They’ve completely lost the plot. Raspberry Pi was founded on the principle of hacking, education, and doing more with less. It’s their DNA, but now it’s clear all they give a shit about is money. They are corporate garbage now, like so many other organizations in the FOSS community that gave up freedom and openness for the Almighty dollar (or pound in this case).
Eben Upton can suck my soldering iron.
Another win for mini PCs. Pis priced themselves out of the market since pi4-pi5 imo
I can get a second hand mini pc or Optiplex for much cheaper, and with quick sync
the measure is primarily intended to prevent third parties from buying lower-capacity boards, replacing their RAM with cheaper parts of uncertain origin and then reselling the modified hardware as a higher-capacity model. The company argues that such modified boards have not undergone its validation process and could subsequently generate support requests if unstable memory is blamed on the company.
The solution to this decidedly rare problem is authorized resellers, not an arbitrary block on a very technically demanding upgrade.
That’s assuming this is the actual problem though. If the problem is actually “We want to make more money by charging extra for ‘enthusiast models’” then this is the correct tactic to ensure that you aren’t undercut by cheap labor.
Their excuse definitely smells like bullshit. It just seems they want to do the Apple thing of making sure they get the money for the upgrade, plus a premium. Except even Apple has a technical reason they don’t allow upgrades, which Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
They already have authorized resellers, who they link to on their website. This problem would only come from unauthorized resellers, who would not qualify for warranty service. It might not help software support requests, but I don’t know how much support they offer for software since I don’t think they’re supplied with any. Anything hardware they should be asking for a receipt from an authorized reseller, and if the customer can’t provide it then it’s not covered by the warranty. And even if the customer can provide a receipt from an authorized reseller in their name, if it comes in for repair and has the wrong RAM then it’s not a warranty repair anyway (although I’m guessing for something this inexpensive they don’t repair individual units, they probably just send a replacement, so the counterfeit parts might not get noticed).
So do we own the pi that we bought or does Raspberry Pi?
First time?
/j
Srs, I don’t think I’ve ever owned a consumer device that, as the other person points out, didn’t have blobs inside from the factory. Sure, ive manually replaced the BIOS with Libreboot and switched to blobless (software) WiFi chips, but then what about the EC blobs? The keyboard and mouse? If being fully FOSS predicates ownership, I don’t think any of us own our devices
How does LibreBoot work? Was it hard to set up?
There’s a blob in there you will never own
The behaviour is particularly interesting because physically replacing the memory on a Raspberry Pi is already well outside the scope of an ordinary upgrade.
I mean… aren’t hackers the target audience for Raspberry Pis?
Yeah, if the reasoning they give isn’t just straight bullshit, then I guess I don’t want to see them drown in support tickets. But it also seems like this move runs pretty counter to the whole point of the Raspberry Pi.
(Plus, can’t resellers buy 2GB models, redo some of the screen printing, and sell them as 8GB models without even trying to upgrade the RAM to 8GB? That seems at least as bad as getting a Raspberry Pi with a dodgy 8GB RAM chip.)
I mean… aren’t hackers the target audience for Raspberry Pis?
They used to be. But for the last few years it has looked less and less like that.
Hey man I just push the buttons to make the green text happy; I don’t build ‘em
I can’t solder to save my life, but this still makes me take them off the list for potential future boards.
Granted, I prerfer RISC-V where posible, but a few things still need ARM.
Now I need to look around for a alternative to two Pi5s, the Pi4, and Pi Zero that were on my list.
I’m now trying to imagine what series of events would lead to you being shot because of subpar soldering skills.
This is 2026, and I’m American, so there are a LOT of ways to get shot for dumb shit.
