> The restriction is somewhat annoying to a small subset of enthusiasts but seems to catch genuine fraud.

What fraud are you speaking of?

alibarber 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.

▲

horsawlarway 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I'm split on this because

1: I think people should be able to replace chips on an RPi as they desire, so I don't love that they're actively preventing this

2: As a buyer, I absolutely want to know if I'm buying an RPi that has had chips replaced

3: A shady seller changing the SKU to mimic a better board after changing chips is just flat out fraud.

---

It's the classic "Mattress tag" case - it should be illegal to remove as a seller, and fine as the final customer.

But that's really hard to functionally enforce.

	▲	alibarber an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Absolutely agree. It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly. I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM. There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.

▲

locknitpicker 5 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while.

You're framing this as if no reputable vendor is willing or able to source cheaper parts.

If they can get a better deal in more RAM, why can't they upgrade the boards? As a consumer, doesn't that benefit you as well?

> Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, (...)

That's specious reasoning and blatant fear-mongering. Consumer protection laws require vendors to support their products. If RAM is faulty, whether it was hand soldered by Eben Upton himself or hacked from a Soviet fridge, vendors are compelled to support customers. This means vendors ultimately have an interest in minimizing faulty equipment, because it hurts their bottom line.

So why can't people have the right to upgrade their hardware? I thought we already went through this battle in the 1980s.

▲

Grombobulous 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Whether it’s fraud depends heavily on how it’s sold.

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

▲

petu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Selling modded board as official 8GB SKU with reliability/warranty expectations.

▲

jamesh98 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

▲

Brian_K_White an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Selling a unit as something that it's not.

A unit that rpi themselves sold with 8g is different than a unit that someone else modified. The reworked unit is not sold with the disclosure that it has been hacked and no longer covered by any warranty, and the memory installed is of totally unknown provenance and quality, timing specs, failed qa, etc. Even the simple process of heating everything up to desolder & resolder temps is not free, it degrades everything, the pcb itself, the epoxy holding the traces and pads down, and all the components, and means higher chance of some failure happening sooner than it would have. But it's sold as a real rpi unit for real rpi price or a little less to beat real ones.

That is the fraud they speak of.

You should be free to do this to your unit if you like of course, and rpi has infinite other possible ways they could have chosen to address the problem and didn't have to do it this way. I'm only saying there is actually a problem.