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Comment by sbarre | Hacker News Reader

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.

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The entire point of the RPi is the user can do whatever they want with it.

So no, it's not reasonable at all.

Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.

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.

> No, RPis are very inexpensive computers.

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.

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.

> You gave me three different currencies which suggests you're picking and choosing, and ignoring taxes.

Even if I'm off by 100%, 410GBP is 41% less than 699. Quite a discount!

> The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?

I think a lot more kids, etc. have 200 GBP than 700.

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.

The community is pretty good at that. The point of swapping RAM is to lower prices and it has clearly been successful at that.

They could have :

• etch the ram around on the board itself.

• provide a pre-RMA check so user can verify if their unit is genuine (serial number linked to ram amount)

• void warranty on resoldered board.

>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.

Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks

> You'd be ok with that trade?

Umm, yes...?

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.

> > You'd be ok with that trade?

> Umm, yes...?

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.

Wow look at those goalposts fly.

The occasional unlicensed and secret RAM upgrade isn't going to kill the business. It's also a small minority!

> 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?

Did you actually read the linked discussion before jumping in to argue?

Your questions have already been answered.

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.

> Currently a minority would want to

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.

All of the above arguments rely on very unlikely hypotheticals and unrealistic assumptions, sorry.

10x price increases? RPi will have bigger problems than "people want to re-solder new RAM chips on our boards" if that happens. Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.

As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so. The self-evidence of this should be apparent based on what RPi is choosing to do (being the ones with all the data on this).

The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go.

You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.

> "ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer"

You're making a ridiculous leap here by equating the above with one small company making a pragmatic choice to protect its business and consumers.

I believe in customer choice and I do think it's important to protect it, but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost and in ways that are not realistic or economically feasible for the other parties involved.

That nuance is sorely lacking from your position here.

> Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.

You answered it on your own. The amount they can increase their margins by depends on things such as competition, barrier to entry et al. By convincing your customers that "it's all for your good", they can increase their margins making it harder to compete for those not employing these practices. Eventually we might end up with just a few players in the market like in the DRAM space, and then they absolutely can increase their margins by such amounts..

> As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so.

This is getting hilarious.. batteries in smartphones can be replaced, does that mean when I go to store.google.com or motorola.com (and choose one of their retailers) I can buy a product with unoriginal battery? Wow, why haven't those evil stealth 3p sellers figured it out yet? Such a great evil business model!

(or maybe battery prices haven't increased by such amounts that manufacturers wanted to sneak their margin increase by blaming rising battery costs?)

> The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go. You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.

Relying on brands and reputation is precisely what I'm doing when buying electronics. Successfully. If you can't do it on your own, perhaps you might also want to contact some humans (those people who provide real answers instead of copy-paste corporate non-responses), this is how my relatives avoid falling for scams. By trusting humans, not for-profit corporations.

And this even works on the darknet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989148), so you simply can't convince me all these mechanics went away, that's ridiculous corporate BS..

> but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost

Ok then, let's see where things go.

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