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Why you can no longer own a Raspberry Pi

Ever since its launch back in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has been praised as a fantastic single-board computer (SBC).

Not only was the Pi reasonably priced for the amount of power it delivered but it has been supported by a huge community, something that makes it far easier to use and which adds immense value to the user-experience.

The product has also continued to evolve, growing from a single-core CPU with just a few hundred KB of memory to a four-core powerhouse with up to 16GB of the now precious RAM.

Over the years, millions of RPis have been bought by both industry and eager hobbyists and they've been turned into all sorts of clever devices or simply used for the same kind of lightweight desktop computing applications that were once the sole domain of regular PCs.

However, everything changed this week after an unexpected announcement.

It seems that the Raspberry Pi has just gone from the darling child of industry and hobbyists everywhere to something you can no longer own.

Don't get me wrong, they're still for sale, you can still hand over money and get a Rasberry Pi shipped to you in return.

The big change is that, due to a small change being made by the company, you now no longer truly own that new Raspberry Pi.

How does that work?

Well they've decided to alter the system so that you can no longer upgrade the memory.

Right now a lot of readers are probably thinking "I didn't know you could upgrade the memory on a Raspberry Pi".

Well such an upgrade was unlikely to be something the average user would do because it requires unsoldering the existing RAM and replacing it with higher capacity components. The truth is that only a very keen hobbyist with the necessary equipment and skills would attempt this, although companies using the RPi in products may have been more inclined to do this in the face of the current RAM crisis.

Changes are now being made that will lock all new RPi SBCs to only work with the amount of RAM that they were originally shipped with. This means you can still change the chips but the extra capacity you add will not be recognised or useable.

WTF Rasberry Pi? They're now telling us that you may pay money and receive a Pi in the post but the *ownership* of that product remains with the company. You clearly don't *own* the product because they're stopping you from modifying it in the way you once could.

This is the whole "heated seats license" stupidity that BMW tried to pull off a few years back, just in a different form.

For their part, the company claims that this is a move they've had to made to protect the market from unscrupulous players who might take a 1GB RPi and upgrade it to 16GB using components of dubious compatibility and performance, before reselling to an unsuspecting market. They're worried that this could produce an onerous support burden that would impact their bottom line.

To be fair, I can understand that concern but on the other hand they have to be aware that a sizeable chunk of the market for these things is a hobby community that likes to mod their hardware -- it's part of the fun. By removing that option, Raspberry Pi are shooting themselves in the foot.

The sad reality is that when you're looking at the Raspberry Pi 5 as an SBC, it no longer really stacks up against the many x86 mini-PCs that have flooded the market. Unless building something where the lowest possible power consumption and smallest form-factor are your key criteria, the mini-PCs often work out far cheaper on a bang-per-buck basis, at least once you've factored in adding an SSD, power supply, case, cooling and such to your RPi.

In today's market, the RPi5 is no longer the cheap and cheerful SBC it once was, with the likes of PBTech charging almost $650 for a 16GB unit (without power supply or cooling solution).

I'm pretty sure that someone would be far more inclined to buy the 1GB version for just $108 if they knew they could upgrade it themselves later (skills and tools being available).

Surely they could figure out some way to allow hobbyists to retain the ability to mod their own hardware, even if it meant registering a serial number that could then be checked by anyone buying on the open market. Requesting an "unlock" of the memory size would in such cases, add the serial number to that list and when someone was shopping online they could compare the number of the unit they're planning to buy to the published list to see if it had been unlocked or if it was a unit still carrying the factory-fitted RAM.

"You will own nothing and be happy" continues to incrementally change the world for the worse :-(

Carpe Diem folks!

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