level they managed in the forum thread. I do feel for them; they're between a rock and a hard place with mis-labeled clone boards. But their implementation seems to be the most hostile and opaque possible way to achieve these goals (which I also understand from an anti-cloning standpoint, but especially anymore, it's going to get reversed anyway).
- alibarber 11d ago
  I dunno - I think the victims in a lot of these cases aren't stupid. They can't contact the seller because they bought it from 'some guy' who's disappeared into the night. They know they've been had and are trying to get a knock-off board working at the expense of [the time of] someone completely unrelated to this. It's pretty normal for the first port of call / warranty claim for a busted item to be the dealer that sold it to you.
  - bri3d 11d ago
    I absolutely agree that engaging with these people beyond "we added checks to ensure your board has the RAM it came with, and this one failed" is a waste of time, but I think that at least providing that level of response would be much more aligned with the image they're still trying to project than just stonewalling entirely.

RandomGerm4n 11d ago

I think they should instead just introduce a clear system for verifying that a Raspberry Pi is genuine. For example, a code printed directly on the device. If you enter that code on the website, you can see exactly which model it belongs to and how often it has been used. That way, you could determine whether a Raspberry Pi is new or used and whether it has been modified. I saw that once at a thermal paste manufacturer. They used it to solve the problem of counterfeit thermal paste.You just have to get people to actually use the system and tell anyone else who asks for support but doesn't have an original copy to GTFO.This would allow them to avoid the increased support burden without limiting people's ability to upgrade their Raspberry Pi.

kiicia 11d ago
fun fact is that some chinese electronics manufacturers do exactly that with their products (even simple ones like led night lights), holographic qr-code on box that can be scanned and verified without opening box and second code inside box to verify box wasn't swapped
colejohnson66 11d ago
Chinese scammers have gotten good at abusing those "codes" by having a list of "known good" codes and printing them on multiple units. And because those holographic codes some companies used are printed in China, the scammers just use the same equipment during the night shift. https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failures/ https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failure...
- indrora 11d ago
  There are methods of doing so that identify multiple, harder to falsify things. One that I have seen is HMAC(serial||SKU) as a datamatrix/QR, laser-etched onto the top silkscreen and burned into a PROM.

jorritposthuma 11d ago

I love how we think we own our hardware, but secretly we don't. Surprised though that even a Raspberry Pi now thinks this as well. They grew big _because_ of tinkering...

aeve890 11d ago
Doesn't matter. At the current RPI prices is just better to buy a mini PC or any of the alternative SBC like the orange pi.

zb3 11d ago

We can't normalize this cash-grab user-hostile late stage capitalism bullshit. Their argument assumes users are idiots - we had swappable components for years, and while there were cheating actors, market has invented things like brands and trust, you know? You don't have to buy models from the sellers you don't trust, nobody forces you to.

yjftsjthsd-h 11d ago

Alright, what would it take to make a completely open source firmware for the pi? I think there was some prior effort that got discontinued...

gunalx 11d ago
Its a closed broadcom chip. Basically futile or heavily resource intensive to try.

mg794613 11d ago

"We do it to protect you and ensure our quality" Nah, they got big enough and now you think you can pull Apple tricks, good luck with that.

jauntywundrkind 11d ago

I like the Chromebook solution for tampering: allow people to go crazy but throw up a big scary warning on boot!

snvzz 11d ago

Raspberry Pi been scummy for a while e.g. locking codecs behind extra payments. It seems they've gone full mask off at last. Got here via Jeff Geerling coverage[0]. 0. https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ https://youtu.be/ltofM26akZQ

philpem 11d ago
The codecs at least had a reasonable explanation - it took a few dollars off the price of the unit (licensing fees to Microsoft and the like). There was also nothing stopping you from decoding MPEG2 with ffmpeg on the CPU. Those specific codecs aren't even present on newer Pi units.
winkelmann 11d ago
The codec unlock is a thing of the past pretty much, they dropped the affected hardware decoders entirely in the Pi4/5 [1]. In any case, if the legends of Pis being genuinely affordable options back then are true, I'm fine with it. A lot of (probably most) use-cases don't require these codecs, so paying $1.20 and $2.40 respectively seems reasonable for those who do need it. [1] https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/

varispeed 11d ago

> We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size. Get fucked. Clearly you want to make all the profit and stop people from upgrading their devices.

ChocolateGod 11d ago

They should make a form where you input the serial number and apply for a key, applying that key in config.txt disables the hardware verification checks on the bootrom.