You either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain.
Ford intentionally blocking Engine Horsepower Upgrades ** — Ford President is quoted - Who the F* is that Carol Shelby? What’s he know about cars. For all we know he’s buying up Mustangs and selling them with his upgraded engines!? What about the unwitting customers!???"
shittification of technology by the ai companies much less innovation much higher cost much higher inflation caused by ai NOT deflation as elon and trump promised by ai. more gas lighting more hot air. less and less productivity.
also raspberry pi is made for the DIY community else just buy a PC delusional doesn’t even know what their product is and was built for. my how the new culture are so far away from its roots after getting popular. this is why never ever let them become too big to not care about their core like all fang stonks and nvda google meta apple microsoft amazon all need to be canceled culturally. have no loyalty to any of them unless they give much better prices and product the answer is no and lower your prices.
EnshittyPi.
If you had read the article instead of just blindly reacting to the title you would have seen that this is actually to prevent that.
Nahh, their reasoning is BS IMO. It’s not an iPhone or something it’s a hobby product for tinkering with.
If someone modifies an asic by soldering a new ram chip on it, that’s grounds to null warranty, no? So their undue support claims is BS, ditto to the reputational damage (as if they aren’t doing that right now).
Or better yet, why don’t they modularize this component from the rest of the device?
I read the article. Fuck Raspberry Pi.
Yes, they are claiming that this is to protect us, the consumers, by preventing us from buying unofficially upgraded boards that may be unreliable or use counterfeit parts on the secondhand market.
But here’s the fun part: That’s a lie. They just don’t want you upgrading your own hardware when you could pay them more instead.
It’s a hobbyist product. If you put “safeguards” in to block tinkerers, you’re dead to me.
The funniest thing about this is that Apple used the same excuse to defend parts locking. And every other company that limited the user’s right to repair and upgrade their purchased products.
It’s all BS. A company cares only about money, and they couldn’t care less about your product performing slightly less than optimally, if it ever does. Apple did it for profit, car manufacturers did it for profit, John Deere did it for profit and Raspberry Pi did it for profit.
There’s a bit of a difference in that your iPhone is (used to be) more likely to be swiped for parts (since the whole phone is unuseable, but the screen e.g is still worth a couple hundred) than anyone is to sell counterfeit raspberry pis for profit - and if anyone did do that, why’s that even a problem? I know someone who successfully upgraded a Macbook Air to 8 GB back when they had the 4 GB option and that was also soldered RAM. All for his personal use, but the thing continued working and it’s trivial to implement a check for original config by serial number.
I read the article, their ‘reasoning’ is bs
I bought the hardware, I as a consumer should be able to do whatever I want with it. If they were actually worried about resellers selling bad ram, they could have just left the detection in and warn the user of the modification instead of blocking it entirely.
Want to buy a bridge?
They’ve completely lost the plot. Raspberry Pi was founded on the principle of hacking, education, and doing more with less. It’s their DNA, but now it’s clear all they give a shit about is money. They are corporate garbage now, like so many other organizations in the FOSS community that gave up freedom and openness for the Almighty dollar (or pound in this case).
Eben Upton can suck my soldering iron.
I knew it was happening the second they mentioned “IPO”. Company was cooked.
Are there any companies that make comparable products? I’ve been thinking of making a simple and small and low power media computer and I’d rather it not be a raspberry pi anymore
Orange Pi, Banana Pi, plenty of other Chinese SBC makers who products don’t necessarilly have names ending in Pi. Tons of those in places like Aliexpress. You can even try a Risk-V architecture if you’re daring.
The problem is that their english language support is inferior, as is the software stack, plus the ecosystem is a lot smaller so there’s a lot less info on those from other people out there. That said, as far as I can tell all of them have at least one Linux distro (at the very least ARMbian), some having more distros.
Still, it would be fine if all you want is a small computer with HDMI to turn it into a media player using Linux and something like Kodi.
Alternativelly, just get a Mini-PC with a low power intel chip like the N100 - which is actually cheaper than a Raspberri Pi 5 whilst being more powerful and with better peripheral compatibility since it has a PC architecture - and put the Linux with Kodi in it. Sure, it uses more power because it’s not ARM, but not actually that much more (15w vs 8w for a Pi, if I remember it correctly).
Raspberri Pi devices are maybe twice the price of other devices with equivalent hardware, which means that the low-end low-power Mini-PCs are cheaper and yet more powerful and compatible than the high end Pi.
I have a mini PC just like that at home working as a TV Media Player (which a nice remote control and everything) and I even use it as a home server and home nas (remotelly controlled via web interfaces and SSH) since it’s has far more power than needed for just being a media player.
Might be a controversial take, but Raspberry Pi’s are pure ass as media servers. They’re profoundly i/o limited, which extends to access to external USB devices as well as ethernet, and lack the oomph required to decode hi-res video streams locally. 1080p can be choppy, forget about 4K.
Pi5 occupies the unhappy spot where it’s too expensive for enthusiast and hobby applications, but inadequate as a desktop PC which benefit from a bit more power.
A mini-PC is a much better fit. An N100 might even be overkill - mine has a Skylake from a decade ago in it, and it crushes ‘media’ activities while gently sipping at electricity.
Well, I went for an N100 myself (and recommended it) because of its low power consumption (it has a 15W TDR), which makes it a good choice for an always on device which is how I operate my Mini-PC because it’s also my home NAS.
That range of CPUs was design to consumer less power and most x86 CPUs consumer significantly more power than this.
I thought media decoding was like the one thing they were decent at. But yeah, for everything else I’ve always ended up severely disappointed by their usability.
This. I switched from planning on a raspberry pi, to just getting a mini PC. It works as my main desktop now.
Also, limited support, both in community size and time. Those Chinese manufacturing companies come and go like docker containers. They spin one up to sell some product for a while, then when they’re done they dissolve it. If you want any support, you’re on your own.
It’s hard to imagine exactly what kind of person would want to build their own Linux media server but also actually needs to contact tech support for hardware they own outright.
Half the fun anyway is getting it to work at all, the other half is tweaking and getting it to work exactly the way you want.
I’m a $50-$100 “mystery Thinkpad from eBay” kind of guy. From what I gather, there are lots of us. Exactly zero times have I thought “oh but what if I need to contact Lenovo?” LMAO
I mean community support, as in the number of people using them and have experience, who know what works and what doesn’t.
Tech support in the sense of stuff like bios updates is important too.
Yeah, good point. The ability to download necessary firmware updates/patches from a safe, trusted source is easy to take for granted, but that shouldn’t be overlooked.
The makers of both Orange Pi and Banana Pi have been around for years, over a decade at least for Orange Pi.
In fact in my experience SBC makers tend to be quite stable, possibly because those thinks are a lot more technically complex than, say, an electric kettle.
There’s a lot of good options, but for media you probably just want an x86 mini PC since they are way cheaper. Intel N100 based, or similar.
look up wyse terminals or micro pcs in youtube.
This guy has a ton of videos on the subject. Entertaining and informative.
It’s been cheaper to buy a SFF desktop and not need dongles for everything
Asus NUC with Intel N150 is what I’ve been looking at. Up-board.org has a credit card sized dev board with the proc, if form factor is a requirement.
There is also the N350 with 8 cores for more power.
Google have an imei checker for their phones. Google.
You could check that it is real and active.
Raspberry pi could allow people to check their board model on their site to see if they are getting the right amount of RAM. They could devise a method to allow checking the correct RAM is attached and not a recovered stick off another board of the same size.
the measure is primarily intended to prevent third parties from buying lower-capacity boards, replacing their RAM with cheaper parts of uncertain origin and then reselling the modified hardware as a higher-capacity model. The company argues that such modified boards have not undergone its validation process and could subsequently generate support requests if unstable memory is blamed on the company.
The solution to this decidedly rare problem is authorized resellers, not an arbitrary block on a very technically demanding upgrade.
That’s assuming this is the actual problem though. If the problem is actually “We want to make more money by charging extra for ‘enthusiast models’” then this is the correct tactic to ensure that you aren’t undercut by cheap labor.
deleted by creator
Their excuse definitely smells like bullshit. It just seems they want to do the Apple thing of making sure they get the money for the upgrade, plus a premium. Except even Apple has a technical reason they don’t allow upgrades, which Raspberry Pi doesn’t.
Raspberry pi is public. They have a clear profit motive behind the upsell. Clear as day.
Nah it’s not technical reasons, it’s just greed and form over function, the new MacBook Neo proves that if Apple wanted to they can make a user repairable and even upgradable laptop, they don’t because the EU hasn’t forced them yet
How does the new MacBook prove that? The way their processors are made it’s impossible to upgrade RAM after the fact.
That was a typo I meant the new MacBook Neo laptop
From a consumer freedom standpoint this is shitty. And it does allow them to sell an enthusiast model at a premium without competing with an after market modder.
But two things can be true. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable for the company to want to protect the integrity of the brand if unreliable after market sellers start releasing bad product indistinguishable from your own with your logo slapped on it.
Even if you have authorized resellers entrusted with doing the upgrades and audited for quality, if you leave the door open, there will be unauthorized mods on the market too. It does hurt not only Raspberry Pi, but the entire resell market if you can’t trust the product to have their expected standard of quality. It still sucks, but I at least get the justification.
A few years back, I worked in an assembly plant for a car company. One time when I was doing a quality containment, I found out that something like 30-50 cars were found to have a very slightly misaligned roof piece when it was welded, and it causes a slight, but visible warp in the roof. It was otherwise fine. Still water proof, still structurally sound, just a cosmetic defect. They were all quarantined to be stripped of any easily removable components and then the remaining parts and body would be scrapped.
I asked why? Even if they didn’t want to put them out to dealers with a visible defect, they were still safe and functional. They could still offer them to employees for sale at a discount and make far more back for them than its value as scrap. The answer was that it could hurt the value of the brand as a whole if low quality cars were put on the market, even if only for resale. It was worth the loss of these 30+ cars to maintain a consumer’s high expectation of quality.
I still think it may have been better to allow employees an opportunity to get a new vehicle at a great price with only a cosmetic defect. But I do get the competing concern there. You do want things you buy from a big company to have reliable quality.
I get the sentiment, but this is a computer’s active component. If they can detect that the RAM is non-stock, they can just have the UEFI say that in POST. Problem solved with about the same amount of code as their current “solution”.
The fact that there are multiple solutions to the problem they say they’re trying to solve, but they chose one that is both anti-consumer and protective of their upcharged models makes it obvious what their real intentions are. Follow the money and it will lead you to the truth nearly always. In your example, the car company was willing to lose money.
Fair.
They already have authorized resellers, who they link to on their website. This problem would only come from unauthorized resellers, who would not qualify for warranty service. It might not help software support requests, but I don’t know how much support they offer for software since I don’t think they’re supplied with any. Anything hardware they should be asking for a receipt from an authorized reseller, and if the customer can’t provide it then it’s not covered by the warranty. And even if the customer can provide a receipt from an authorized reseller in their name, if it comes in for repair and has the wrong RAM then it’s not a warranty repair anyway (although I’m guessing for something this inexpensive they don’t repair individual units, they probably just send a replacement, so the counterfeit parts might not get noticed).
One consideration is that the community support would not like the fallout of shady 3rd party manufacturers/resellers putting out faulty hardware either.
Yeah load of bullshit
Yeah, it sure is. It’s a hobbyist product and they took away my ability to upgrade it. After 14 years of buying these boards, they decided now, during a global RAM shortage, to tighten the leash…
I can solder new RAM into my MacBook or Nvidia GPU, but Raspberry Pi is the first to implement physical locks preventing RAM upgrades. What a fucking joke.
I can solder new RAM into my MacBook or Nvidia GPU
You still have to extract and modify the bios to recognize and address the new ram in those cases, you can’t just “drop in” more ram.
That’s what’s being locked down, here. Raspberry Pi devices used to not care if you did so because the firmware was open.
I personally know someone who installed extra RAM on a Macbook Air at least, didn’t require modifying any firmware IIRC. It just detected it. Not sure how GPUs are these days, though.
So if you take a macbook air with soldered-on ram, which was available in 2 configurations of 16GB and 32GB, those two configs are baked into the bios, you just need the correct density, speed, and CAS latency to go from 16 to 32.
But if you stray from what’s in the firmware/bios, you’ll need to figure out how to get the ram recognized so it can be used.
In a raspberry pi, the known configs are in the firmware, so resellers were taking cheap low-ram pis, replacing the ram with double-density and selling them for a big markup from their cost, but lower than a retail RPI.
The new policy would force these resellers to mod the bios to keep doing it.
Enshitification will continue until morale improves
I feel like raspberry has been backstabbing everyone for a while.
might as well just buy a normal laptop(or something used) then or smth if i decide this restriction is not fine,
also RPI5 8gb ram for 150~ usd alone is not worth it anymore, 80 usd was fine.Probably cheaper to buy a laptop than a smith.
true
Is that BJ Blazcowicz?
So do we own the pi that we bought or does Raspberry Pi?
There’s a blob in there you will never own
First time? /j Srs, I don’t think I’ve ever owned a consumer device that, as the other person points out, didn’t have blobs inside from the factory. Sure, ive manually replaced the BIOS with Libreboot and switched to blobless (software) WiFi chips, but then what about the EC blobs? The keyboard and mouse? If being fully FOSS predicates ownership, I don’t think any of us own our devices
How does LibreBoot work? Was it hard to set up?
It’s a coreboot distribution (FOSS BIOS/UEFI), so technically it works on more things than advertised.
To install it it does require a little bit of preparation. There’s a lot of commands you have to run using a custom compiler toolchain to build an image for your board. The hardest part is disassembling the laptop, if you have an older one, which is mostly what Libreboot targets.
It doesn’t work in most things fyi
Another win for mini PCs. Pis priced themselves out of the market since pi4-pi5 imo
I can get a second hand mini pc or Optiplex for much cheaper, and with quick sync
yep and I/O isn’t terrible to add. A CP2112 USB <–> I2C module is like $5 on amazon (and way less on AliExpress) and gets you an I2C port and a few GPIO all controllable through Python or libusb. The FT232H or CH347 modules are similar and offer SPI as well.
