Is that BJ Blazcowicz?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Want to buy a bridge?
Nahh, their reasoning is BS IMO. It’s not an iPhone or something it’s a hobby product for tinkering with.
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.
This makes sense. Hear me out.
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A CM5 is a device designed to be embedded into other devices. I believe most of their sales come from just that- companies that make other things, and build a CM5 into them rather than design their own control board.
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As you go up through the model tiers, the price increases faster than the added price of memory. IE, if the 2gb one is $20, and the difference between a 2gb memory chip and an 8gb memory chip is $10, the 8gb unit isn’t $30 it’s $60. You pay RPi a premium for the high end products.
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Desoldering RAM off a production PCB is something no hobbyist is going to bother with. BUT, a company buying 10,000 of these to build into their product MIGHT find it cost effective to setup a production line to do so. And they could probably resell the 2gb chips.
Point being- while I don’t like this, and I don’t like the ideas it represents, I also understand why they are doing it. It’s not about us, the hobbyists. It’s about the manufacturers that build compute modules into their products.
What’s the problem with a company doing what they want with hardware they purchased and own?
In concept nothing. But do you also recognize a legitimate business model of selling multiple products at different price points, spaced out more than the different cost of production?
And speaking hypothetically with some stupid numbers is it your argument that they should be able to purchase the $20 product, add $10 of parts, and either use it or sell it as the $200 product?
Desoldering RAM off a production PCB is something no hobbyist is going to bother with
Ever heard of “repair” when no original spare parts are available?
According to the article you can still do this. It’s just you can’t replace a 2 GB with an 8 GB because the board will still only recognize 2GB of that chip.
This is to prevent the resellers from buying 2 GB boards for cheap, replacing them with cheap 8 GB chips, and then reselling them for just under retail of the official 8 GB boards.
The article also states that you likely can’t use just any compatible chip, the part number is baked into the board, so you might not even be able to swap out a 2GB SK Hynix with a 2GB Samsung chip
it does not say part number is baked in. it says parameters are baked in (latencies, frequency), and so chips with a different part number might not work.
enshitification always makes sense. Hear me out.
- Company needs to make more money
But it’s a foundation, with a charitable goal…
So they are a company but also a foundation.
How?
Clever accounting, one entity invoices the other and whatnot. One entity could be the reseller for the goods the other one is producing for example. Similar arrangements (no need for a foundation, just invoicing between your own entities) like that are often done e.g to pay your taxes in a lower rate jurisdiction than where you earn your money. You could set up a company that sells stuff and another company to hold the IP and then pay royalties. Etc.
ClosedAI is looking to do something similar, go from non-profit to for-profit. Personally I’m of the opinion that such a thing should warrant investigations and possibly indictments for fraud. Because it IS fraud, or at least false advertising. If I buy a Raspberry Pi, knowing that it’s a foundation with a good cause, and the next day they announce they’re starting a for-profit company to handle everything, that’s very much false advertising, as the foundation model was be one of the factors in choosing which product to buy. If that makes sense.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is governed by a Board of Trustees that is responsible for ensuring that we use our resources effectively to achieve our charitable goals.
It seems the Trustees can’t be trusted
Yes, companies need to make money. It’s kind of what they do.
Yeah just like cancer needs to spread and grow. It’s just what cancer does. It does make sense.
But, never the less, we’re still going to cut the cancer out someday.
Either that, or the cancer will end up killing us.
And, curiously, kill itself in the process.
We sure are, comrade, we sure are.
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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, upgrading those two configs are baked into the bios, you just need the correct density, speed, and CAS latency.to gonfeom 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.
I feel like raspberry has been backstabbing everyone for a while.
I’m not really familiar with this industry, but as far as I know, there are quite a few pi-named alternatives from China. Banana Pi, Orange Pi, Lichee Pi, and there are probably more. Unless there’s something only Raspberry Pi can offer, this looks suicide to me.
There are a lot of them but most suffer from chinese hardware support problem (e.g. they are unsopported beyond what did they ship with softwarewise, provide close to zero documentation, and have dozens models sold at any one time), rpi themselves aren’t all that libre and always shipped with blobs and had bullshit excuses about it. Anyway rp2350 is the best thing that raspberry produces right now.
That’s my experience too.
That said at the higher end (Raspberry Pi 5) its actually cheaper to get a Mini-PC with a low-power intel chip like the N100 than a Pi and it’s more powerful, more extendable, more compatible, with a much better and well supported tech stack (because that’s an actual PC) and you get the whole device already, not just a board that you have to add the box and everything else to make a computer from.
Maybe at the level of the little SBCs the rp2350 is good value, but that stuff is more towards the embedded systems side (high end, though, beyond things like ESP32) than a general consumer computer.
Radxa and orange pi are better anyway.
I have to disagree. They are better hardware with way worse software support. Pi’s one big selling point is how out of the box friendly they are, meanwhile getting an orange pi flashed and booting Linux is an interesting experience using a Chinese flash writer with no English translation (back when I tried an orange pi 4).
You can flash them with whatever usb imager or dd? Like there is close to zero effort required and they are somewhat supported by armbian.
You can just use the Armbian flasher. I have an orange pi 5 plus and a Radxa rock 5-itx, and that’s what I’ve done with both.
you can also use the raspberry pi flasher, ironically.
You’ll know it isn’t a genuine Raspberry Pi because it won’t cost $35… right…?
It’s not like they cost 35€ anymore… But I know you know but damn ! They had to make it so expensive…
Enshitification will continue until morale improves
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.
