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Comment by illright | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

Personally? I'd say that this is totally unreasonable. Pre-restricting the use cases of the device that YOU bought and have the ownership of is absolutely not OK.

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 :(

> Pre-restricting the use cases of the device that YOU bought and have the ownership of is absolutely not OK.

This is the same problem I have with my car manufacturer. They completely pre-restricted its flying capability.

This is a shitty bad-faith argument, AND the claim you're making is unfortunately incorrect :D For example, nothing actually restricts you putting your car to bits and using the motor :) It'd be a whole another ordeal that if they'd deliberately try make the car parts to brick themselves in an unknown environment. But they do not. Makes you think.

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.

> 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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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