Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size) (hackaday.com) 127
Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings "jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6 million."
Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM adoption: direct unit shipments rose 26% to 3.4 million, total unit shipments climbed 17% to 4.2 million, and the customer order backlog doubled during the half to 2.6 million units. Demand was particularly robust in the Smart Home and Aerospace and Defence segments, and the company launched the AI HAT+ 2 for Raspberry Pi 5, extending its edge-AI product line.
DRAM prices have been increasing everywhere, notes The Times of London, and Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton "said new customers, who required computers or microcontrollers to manufacture other technologies, were choosing Raspberry Pi's computers because they had a better inventory of components than competitors." "There's always that choice for an original equipment manufacturer as to whether they should 'make' or 'buy' the computer elements of their platforms," Upton said. "The supply chain disruption is making 'make' a much harder choice and it's making the cost of repair a much harder choice. So we're seeing strength there." Raspberry Pi has already increased its suppliers of Dram more than threefold...
Upton said the increased demand had led to its backlog for units doubling to 2.6 million, which meant production rates would need to increase to prevent the numbers from getting "unhealthy". New production capacity at the manufacturing facility in Pencoed, Wales was expected to come online this week... Exports were almost evenly split between North America, Europe and the rest of the world, which was primarily China, where demand was growing... Analysts at Peel Hunt said the company was "well positioned for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond" with demand expected from enthusiasts as well as the AI and security sectors.
In other news, Hackaday notes the Raspberry Pi Foundation has "pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM..." This change restricts upgrading the RAM chip on your Pi 4 and Pi 5, as well as Compute Modules. By the looks of it, it does not restrict replacing the RAM chip with a chip of a similar size, quote, "locking devices to their original RAM size". As such, this does not prevent repair of your Raspberry Pi board, but does somewhat limit your repair part choice, at most.
This restriction is easily bypassable. The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far. This means even if you manually swap the RAM chip, all you need to do is to also downgrade the bootloader to the last known good release — 2024-09-10 — and then your Pi board or Compute Module will function with upgraded RAM. If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader. For most regular use, having a two-year old bootloader version won't really matter...
For the reference, this bootloader change happened almost exactly two years ago, at some point between September 10 and September 23, 2024... The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) justifies this as follows: they saw third-party resellers sourcing low-RAM Compute Modules, upgrading them with RAM from unknown source and unknown stability. My observation is that they'd also be reselling the modules at a markup for purely commercial gain, while undercutting RPF who would otherwise direct that money into RnD, something I much enjoy to see them do. This creates perverse incentives and risk for people buying Raspberry Pi boards online, and RPF decided to limit this primarily for their users' benefit, plus, if you ask me, some of theirs... The related GitHub issues have a fair few pingbacks, and exploring them makes the problem look grim to me....
My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.
Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2011 and 2016.
DRAM prices have been increasing everywhere, notes The Times of London, and Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton "said new customers, who required computers or microcontrollers to manufacture other technologies, were choosing Raspberry Pi's computers because they had a better inventory of components than competitors." "There's always that choice for an original equipment manufacturer as to whether they should 'make' or 'buy' the computer elements of their platforms," Upton said. "The supply chain disruption is making 'make' a much harder choice and it's making the cost of repair a much harder choice. So we're seeing strength there." Raspberry Pi has already increased its suppliers of Dram more than threefold...
Upton said the increased demand had led to its backlog for units doubling to 2.6 million, which meant production rates would need to increase to prevent the numbers from getting "unhealthy". New production capacity at the manufacturing facility in Pencoed, Wales was expected to come online this week... Exports were almost evenly split between North America, Europe and the rest of the world, which was primarily China, where demand was growing... Analysts at Peel Hunt said the company was "well positioned for rapid growth in unit shipments in 2027 and beyond" with demand expected from enthusiasts as well as the AI and security sectors.
In other news, Hackaday notes the Raspberry Pi Foundation has "pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM..." This change restricts upgrading the RAM chip on your Pi 4 and Pi 5, as well as Compute Modules. By the looks of it, it does not restrict replacing the RAM chip with a chip of a similar size, quote, "locking devices to their original RAM size". As such, this does not prevent repair of your Raspberry Pi board, but does somewhat limit your repair part choice, at most.
This restriction is easily bypassable. The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far. This means even if you manually swap the RAM chip, all you need to do is to also downgrade the bootloader to the last known good release — 2024-09-10 — and then your Pi board or Compute Module will function with upgraded RAM. If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader. For most regular use, having a two-year old bootloader version won't really matter...
For the reference, this bootloader change happened almost exactly two years ago, at some point between September 10 and September 23, 2024... The Raspberry Pi Foundation (RPF) justifies this as follows: they saw third-party resellers sourcing low-RAM Compute Modules, upgrading them with RAM from unknown source and unknown stability. My observation is that they'd also be reselling the modules at a markup for purely commercial gain, while undercutting RPF who would otherwise direct that money into RnD, something I much enjoy to see them do. This creates perverse incentives and risk for people buying Raspberry Pi boards online, and RPF decided to limit this primarily for their users' benefit, plus, if you ask me, some of theirs... The related GitHub issues have a fair few pingbacks, and exploring them makes the problem look grim to me....
My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online, and in most cases, repair doesn't seem to be impeded at all, either. Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.
Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2011 and 2016.
Uncomfortable truth (Score:5, Informative)
The Pi platform was never designed to be completely open source. It’s goal was to make single board computers as cheaply as possible. The cpu is owned by one of the worst tech companies Broadcom, and always used binary blob drivers. It only runs linux because linux is free. They probably never dreamed big companies would put these cheap boards in everything.
If you want truly open source hardware then RISCV is the future. Companies like WCH crank out microcontrollers for literal pennies and they’re well designed hardware.
Re:Uncomfortable truth (Score:5, Informative)
I think the main reason Raspberry Pi succeeds is the quality of the software ecosystem. There are plenty of other SBCs out there, but most of them have very poor software support. The vendor typically cobbles together a janky Linux distro, throws it over the wall and says "OK, it's done!" and never provides upgrades or much in the way of assistance.
Raspberry Pi hardware might be meh and it's certainly not as open as I like, but the software support is the best there is for SBCs. If other SBC vendors want to compete, they'll have to up their software game (and work with the community to get any modifications upstreamed into mainstream distros.)
Re:Uncomfortable truth (Score:4, Interesting)
Absolutely, and by "meh", it's often "fine" or "adequate". And there's nothing wrong with adequate it is by definition good enough. Would I like a machine that's 3x as fast for half the price and fully open source? Well of course. Do I need one? Well... no. I don't think I've ever been in a situation were one of those would be necessary and a Pi would be inadequate.
I've used NVidia Jetson Orin AGXs, but nothing is comparable to them anyway, even a 5x faster pi wouldn't match it.
It's a real pity that the ARM world is such a shitshow compared to the x86 world, which is funny to say. Broadly speaking the first and last time I have interaction with the vendor is when I buy it and the hardware will run for decades if it lasts that long with quite possibly excellent support across the board.
Re:Uncomfortable truth (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, I agree. I run most of my life on a Pi 4: Internet router, Asterisk PBX, SMTP and IMAP server, file backup server, pi-hole, Radicale calendar/contact server, Xymon monitor, etc, etc, and it's just fine.
It was pretty cheap when I bought it a few years ago. Nowadays, a mini PC might be cheaper, but it would likely consume more power, and low power consumption and silent operation was important to me for a server that's on 24x7.
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The Pi 5s I've been buying (Cana kit) have gone from $299 to $349 in the last year or two. Not nearly as much increase as most computers.
Re: Uncomfortable truth (Score:1)
Re: Uncomfortable truth (Score:1)
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I imagine the 16 GB model have been more affected (I buy 8 GB), but that's still better than low end Dell servers that have gone from $800-900 to about $4,000 (though the low end today is higher than it was a couple of years ago).
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Nowadays, a mini PC might be cheaper, but it would likely consume more power, and low power consumption and silent operation was important to me for a server that's on 24x7.
Finally at least someone understands. All those people who said "I was going to buy a Pi, but bought this miniPC instead and it's more powerful!" shouldn't have been looking at a Pi in the first place. The Pi has purposes a MiniPC could never fill.
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Yep.
There's especially the people who say "you can get a refurbished mini pc for less".
Well cool. That's also not comparable!
Raspberry Pi, starts at US$15 or US$45 (Score:3)
Raspberry Pi hardware might be meh ...
Raspberry Pi hardware was, and still is, designed to be a low cost SBC where a student can learn software and hardware. The current Raspberry Pi 5 1GB quad-core Arm Cortex A76 is US&45. It is an incredible education platform.
Models with more RAM are also available, 16GB is US$305.
There is a smaller Raspberry Pi that is less capable and requires some soldering if you want the pins to hack around with hardware. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 512MB 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 for US$15.
The industrial customer
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Raspberry Pi hardware might be meh ...
Raspberry Pi hardware was, and still is, designed to be a low cost SBC where a student can learn software and hardware. The current Raspberry Pi 5 1GB quad-core Arm Cortex A76 is US&45. It is an incredible education platform.
And the Pi5 is not all that meh anyhow.
I have a Pi5. I can run my FlexRadio 6600 using AetherSDR with it and it runs pretty darn well. As you might guess, a radio that is a server with a radio front end and with graphics heavy whole buncha stuff going on is a pretty good test of computer horsepower.
If I was just surfing and doing email, and documents, the little thing could be a daily driver.
Note if anyone wondering about AetherSDR, it is a platform agnostic Open Source Software Defined Radio softwar
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And the Pi5 is not all that meh anyhow.
I added the M.2 hat, it is amazingly capable for the price.
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My ODROID U3 and ODROID XU4 say hi :( Even official Android support was stuck to ancient Android versions shortly after release and the graphics had stuttering
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The quality of the software is probably above average for Linux distros, but the documentation isn't great.
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I used various Raspberry Pi's over the past decade, starting with the Pi B+, then Pi 3 B , then Pi 4.
The Raspberry Pi's have support in mainline distros (e.g. Debian and Ubuntu), so that is why their support is good, compared to the more powerful SBC's that have 'one hit wonder' Linux releases (Odroid, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, ...etc), then no support after that.
Although, something similar happened to me on the Pi 3 B: I am stuck with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and can't upgrade to 24.04 LTS or later, because they stop
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Raspberry Pi Pico has both ARM and RISC-V cores (Score:3)
If you want truly open source hardware then RISCV is the future. Companies like WCH crank out microcontrollers for literal pennies and they’re well designed hardware.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is already using RISC-V. When they updated the Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller to v2 they added two RISC-V cores. The device can recognize whether the code flashed to the device is ARM or RISC-V and use the appropriate pair of cores.
For now this is just the microcontroller. It is widely hoped that they do the same with the Raspberry Pi embedded Linux board.
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What was the thinking behind having both types of core?
Espressif have used at least three different CPU cores, including ARM and RISC V, in their microcontrollers. I think for the more integrated system on chip style MCUs it doesn't really matter which they have now. As long as GCC supports it, it's largely invisible to the user.
I haven't tried the Pi Zero but with Espressif they only support libraries for all peripherals, and with the WiFi it's a certification issue. Their build system is crap too.
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I meant Pi Pico, not Zero.
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I was under the impression that Espressif had used Tensor cores, and later migrated to RISC-V. I had no idea of any products in which they used Arm
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I could be wrong about that. I thought I saw it, but maybe not. The RISC-V cores are much preferred over the other ones, not least because RISC-V gets more attention in GCC.
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I think Espressif also used ARM in some parts. They are a bit frustrating because ESP32 has a good ecosystem and is cheap, but it's also got crappy tooling and its peripherals, it's microcontroller features, are lacking. As well as having to use their library code, unless you reverse engineer the part, they are just very basic and inflexible.
Unfortunately though they are the only option really. The RPi Pico W is more expensive and there isn't much availability of small modules. I haven't really looked much
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I'd be surprised if they didn't. Industrial computers were stupidly priced before the Raspberry Pi. Lots of them still are. And industrial customers care much more about whether the drivers work than whether they're open source.
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Unfortunately this is a common misconception. RISCV is not open source in any way that slashdotters recognize. When they say RISC V is "open" all it means is that you can implement a chip design with the RISC V ISA without a license. That's literally the only practical difference between it and ARM.
If you want to use an existing RISC V core in your own custom chip and don't want to make your own core, all cores available now are fully proprie
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"All" is a broad statement my friend. The Raspberry Pi Pico RISC-V core (Hazard 3) is entirely open source under the Apache 2 license.
If by "custom chip" you mean something a chip competitive with the BCM2712, ok, but nobody would build a chip competitive with the BCM2712 from scratch just to save on ARM licensing fees; it would be an insane amount of work that would never lead to a positive return on investment.
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While everything you said in your comment is true, we might and someday get an actually Open RISC-V implementation. It's legally possible, unlike ARM or x86. Perhaps we could instead have an outdated MIPS or SPARC, but why would we want that except for hobbyism? I honestly would like both, but only as toys.
From an end user point of view, I am using amd64. The OSS Linux drivers are just so good now there's almost no sense in using anything else at this moment if that's what you want to run. For once I regret
Arm vs RISC-V (Score:2)
A company also has the option of publishing its HDL models openly, w/o violating any license, since this is an MIT licensed CPU. (Why they might want to is another story)
RISC-V is still relatively new, just like Arm was in the 00s. Once there are a variety of Arm vendors, it will be a different story
Re: Uncomfortable truth (Score:1)
They probably never dreamed big companies would put these cheap boards in everything.
RPi Foundation absolutely wanted big companies to put these cheap boards in everything - they are committing to a ten year production life for their devices and have maintained the same physical dimensions so they could easily be added to product designs.
I understand the RPi Foundation also went the extra mile and certified the device as an embed able device that can be incorporated in third-party dedigns without requiring the manufacturer to certify the WiFi and Bluetooth in the RPi in their device.
The com
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I agree with you -- even on antediluvian Linux kernels and kernel drivers, RISC-V boards to well, just because of the constant evolution. However, what the Raspberry Pi brings to the table is consistency. You can buy a Raspberry Pi from over ten years ago still, which is important for businesses who use them, where a board replacement is doable. No need to buy a bunch of stock and sock it away in a warehouse until all customer warranties run out.
I do wish RISC-V would get to a similar point, but it will
Moot point (Score:2)
I guess it's a moot point if I can or cannot upgrade one if they're several hundred pounds and won't ship until three years from now if at all.
They are designed for students ... (Score:1)
I guess it's a moot point if I can or cannot upgrade one if they're several hundred pounds and won't ship until three years from now if at all.
They are designed for students, depending on family they start at US$15 or $US45. They are absolutely awesome for this mission.
More expensive models with more RAM are available for hobbyists. There are also industrial oriented boards. But these hobbyists and industrial applications are a sideline that subsidizes the educational mission. IMHO these more expensive models are still a pretty damn good deal.
Pi's or Pico's driving this? (Score:2)
Pi not for real-time, Pi Pico is (Score:1)
Pi Pico is a microcontroller. There is a C SDK for your embedded app to call. Micropython is an option. But what is really exciting is that FreeRTOS is also an option.
In short, Pico is typically running a bare metal app that makes SDK calls, or it has a more robust Real-Time Operating System. Embedded Linux is not real-time, but not all embedded apps need real-time.
Another really exciting thing is that the Pi Pico 2 has both dual ARM and
My advice (Score:3, Insightful)
My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now.
My advice is to not be a cuck. The raspi people made it harder for you to tinker with your own hardware and you should not appreciate that any more than in the earliest days when Liz promised us that they were going to release Android for the Pi and then never did. They've been customer-unfriendly from the beginning, when they were selling boards with dumb mistakes that ruined them for many purposes (remember raspi A USB fails? remember the MANY power supply failures?) and then telling us we should suck it up and be happy to have got them at all.
Re:My advice (Score:5, Informative)
While i also hate the RAM upgrade restriction, hearing why they did it sadly does make some sense.
With how expensive the versions with more ram have become, they've been facing sellers swapping the ram chips with low quality chips with higher capacity, and selling it as an authentic pi with that capacity...
As always, assholes are the reason we can't have nice things... And it sucks for raspberry pi to make that decision... But i do kind of get it, they don't want people to get scammed left & right in this period of ram shortages...
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But wouldn't for-profit resellers who upgrade the ram be the least affected by this change? They are both capable of downgrading the bootloader and the ones who would care the least about having an old bootloader. Plus, the required bootloader is 2 years old now, bit it will be VERY old down the line...
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Their reasoning sounds plausible only if read from a "business weasel" perspective. If there's a market for RPis with more lower quality RAM, nobody is "undercutting" RPF; they're selling the products they want to, at the price they want to, and choosing not to offer big/slow/cheap OEM RAM configurations. And even if someone could undercut them on the exact same components - So what??? RPF may be a non-profit, but I am not!
The RPi is specifically targeted at DIY'e
Re:My advice (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't resellers undercutting RPi. It's someone buying a 1GB RPi, doing the mod with 8GB of poor quality RAM, then selling it as an 8GB RPi at a modest discount.
The problem is that you buy the board and because the RAM is bad, you perform a return and find out it was a counterfeit RPi board that doesn't work for you.
Despite the AI issue, you can find RAM. Often poor quality recycled RAM with errors are stupidly cheap (and used in many products as-is). The board can boot with bad RAM, but run stable it might not, and you'd be more likely to blame RPi than on the reseller you bought the dodgy unit from
The fact that RPi took this long to do it would mean they're actually seeing a bunch of returns with the RAM swapped out.
It could also be that people are buying the 8GB units, swapping them with 1GB units and selling them as fake 8GB units, like those $20 "1TB" USB sticks you can find easily on Amazon.
Changing the RAM on an RPi isn't a trivial procedure - I believe it's PoP RAM so it's not something a hobbyist would easily do without a lot of specialized equipment and experience in being able to separate PoP RAM from the base CPU and reballing and such. So hobbyist wise, they aren't likely to be ones affected since few would have the expertise or equipment. But those trying to sell counterfeits do.
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I don't think rpi has been PoP since the B; pi4 and 5 are definitely not PoP, but your other points are all valid.
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Correct. Though it's worth noting that BGA rework stations make little work of chips regardless of whether they are pop or not. The issue is resoldering 2 chips vs 1 since you're likely to detach the main SOC while trying to remove the RAM package. But in the end it's actually all the same work process whether you're prepping / mounting RAM to a PCB or to another package.
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How much profit margin can there be in something like that?
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For a board with Gigabytes of DRAM? I'd say quite a lot these days. More than enough for the scum to rise on.
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I'm living with the USB failures today. We have a fleet of SBC's installedin hard to reach locations. Half of them have had USB ports fail in service over the last couple of years. Oh, wait, they are expensive Nvidia Jetson Nano boards not Raspberry Pi's. Our installed Raspies have been working very well.
Re: My advice (Score:2)
I'm talking about the original Pis whose USB would crater with any non trivial traffic. Those boards were defective and they should have replaced them. That should have been the end of the raspi when they didn't.
Re:My advice (Score:4, Insightful)
My advice is to not be a cuck.
My advice is not to use weird dated MAGA terms.
The raspi people made it harder for you to tinker with your own hardware
Yeah generally I don't like this. On the other hand we now have massive widespread acceptance of online scamming where legally sound companies get to cream off the scam profits so basically encourage them.
This puts manufacturers between a rock and a hard place. If the channels are filled with broken re-badged raspi's that is in the world as it is right now Raspberry Pi's problem. And RasPi customer's problem. So what would you have them do? Just shrug and say "lol sux to be u"? In this case 99.999% of their customers will never change the RAM.
They've been customer-unfriendly from the beginning, when they were selling boards with dumb mistakes that ruined them for many purposes (remember raspi A USB fails? remember the MANY power supply failures?
And yet I've been happily using them for various tasks for years. Bugs or design flaws aren't customer hostility and it's dumb to conflate them.
Re: My advice (Score:2)
Treating you like you're the problem when they have bugs and design flaws is not ok.
I dropped Apple over their handling of the B&W G3 logic board faults. This is the same kind of shit.
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"Cuck" was a pejorative LONG before "MAGA" even existed.
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"Cuck" was a pejorative LONG before "MAGA" even existed.
It is a contraction of "Cuckhold" Men who enjoy watching their wives have sex with other men - or possibly other women. The man is called a cuck, his wife is called a "hotwife"
A derivative is "CuckQueen, a female version of a cuckhold.
Probably more than anyone wants to know. Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.
Re: (Score:2)
Surely you know it exploded in popularity after Internet MAGA people started throwing the word around.
I have been working on keeping it around since they stopped using it when it became clear that they were the ultimate cucks. So yes, you are in this case 100% correct, coward. I was absolutely inspired by the maggots' use of cuck, but only indirectly because it only became good to me when it became embarrassing to them. Is that petty? Fuck 'em. Anything that beats them over the head with what they said has the potential, however slight, to get through their skulls.
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My advice is to not be a cuck.
My advice is not to use weird dated MAGA terms.
That's DrinkyPoo's word of the day. Called me a cuck about DNA in another story.
I have no idea why DrinkyPoo thinks that poster and I enjoy watching other men bang our wives.
Be gentle, I think he might be spiraling.
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someone is protective of their fetish.
now you just need to get a wife and you can live it for real!
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My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now.
My advice is to not be a cuck. The raspi people made it harder for you to tinker with your own hardware and you should not appreciate that any more than in the earliest days when Liz promised us that they were going to release Android for the R-Pi and then never did.
I agree with your sentiment, and the RPi has carried the scent of enshittification for a while now. But I think it's important to acknowledge that this latest looks-like-a-dick-move seems to have been in self-defence.
I have to wonder if they might not have done this if it hadn't been for the third-party dickheads buying low-RAM Pis, swapping in bigger RAM chips with shitty provenance and shittier performance, and passing them off as legitimate Pis. This gave both the product and the Foundation a nasty reput
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They had to do something to counter this scam, and I'm at a loss as to what other course of action might have been viable. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions.
I think the best way to do it is probably through a trusted distribution chain. This can also be manipulated in nasty ways so some people won't trust it, but in it's what I would trust most. They'd need to do some testing of products sourced anonymously from those distributors to verify that it was working to make it trustworthy. I'd prefer it be in-house but they could probably afford to pay someone reputable at this point.
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My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now.
My advice is to not be a cuck. The raspi people made it harder for you to tinker with your own hardware and you should not appreciate that any more than in the earliest days when Liz promised us that they were going to release Android for the Pi and then never did. They've been customer-unfriendly from the beginning, when they were selling boards with dumb mistakes that ruined them for many purposes (remember raspi A USB fails? remember the MANY power supply failures?) and then telling us we should suck it up and be happy to have got them at all.
There are Android images available for the Orange Pi I have. No idea why you would want to run that over a real Linux distro unless your really need a phone app of some sort.
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Yes, why would you want to use an embedded OS that is optimized for touch display, on hardware that is trivial to turn into an embedded system with a touch display...
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Yes, why would you want to use an embedded OS that is optimized for touch display, on hardware that is trivial to turn into an embedded system with a touch display...
Fair enough, touchscreens on Linux are indeed hit and miss. I thought Android on non-phone/tablets was much the same.
Re:My advice (Score:4, Interesting)
My advice is to not be a cuck.
You can't get cucked if you didn't have a girlfriend in the first place. The Raspi people made a change that affects virtually zero of their customers. That's not cucking by definition.
in the earliest days when Liz promised us that they were going to release Android for the Pi and then never did
Liz and Upton promised you precisely nothing. Android 4.0 on the Pi was nothing more than possibility that never left early development. It was never officially announced by anyone. The best you ever got is that running Android on a Pi "looks promising" to quote the man himself. That you misunderstood it and got excited is your failing, not theirs.
They've been customer-unfriendly from the beginning
Yes by creating a low cost tinker device and seeding a community of support. Fuck them right? What have you ever done other than bitch and moan on Slashdot?
when they were selling boards with dumb mistakes that ruined them for many purposes
Still waiting for your design to show them how they did it all wrong. How fucking dare they not be perfect unlike your godly self? *Note, the only thing godly about you is how big of an arsehole you are at times.
and then telling us we should suck it up and be happy
They did precisely none of that. In fact they changed PSU supplier and re-designed the powersupply section of the board under a new revision. What the fuck happened to you? Did Liz kick your dog? Or did Upton fuck your wife or something? At the risk of giving you an inadvertent complement, I've never seen a bigger hateboner than yours.
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And yet when Sony removed Linux support for the PS3, a change that affects 'virtually zero of their customers,' Slashdot was calling for lawsuits.
Except that is false. The number of legitimate customers buying RPis and then upgrading the RAM is zero. It costs more to do so than buy the correct RPi to begin with and the only way to make this financially viable is to use RAM chips which are virtually broken from the onset (which is precisely the fraud this is trying to stop).
On the other hand when Sony removed Linux support from the PS3 on the other hand it not only affected many tinkerers who were actively using the platform, but researchers as well.
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It's genuinely nice that you have fond memories of disassembling a George Foreman grill cluster, and also very sad that Sony killed Other OS, but that rugpull was pretty much inevitable once it was discovered that the PS3 running Linux was the finest Blu-Ray ripper man had conceived, which in turn was pretty much inevitable anyway since Sony gave access to the drive through the hypervisor.
As you say, statistically nobody is upgrading the RAM on their raspi, but it sure would be nice if customers who bought
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And yet when Sony removed Linux support for the PS3, a change that affects 'virtually zero of their customers,' Slashdot was calling for lawsuits.
Some of our people have issues. I've wondered about the number of people who simply mustuse a Pi, and must upgrade the Ram. That number must be close to zero. But the perpetually offended can always find a reason to be offended.
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Liz made a video showing Android working and saying they would release it soon, and then we never heard about it again.
At the risk of giving you an inadvertent complement, I've never seen a bigger hateboner than yours.
That is, to be fair, one of the nicer things you've said to me. In fact though it's your usual grade of hyperbolic hooplah because this is one of the things I've ranted about the least, at least in this decade.
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No, she made a video showing Android 4.0 working, and made no promises on an actual release. Stop putting words in other people's mouths. Android was never promised to you for Raspberry Pi. It was a tech curiosity they were playing with that simply never came to market.
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They did precisely none of that. In fact they changed PSU supplier and re-designed the powersupply section of the board under a new revision. What the fuck happened to you? Did Liz kick your dog? Or did Upton fuck your wife or something? At the risk of giving you an inadvertent complement, I've never seen a bigger hateboner than yours.
Something surely happened to the guy. Having a conversation with him is worthless these days. Calling people cucks over nothing, and his rageboners aside Dr Ol suggests some weed gummies, or ketamine.
My main beef with the Pi foundation is I had to buy a new Power supply when I switched from the Pi4 to 5. And that's pretty darn trivial, more a minor annoyance.
And seriously - who is tricking out their Pi with gobs of Ram anyhow? Who would even want to?
Re: My advice (Score:2)
He is the troll. The call is coming from inside his head
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This isn't troll bait. I actively enjoy arguing with drinkypoo.
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Since when does "they didn't deliver what they said they would, for reasons they won't enumerate, but hey they hit their marketing budget so I guess it all evens out" make any sense at all?
If you aren't actually going to do a thing, don't tell everyone you are doing that thing. It's not hard.
That doesn't follow... (Score:2)
How does that follow? You are treating the idea of a user upgrading their own RAM like a service RPI is providing.
RPI paid to design the board, sold them, then spent more money to make an update to prevent users from modifying a developer board in certain ways? That makes zero sense, and can only serve to alienate the very clientele that are paying their bills.
I kinda agree with the lock, Ill explain (Score:5, Informative)
So I am normally anti DRM and would normally complain loudly about this lock but if you read into it the idea makes perfect sense and it's less of a "lock" and more about "authenticity".
People were buying these with the lowest ram, sourcing crappy questionable ram and upgrading them then reselling at the higher cost which left people eventually holding the bag when the memory errors and such appeared.
When you get one and flash the official image the "lock" is in effect. Anyone can make their own image without it thus the end user tinkerers can STILL UPGRADE THEIR RAM. This just stops someone from selling a knock-off upgraded PI as "genuine" because people will likely expect to flash official images on it. This just thwarts those plans and keeps the higher quality chips around for people.
If you don't like this buy the cheap one, get the ram chip and ugrade it and remove the lock yourself. Tinkering still works....
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Unsoldering the ram chips and replacing them takes some effort and skill, and then you end up paying for 2 sets of ram chips - the old ones (which you cant do anything with) and the new ones. Given the effort and cost involved, this is only worth doing if:
1) the higher ram model is heavily marked up vs the incremental component cost so buying the ram yourself is significantly cheaper.
2) the same ram is genuinely expensive, but much cheaper ram is available and still works without noticeable side effects
If i
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Your comment is like pretending random knock-off USB flash memory that reports 256GB will actually hold the full amount. It's pretending the cheap knock-off sdcards on amazon don't noticeably lose data earlier or run slower. Pretending knock-off SSDs don't wrap around to the beginning earlier than their reported sizes.
I don't want those people touching my hardware before me and not telling me. Cheaper or not.
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Feel like that's not what is being said at all. It's saying in a world where they are willing to lie about capacity and have the technical ability to do so, they *certainly* would also have the ability to defeat this mechanism to lock out changing the RAM chips.
It just seems on the face of it a bit silly when the reporting is 'they are blocking supply chain BS by blocking ram modules' but at the same time 'but don't worry, you can easily undo the lockout'.
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As if the evil resellers won't be able to apply the same trick.
Who checks the bootloader version in advance before buying a RPi?
Binary Blob Bootloaders? (Score:2)
Real geeks boot with the front panel toggle switches.
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You still need a working Raspberry pi to do that :)
https://obsolescence.wixsite.c... [wixsite.com]
I have indeed now keyed a few basic programs in at boot time (well for the emulator not the pi obviously!). It's amazingly good fun and I then understood why octal rather than hex has such pride of place in unix and C.
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why octal rather than hex has such pride of place in unix and C.
Because homo sapiens have eight fingers.
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The thumbs are the carry and borrow flags.
You, guys, are hypocrites (Score:2)
Ah, yes, the good old "this thing is completely unacceptable and evil except when our guys do it".
stock shot up over 30% in the last week (Score:3)
Oh yeah? Try to buy a Pi Zero 2 W. You might find one, at no where near the $15 list price.
The stock price will be short lived without enough product to sell.
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Last month, I ended up getting a Pi 3 Model A+ from Adafruit for my project because most other models were out of stock seemingly everywhere. But it looks like even those are out of stock now.
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Oh yeah? Try to buy a Pi Zero 2 W. You might find one, at no where near the $15 list price.
The stock price will be short lived without enough product to sell.
Well yeah... that's entirely the point here.
Silly (Score:2)
Holy shit, have some self awareness (Score:3)
This doesn't pass the 'would you say the same thing if it wasn't your baby' test.
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What kind of baby do you have that you're giving its hippocampus a transplant? Because actually that's precisely the kind of rare thing we're talking about here. Precisely zero people were upgrading Raspberry Pi RAM for anything other than fraud. It was an expensive way to achieve something that was completely avoidable and it served no practical purpose beyond "Look ma what I managed to do!"
Pis are available in a large array of memory config. Buying the right config is cheaper than buying the wrong one and
Great shades of FTDI (Score:2)
Raspberri Pi: The jerk who is still your friend? (Score:3)
It's like making excuses for that narcissist friend you've been meaning to let go.
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Okay, their mission didn't end up helping British schoolkids learn programming
Err... I've seen Pis used in a variety of highschools. That they didn't end up becoming a core curriculum item wasn't the goal post that was said. There's no question that it made electronics tinkering and basic programming far more accessible to schoolkids, but there is a question of whether the schoolkids cared.
and they did poorly not selling out to commercial enterprise
"Selling out" is an interesting way of saying "our product was so popular that we couldn't fund its production under the original goal and had to find a money source." The Raspberry Pi Foundation n
So (Score:1)
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A cheap Windows PC is now around $1,000. If you don't need Windows you can use one of these instead and even at current inflated prices it costs a lot less than that Windows PC.
I also have one running as a frontend to some local AI servers, with Open WebUI, Opencode and other things that don't require much CPU power. I'd rather them running on a box that I can wipe and reinstall if the AI software decides it wants to take over the machine and do dastardly things to it than direct on the users' computer or t
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$1000? I don't think so. Beelink sells lots of windows 11 mini computers with 16 GB ram and pitiful SSDs (256-512) for under $300 USD. These computers run Linux quite well. I have several in my home lab. For me they work so much better than Pis for non-embedded, server-type work.
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Granted prices have gone up by 50% in the last year or two.
Re: So (Score:2)
A MiniPC with the specs of the one I bought for $300 is now $600.
I'm not finding reasons to buy one (Score:3)
I haven't bought one since the 4. I found other mini pcs being superior options.
Maybe that's just me. Having included GPIO pins are the only upside IMHO. At least for my personal use. At the office, mini PCs are far superior options.
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I haven't bought one since the 4. I found other mini pcs being superior options.
If a MiniPC is the "superior option" then you shouldn't have looked to the Rpi in the first place. They are different formfactor devices with fundamentally different purposes and fundamentally different platforms for use.
What's the point? (Score:2)