Raspberry Pi blocks changing RAM chips

Doing a RAM swap and then selling the resulting unit as if it were a Raspberry Pi of the higher RAM capacity might be construed as trademark infringement[0]. And in general it's fairly difficult to make arguments in antitrust cases that boil down to "yes, your honor, everything they're doing is within their rights but I don't like it".

[0] At the same time, the scammers could probably get away with this by putting "Upgraded to 16GB!" in the title of their eBay listings or whatever, in the same way that fraudulent storage devices are labeled as "upgraded" (read: lying about their capacity). That doesn't impact the antitrust analysis though.

If it’s represented as a new product or offered with manufacturer’s warranty, that would cross into fraud.

• 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.

So no, it's not reasonable at all.

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

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.

Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks

I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.

Since, presumably, nobody would try to sell a board with less RAM on it than shipped, a count-down scheme instead of count-up would work.

16GB board: no holes drilled in a marked area; 8GB: one hole drilled; 4GB: two holes drilled; 2GB: three holes drilled.

There is always a reason someone does any bad thing. There is always obviously some advantage to the perpetrator.

The fact they are only reacting to some other bad actions doesn't excuse it because there are any number of ways to to react. This way is the one way they chose when they have infinity to choose from.

Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.