Posted by csmantle 1 day ago
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)
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.
It's already a signed binary, with rollback protection. (According to Reddit comments; I stopped using Raspis a long time ago)
Perfectly rational.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom/issues/761
One EEPROM update and suddenly you brick the board. It's like the FTDI bullshit. You're going to end up snaring legitimate users that didn't know they had illegitimate boards.
Given the state of the world I'm a little amazed anyone can muster any outrage about this.
>but given how few users are actually capable of doing this upgrade, also probably an imaginary problem.
Just remember that in China there are places where you can get your iPhone storage upgraded by someone desoldering the original chip and soldering on a new one, they get the whole process done in 20 minutes. If labour is cheap and the skills high that's what you get.
> 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
There are a multitude other trivial ways this could be accomplished, but they chose the "lets squeeze the market" and "fuck the modders" option.
The company is a part of the society, and has the responsibility of providing support for their devices. Society provides the customers and money, and the company has the obligation of providing support.
They could just burn the serial to the silicon and when someone needs support, they need to provide the serial and they cross-reference the data tied to the serial number. Too much ram? "Yeah, sorry, we can't guarantee the operation of your device. Here's a 5% off coupon for our store to get one with our genuine hardware"
THIS WAS SUCH AN EASY MARKETING WIN :(
This is the same problem I have with my car manufacturer. They completely pre-restricted its flying capability.
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.
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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.
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.
Therefore I agree with manufacturer's decision.