No. They are greedy bastards:

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/raspberry-pi-ram-lock...

The article you've linked makes no claim that it has anything to do with greed any everything to do with protecting the supply chain since there is currently a large monetary incentive for people to fuck with it.

They have been struggling for years to match supply with demand, and RAM arbitrage would undermine those efforts... and the market would be flooded with flaky boards remanufactured in the cheapest possible way.

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Dylan16807 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't follow. Assuming they're not being greedy, why would ram arbitrage be profitable enough to undermine their efforts?

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kube-system 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They have to plan their production in advance, with budgeting, contracts, and prices decided before the products are even manufactured. This is hard to do even when you're just trying to plan for the demands of legitimate buyers.

But every single day in the meantime, RAM prices will continue fluctuate, and arbitrage takes advantage of this. And arbitrate markets don't even necessarily track new RAM prices, if someone dumps a bunch of used LPDDR devices in China, people may harvest used memory for arbitrage.

For example, lets say they plan for how many people want to actually buy a 1GB Pi 5. Then they produce that amount. Then scalpers (hypothetically) realize they scape old RAM off discarded cable TV boxes for less than the OEM pays for new RAM. Then the legitimate 1GB Pis will be quickly scalped up off the market, and the market will be flooded with modified boards of higher capacities.

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paxy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It says so right in the article. People were flooding the market with cheap/counterfeit/misconfigured Raspberry Pis and the organization was on the hook for support and dealing with angry customers.

	▲	Dylan16807 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I have not seen any evidence of "flooding". Just a couple posts about it. And one of those posts was saying theirs did work with the old firmware, so for that instance the Pi folks deserve the full blame for adding a check that disabled booting. I also don't see any mention of it in this article?