alt Hacker NewsThere 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.
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Just make the RAM mismatch a warning that voids warranty rather than a hard error. This is no excuse for forcing hardware pairing
Mac Minis used to have soldered on SSDs, but the 2024 model is upgradable. A lot of people purchased a cheaper Mac Mini and upgraded the storage themselves. Most people would argue this is a good thing, even if some of those Mac Minis were resold. This is no different.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation.
They don't need the resellers help for that! I've already been burned twice thinking "I'll use a raspberry pi for this small project" and having it die within a month because reliably reading/writing to an SD card is hard or something.
Between the notorious unreliability, crazy price hikes, trademark or whatever disputes, and this anti consumer ewaste generating policy, I can't think of any reason I'd ever patronize them again.. my only regret is it took me two purchases to learn this lesson!
What if the manufacturer charged no markup on RAM price, wouldn't it make "illegal upgrading" pointless because they couldn't compete on price? The manufacturer buys RAM in bulk and has better pricing.
Oh no, there were bad actors on the market, let's lock the hardware so cheaper but genuine options can't emerge.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi
It's not their problem then, the seller is responsible for it and I think we can assume the user has a brain so they knew they could buy a more expensive option from the authorized sellers. Isn't this the case?
could it be construed as anti-competitive to block end-users or resellers from swapping RAM?
But bricking retroactively in the field is a bad move, and sends even more anger and RMA requests back towards parties.
https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick
Pepperidge Farm remembers the FTDI driver bricking.
Should just print "warranty void on unauthorized RAM", instead of not booting
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Curiously NVIDIA have long allowed consumer GPUs to be upgraded with larger memory chips - they could very easily reject booting those configurations. This is something done almost exclusively by unsavory Chinese actors who then sell on the bare retail PCBs (core removed, since they use different PCBs and heatsinks) to various scammers that foist them upon unsuspecting retail buyers.
In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.
The user friendly option would be to print the amount of RAM in very large letters on the PCB. There happens to be a lot of suitable surface on the PCB to the right of the text "Raspberry Pi 5" on the PCB anyway (§). Right now the amount of RAM is hard to read and easy to modify (move a little tiny SMD resistor).
Drawback: You need different silkscreens for different amounts of RAM.
Btw, if you're worried about RAM-swapped units you can already verify them as described at https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr...
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(§) as can be seen here https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1129-pcn/docum...