Raspberry Pi 5 EEPROM update now blocks manual RAM upgrades

Consider the alternative where a bigger number of modded boards with dubious RAM gets into circulation, which is no problem for Chinese companies to do. It would quickly result in a distrust of all RPi products and everyone would suffer.

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.

> until it becomes a signed binary

It's already a signed binary, with rollback protection. (According to Reddit comments; I stopped using Raspis a long time ago)

Likely botched resellers claiming theyre RPI and the company getting angry customers.

Perfectly rational.

I think what's giving me more concern is: what if the Pi is embedded in a device and the manufacturer doesn't realize the supply chain got tampered with?

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.

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 :(

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Capitalism