Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades(www.reddit.com)
29 pointsby csmantle6 hours ago3 comments
  • Dead_Lemon3 hours ago
    Raspi is likely going to continue making moves like this, since they have gone public. You can't just have people buying the cheaper 1GiB boards and upgrading them to 4GiB, that's taking potential profits away from the investors...

    I doubt many are doing this upgrade, and I think its awesome someone has the tooling & skill to do so. I cannot fathom how this is a threat to RPI. I would assume a community firmware patch will likely release & resolve the limitation (until it becomes a signed binary)

    • jezek2an hour ago
      Consider the alternative where a bigger number of modded boards with dubious RAM gets into circulation, which is no problem for Chinese companies to do. It would quickly result in a distrust of all RPi products and everyone would suffer.

      It also has nothing to do with going public, it is consistent with what they were always doing: it never was fully open, in fact quite the opposite and they were always protective about their HW, you can't even order the SoC as a separate chip, only as a part of premade/customized board.

    • eqvinox3 hours ago
      > until it becomes a signed binary

      It's already a signed binary, with rollback protection. (According to Reddit comments; I stopped using Raspis a long time ago)

  • illright2 hours ago
    In the comments there's a link to consumer rights wiki that includes Raspberry Pi's response to this:

    > there may be a minor financial gain in buying a part with say a 2GB part, swapping it for an 8GB part of dubious origin, and reselling it as an 8GB device. However, this brings an element of risk to the user - the board hasn't been tested by us - and is a potential support burden for us, with customers complaining of unreliable devices. We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size.

    Frankly, that sounds pretty reasonable to me

    • lesuorac30 minutes ago
      > potential support burden for us

      It's not though.

      "Potential" is just that, potential. They're not claiming any actual harm to them about this. It's akin to saying, potentially terrorists could upgrade 1 GB chips for missiles.

      There also just isn't a support burden for them.

      If I buy a 2 GB RasPi5 and upgraded it into an 8 GB RaspPi5 and then _you buy it from me_ and it does not work. You cannot mail it to the RasPi Foundation and ask for a refund. They will tell you that they don't sell directly to consumers and to contact whomever you bought the device from for the refund.

      ---

      I'm fine taking the contrarian opinion that RasPi can lock down their products if they want. But a spade is a spade. It's not about "Potential support burden". It's about the realized profitability of a 8 GB unit over a 2 GB unit.

      • marysol523 minutes ago
        And they, as proven by "blocking" can add a warning into the OS that the hardware has been modified. They could even make it block, but over-ride with a config setting.
    • mitxelaan hour ago
      It's not reasonable. Every company uses a similar "consumer safety" excuse for all its locking down. It's why you can't install apps on iPhones. It's why you can't upgrade the RAM on your laptop. It's why you can't replace your battery when it wears out. It's why your car door won't open if you replace the door handle. It's carefully manipulated PR bullshit in every case.
    • pmx2 hours ago
      I don't agree. They're stopping the owner of the device from using it how they want to based on a theoretical user who purchases a modded device. There may be some small profit to be had in raw material costs but if you factor in the time it takes to pull off a mod like this, and the number of failures I don't think it's a good argument. Even if it was, why not a warning that you can bypass by setting a config in a txt file in the root of the SD? Or even just typing "I agree I won't bother you about this board" or something?
    • cloudie78an hour ago
      No it does not sound reasonable.

      If they want to reduce the support burden they can use serial numbers to track what board has what ram - if they don’t match no support because it’s modified hardware.

    • HackerThemAll2 hours ago
      Yeah that practice is not unheard of. I can easily imagine having a ready-made device to desolder the original chip out of Raspberry and solder another one, of poor quality and/or counterfeit, and then sell that modded Pi for profit. Heck, remember fake SD cards, USB drives etc.

      Therefore I agree with manufacturer's decision.

  • mrheosuper3 hours ago
    Ah this suck, why does every company who goes big have to be hostile to end-user.