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.
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.
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.
This. You're paying for various forms of documentation and support. If you don't need that, there are cheaper (e.g. Orange Pi) or better (1L, thin client) options.
A MacBook Neo is 699 GBP. An 8GB Raspberry Pi w/ 32GB SD card, cable, housing, fan and power supply from Kiwi Electronics is 188 EUR (160 GBP). A monitor, kb/mouse, and SD card from Newegg is 70 USD (45 GBP). Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
I gave you prices from UK sellers for all of them. You gave me three different currencies which suggests you're picking and choosing, and ignoring taxes. Probably because newegg in the UK doesn't sell them anymore.
You're also implying that Kiwi Electronics sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 with SD card, housing, cable, power supply and fan for 5 euros less than they sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 without any of those things: https://www.kiwi-electronics.com/en/raspberry-pi-5-computers...
> Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
With 85% less storage, and nowhere near as powerful. The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?
The raspberry pi's day as cheap hobbyist computing has long gone.
>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.
Just put a 'warranty void when removed' frangible sticker on it. Seems to work fine for PCs.
But so many people these days seem to be brainwashed into accepting that computing devices should come with soldered RAM and locked bootloaders, they probably can't even envisage how hardware used to be. Yes, modding my device voided the warranty and I didn't care. Freedom has a cost.
Pis aren't supposed to be for ultra-advanced users, they're even specifically marketed for kids. They're not gonna know if they got a bootlegged version or not.
Ok, and so that trade then means Raspberry Pis don't exist, because the conditions are such that the company doesn't have the incentive to produce the device in a way that makes sense to them.
Congrats, you now live in a world where you are theoretically free to swamp the RAM on a device that never got made.
Also tone down the freedom sob story: if you don't like the limitations of this device, buy a different one. Your "freedoms" are not at risk just because this small company trying to put out an affordable device is making trade-offs to protect the vast majority of their customers (who will never swap the RAM chips on their board) at the expense of a small minority who wants to do a thing their product is not intended for.
> 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.
I can swap RAM on my laptop. What broader systemic problems beyond missed opportunities for more shareholder value (at the expense of everything else) does it create?
> a support burden for their organization.
What? I thought the seller is responsible for what they sell? Don't we have things like brands and trust or authorized sellers?
Yes I have read the forum post and discussions here before commenting.
I can fall victim to scams if I willingly take the risk and buy something cheaper than official authorized sellers offer. Thanks to this risk I haven't yet lost all my brain cells or critical thinking yet.
But if I do, I can always complain about pretty much everything to Raspberry Pi which'd undoubtedly increase support burden for them since they apparently can use AI or post copy-paste responses only when it's not the user complaining (or they just complain about locked hardware = no support burden then, these complaints are ok).
Doesn't me losing my brain due to corporations treating me like a toddler count as a broader systemic risk to you? Probably not, but how about me AND YOU losing consumer choice?
Swapping RAM chips on a board is something a tiny minority of customers would want to do.
Giving that tiny minority that freedom, at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems, is a dumb choice to make (IMO), which is why they didn't make it.
On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want, rather than expecting every product to cater to your needs, regardless of whether it makes sense for it to do so or not.
By themelves or in general? If it's the latter, it's because currently rpi offers relatively fair pricing. If they started charging 10x that amount, more would be interested in 3rd party upgrades..
> at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems
Who forces you to take the risk and buy from a 3rd party supplier at a cheaper price? You did not address my point about trust, brands and reputation handling these problems for years.
> On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want
That's precisely why I care. I'm not taking away your ability to buy original products from authorized sellers.
But you accepting ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer, paired with the economics of scale means that I'll lose my choice soon, as those companies will learn consumers are mostly fine with being screwed like that.
I'll be hit first, yes. But when they go so far that you'll start to complain, it'll be too late because no consumer friendly alternatives will exist on the market by then, thanks to economics of scale and extremely weak antitrust enforcement.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes it’ll eventually get built into the harness/model/interface; just like how “work it out step by step” became thinking, but if you have work to do today, it can be worth trying to improve it.
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
If the name Bright Data is ringing a bell to anyone, it’s probably because they are a (the?) primary offender running the LG TV “residential proxy” (botnet)
Which, btw, was the least bad thing about those TVs. I support residential proxying as a means to liberate public data that's being held captive by people like Elon.
Notice it says "terms of service or copyright". If X's lawyers have any intelligence, they'll have a reason why XCancel is not identical to Bright Data. Perhaps this time, instead of claiming it's a copyright violation, they'll claim it's wire fraud because multiple accounts are used.
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