Raspi is likely going to continue making moves like this, since they have gone public. You can't just have people buying the cheaper 1GiB boards and upgrading them to 4GiB, that's taking potential profits away from the investors...

I doubt many are doing this upgrade, and I think its awesome someone has the tooling & skill to do so. I cannot fathom how this is a threat to RPI. I would assume a community firmware patch will likely release & resolve the limitation (until it becomes a signed binary)

Preventing counterfeit boards with janky memory upgrades, or something, from getting out onto the market seems like a potentially worthwhile thing, but also probably a reaction to an imaginary problem. Preventing end users from doing what they want seems like a bad thing, but given how few users are actually capable of doing this upgrade, also probably an imaginary problem.

Given the state of the world I'm a little amazed anyone can muster any outrage about this.

A blaring warning might've been better than a full-on block.

Ah this suck, why does every company who goes big have to be hostile to end-user.

In the comments there's a link to consumer rights wiki that includes Raspberry Pi's response to this:

> there may be a minor financial gain in buying a part with say a 2GB part, swapping it for an 8GB part of dubious origin, and reselling it as an 8GB device. However, this brings an element of risk to the user - the board hasn't been tested by us - and is a potential support burden for us, with customers complaining of unreliable devices. We therefore remove the commercial incentive by locking devices to their original RAM size.

Frankly, that sounds pretty reasonable to me