Drawback: You need different silkscreens for different amounts of RAM.
Btw, if you're worried about RAM-swapped units you can already verify them as described at https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr...
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(§) as can be seen here https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1129-pcn/docum...
Replacing a socketed component that is modular by design, even if it's not officially intended to be upgraded outside the factory, is worlds different from replacing BGA components on a densely packed PCB.
That said, there could also be a middle ground by just providing some way to look up the hardware specs of a given serial number. Post the part numbers of the components that you're concerned about being replaced and provide tools to verify as many of them through software as is practical. Allow owners to know if their device has been modified and how so, but allow them to choose what to do with that information.
Combating fraudsters trying to pass off modified and/or refurbished devices as genuine is valid, but preventing owners from modifying or repairing their own or knowingly purchasing such devices from honest resellers is not.
That’s awesome. If it’s economical to do, it’s clearly good for consumers.
> The sellers who do this don’t always care to use good RAM chips and may even use QA reject parts.
That’s clearly on the sellers.
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi foundation
That’s a bit of a conjecture and easily solved in ways that preserve user freedom.
https://github.com/therealdreg/ftdibrick
Pepperidge Farm remembers the FTDI driver bricking.
https://www.eurogamer.net/3ds-flashcard-includes-secret-kill...
> When the unit doesn’t work correctly, the anger and RMA requests are directed back at the Raspberry Pi
It's not their problem then, the seller is responsible for it and I think we can assume the user has a brain so they knew they could buy a more expensive option from the authorized sellers. Isn't this the case?
Dangerous assumption there. I'm not just being cynical, that is decades of experience speaking.
They don't need the resellers help for that! I've already been burned twice thinking "I'll use a raspberry pi for this small project" and having it die within a month because reliably reading/writing to an SD card is hard or something.
Between the notorious unreliability, crazy price hikes, trademark or whatever disputes, and this anti consumer ewaste generating policy, I can't think of any reason I'd ever patronize them again.. my only regret is it took me two purchases to learn this lesson!
The person in the forum thread claimed to be repairing CM5s and CM4s. Unusual but it seems like an otherwise hyper reactive response by the RPi Foundation. Something you wouldn’t batt an eye at if it were Apple instead.
Doing a RAM swap and then selling the resulting unit as if it were a Raspberry Pi of the higher RAM capacity might be construed as trademark infringement[0]. And in general it's fairly difficult to make arguments in antitrust cases that boil down to "yes, your honor, everything they're doing is within their rights but I don't like it".
[0] At the same time, the scammers could probably get away with this by putting "Upgraded to 16GB!" in the title of their eBay listings or whatever, in the same way that fraudulent storage devices are labeled as "upgraded" (read: lying about their capacity). That doesn't impact the antitrust analysis though.
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In short, someone at NVIDIA really hates retail, but loves Chinese sanction busters.
You can already check whether the RAM has been swapped via https://geekworm.com/blogs/news/prevent-ram-swapped-raspberr....
It might help in the short term to stop dodgy resellers who mod the boards with cheap upgraded RAM to make a buck or two...
But the Pi itself is always taking one step forward, one step back in terms of firmware. I've been tinkering with some Qualcomm boards from Radxa and things are slightly better there, though you don't have anywhere near the ecosystem you get with Pi (or onboarding niceties).
Remember when FTDI did this and suddenly medical equipment at some hospital stopped working?
Sad to see industry pioneers lose to players that copy them and undercut prices using cheap labor.
AFAIR the EEPROM mostly uses the VideoCore instruction set.
Any sellers caught doing this would quickly be flagged by the community as unreliable; also purchase protection is pretty strong these days.
And then they got some capital injections and started caring more about the commercial side, didn’t they?
Money and greed has been at the first place from the beginning.
I think of I this way. As a casual/hobbyist user, maybe I'm happy to accept a 10% risk of the device failing prematurely in exchange for saving $20 on a memory upgrade. Ok, so these unscrupulous sellers will never tell me that info up-front...but this defective-by-design system doesn't help me either. The sellers playing this shady game might not accept returns (one example of this already in the github issue linked from the main thread) and there's no sign anything's wrong until you receive and boot up. So the user is left holding the bag, with kneecapped memory capacity, and the same stability risks anyway!
If these DRAM-upgraders are really so clever, they'll find a way to bypass this (patched firmware or hacked serial in the CPU). At least, it'll work until the user is out of the 30-day period when they finally update the firmware.
Or if the CPU/mainboard can really detect this in a non-defeatable manner, why cut the usable memory? Just print something to dmesg or stderr when the user logs in. "This device's memory has been modified and may be unstable, warranty blah blah"
Apple locks down fingerprint/camera module swaps, but at least there's a plausible (afaik) security rationale for it. Seems like Raspberry just got tired of being undercut on price.
If RMA process includes hardware verification then rpi doesn’t get bled out by absorbing the cost of “counterfeits”
If they widely tell people what the market is doing and make all the tools public, they will offload the work of dealing with counterfeits while levelling up the tinkerers
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The way they price their RPi’s - are we even surprised there’s now a market for cheap modified Pi’s with more RAM?
Practically speaking, though, this antifeature doesn't affect most people, because I don't think most people are willing to take a heat gun to a microsoldered part just to save a few bucks on RAM. If the RAM was socketed somehow - which at this scale and performance tier is not possible - then I'd probably be way angrier.
(To be clear, I don't know either way; I'm just assuming that this was contemplated at the time because it's easier)
I don't think that's been true for a long time. Their main market is commercial users now - reference what happened with COVID shortages and RPi prioritizing nearly all of their capacity to commercial users, leaving tinkerers with little to no stock.
Nah, they got big enough and now you think you can pull Apple tricks, good luck with that.
Get fucked. Clearly you want to make all the profit and stop people from upgrading their devices.
Their argument assumes users are idiots - we had swappable components for years, and while there were cheating actors, market has invented things like brands and trust, you know? You don't have to buy models from the sellers you don't trust, nobody forces you to.
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The 2026 financial report is apparently this Thursday on Sept 24. So will see how this played out for them. Their stock is all over the place anyway with low float.
As they clearly explained, giving you the choice to swap the RAM chips would create broader systemic problems that would lead to bad customer experiences and a support burden for their organization.
You'd be ok with that trade?
Local maximalists like to imagine a world where everything is aligned with their own personal incentives, but then present this world as being filled with freedom and choices. Just not anyone else's freedom or choices, only their own.
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Got here via Jeff Geerling coverage[0].
Way to read the room, jfc. Hardbricking hardware is not the answer, see FTDI.
I get why they are doing that... but I think there should be a way for users to flash a separate firmware, maybe tied to the hardware key similar to the old h264/mpeg license, that allows the usage of a modified board.
PS: Arrest Sam Altman who caused all of this mess in the first place with his market manipulation stunt.
These operations are not hobbyist level, they have access to the machinery to make it trivial.
They also added a bit of internal ink, which is worth just a little more:
> we now also program in some other device attributes, meaning that switching parts of the same size may not work.
Working with vendors in China is entirely adversarial (mostly because their supply chain is vulnerable too), at this scale.
the only reason why pis are not marked this way is because raspberry didn't wanted to (so far)
On-chip fuses would be a good solution. Which, of course, is already what they're using to lock chips to specific memory. There's just not a good reason to brick the board when the memory doesn't match. Have the firmware flash a warning on the screen before boot. Problem solved.
...unless the goal really is locking boards to stock memory configurations.
I'm sorry, you seem to be confused. Soldering is not the problem. Locking up the hardware to have hardware provisioned tier limits to block you from upgrading your own hardware is silly.
And do note, raspberry pi doesn't prevent you from switching RAM chips. The board will continue to work just the same with high capacity variants. But for some reason raspberry pi hardcodes a max memory size that prevents you from using the hardware upgrade you paid for in full.
If someone gets updated in the wild (like this person did without realizing they had a counterfeit board), they'll fail to boot.
But if this is the real concern, they could just display the fact that "Unoriginal RAM detected" to inform the user its not a vanilla RPi Foundation product, so buyers understand the situation, but continue booting normally.
Every board sold would have been an extra user, the reseller isn't adding full users (although they may increase the indirect customer base!), so even gaining a user through a reseller increases the amortization divider for the support burden.
Now lets consider RAM chip support burden, the original Pi RAM chips can have issues generating support burden, and so can the reseller RAM chips. Unless RP foundation refuses to upstream link training / RAM bringup patches from resellers, there is no real additional support burden.
In fact if RP were a little more creative, they could have tried contacting the resellers to explain they can continue their modding business as long as they advertise it clearly as modified, and to inform them they will be receiving units that didn't pass the RAM tests from the automated lines, since they're going to desolder the chips anyway, this can save costs for RP foundation.
in those jurisdictions where either price discrimination or locking hardware are not illegal, it is typically perfectly legal to reverse engineer for compatibility purposes. So nothing prevents such resellers from upping their game and learning a thing or two about link training and general SDRAM bringup.
Once they have acquired the knowledge legally in such jurisdictions the product just flows in the other jurisdictions anyway.
Courts upheld the monopolistic position of microsoft etc. for decades, but respect has no finality, "re" + "spect" to review, so later such companies were fined for their decades long transgressions.
But during those decades it may appear legal to the average consumer.
Inaction is not permission.
Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
I doubt antitrust would get anywhere on this RAM issue, but antitrust law is not defined in terms of either of those categories.
https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2010/microsd-card-failure...
One that I have seen is HMAC(serial||SKU) as a datamatrix/QR, laser-etched onto the top silkscreen and burned into a PROM.
What the fuck are they talking about?
What fraud are you speaking of?
1: I think people should be able to replace chips on an RPi as they desire, so I don't love that they're actively preventing this
2: As a buyer, I absolutely want to know if I'm buying an RPi that has had chips replaced
3: A shady seller changing the SKU to mimic a better board after changing chips is just flat out fraud.
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It's the classic "Mattress tag" case - it should be illegal to remove as a seller, and fine as the final customer.
But that's really hard to functionally enforce.
A unit that rpi themselves sold with 8g is different than a unit that someone else modified. The reworked unit is not sold with the disclosure that it has been hacked and no longer covered by any warranty, and the memory installed is of totally unknown provenance and quality, timing specs, failed qa, etc. Even the simple process of heating everything up to desolder & resolder temps is not free, it degrades everything, the pcb itself, the epoxy holding the traces and pads down, and all the components, and means higher chance of some failure happening sooner than it would have. But it's sold as a real rpi unit for real rpi price or a little less to beat real ones.
That is the fraud they speak of.
You should be free to do this to your unit if you like of course, and rpi has infinite other possible ways they could have chosen to address the problem and didn't have to do it this way. I'm only saying there is actually a problem.
If it’s represented as a new product or offered with manufacturer’s warranty, that would cross into fraud.
Only as far as new vs refurbished goes.
But that's not the problem being addressed, is it? I mean, why can't I upgrade it myself?
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In what way this is fraudulent if device works as described?
No different than upgrading a PC and then selling it. You don't call it fraud.
If someone sells RPi with 16GB and the RAM is working fine, then why would that be fraud?
If someone buys e.g. Dell PC, then adds 16GB of ram and sells it at 32GB without mentioning they put extra 16GB, is it a fraud?
That's ridiculous.
If the reply was along the lines of "This is a new firmware check to curb fraud related to undisclosed aftermarket RAM upgrades with potentially unreliable chips." - I'd be fine with it, but basically just coming out to gaslight the user about the issue leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. In the end, they had to come clean anyway, big surprise.
I say this as someone who has been loving Pis despite their price for the straightforward and reliable long-term software support. Not gonna pretent like I'll never buy a Pi again, but it's another strike moving me to explore other options in the future.
Yes they knew everything about how training DDR4 RAM works, they knew everything including that the seller doesn't know how their training code works and bailed out and no longer exists but still got paid and that it was worth it for the reseller.
I do feel for them; they're between a rock and a hard place with mis-labeled clone boards. But their implementation seems to be the most hostile and opaque possible way to achieve these goals (which I also understand from an anti-cloning standpoint, but especially anymore, it's going to get reversed anyway).
It's pretty normal for the first port of call / warranty claim for a busted item to be the dealer that sold it to you.
Its called competition. Should those „cheap labourers“ not have a job?
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That that still have a closed source firmware, which makes it possible for them to pull off the bullshit discussed in the article & this discussion - that proves there was & still is a shady undertone under all that openness facade of the RPi foundation. :P
This is where I tapped out. They could have done so much to open the industry for makers once they had traction but instead they went the other way. Disappointing at best.
This is pretty clearly just them trying to block resellers that mod their boards as that removes price pressure from them. It's end user hostile, full stop.
I think there's actually a lot of commercial use of the regular boards as well. Plenty of products for which a Pi is sufficiently capable and for which they can use something off-the-shelf rather than developing a custom PCB.
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Except linked in this exact discussion is a thread where the person is asking RPi for remedy instead because the seller has been unable to assist (i.e. has run off with their money).
That RAM is not fiction, it was working before they updated and worked again when they removed the update. It's failing verification, not failing to function.
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Even for pi, the real value is in industrial companies that don't want to hire their own maintainers.
Disagree.
For example, Toradex i.MX8 is supported until 2035 and possibly beyond.
Reminds me of Adobe's history to be honest. They also were big on hooking the young to their ecosystem, including turning more than one blind eye towards piracy, and once they had a captive userbase plus a lack of competition, they enshittified.
So no, it's not reasonable at all.
Buy an Apple product if you want what you're stating.
This hasn't been true for 5 or 6 years and there is very little reason to buy one over a second hand 1L PC these days. They are expensive and notorious for screwing SD cards.
To put it into perspective, an 8GB raspberry pi with a 32GB SD card and cable but no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse is 251GBP. 35% the price of a macbook neo.
• etch the ram around on the board itself.
• provide a pre-RMA check so user can verify if their unit is genuine (serial number linked to ram amount)
• void warranty on resoldered board.
Excellent comment, worth repeating, thanks
Umm, yes...?
Just put a 'warranty void when removed' frangible sticker on it. Seems to work fine for PCs.
But so many people these days seem to be brainwashed into accepting that computing devices should come with soldered RAM and locked bootloaders, they probably can't even envisage how hardware used to be. Yes, modding my device voided the warranty and I didn't care. Freedom has a cost.
I can swap RAM on my laptop. What broader systemic problems beyond missed opportunities for more shareholder value (at the expense of everything else) does it create?
> a support burden for their organization.
What? I thought the seller is responsible for what they sell? Don't we have things like brands and trust or authorized sellers?
Yeah it's stupid, but people doesn't know better, they'll complain loudly Raspberry PI is sh* it doesn't work and the Pi Foundation are scammers.
I can understand why they don't want that.
Since, presumably, nobody would try to sell a board with less RAM on it than shipped, a count-down scheme instead of count-up would work.
16GB board: no holes drilled in a marked area; 8GB: one hole drilled; 4GB: two holes drilled; 2GB: three holes drilled.
I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
- 8GB Pi is out of stock / too expensive - due to RAM shortage
- Someone bought a load of non-8GB Pis
- Replaced the RAM with whatever they could get their hands on (cheap enough to be worth the hassle, cheap because no one else wants it even given the ongoing shortage - so probably pretty suspicious / of dubious quality)
- The end user buys it and has no idea it has been modified and the warranty is void
- RPi probably don't want to spend their time supporting it. Probably can't if the memory is a load of crap, even if they wanted to. It gets bricked.
The point here is someone bought something else (a fake pi) than they thought they were getting. Not that someone willingly wanted to go hacking.
There is always a reason someone does any bad thing. There is always obviously some advantage to the perpetrator.
The fact they are only reacting to some other bad actions doesn't excuse it because there are any number of ways to to react. This way is the one way they chose when they have infinity to choose from.
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Admittedly, this may be closer to $40-50 in today's money (and didn't include an SD card, but those were more common back then in the era of digital cameras)...
It is so trivial anyone that's ever done fingernail polish can do it. The process is roughly the same.
Instead we get restrictions on all users because some users buy stuff from random marketplaces online?
I don't know why you're suggesting the fix is that they offer support for 3rd modded RAM.
I'm not.
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> Reverse engineering is legal, but manufacturers don’t have to help you figure out how to reverse engineer their products and they’re allowed to design their products in a way that makes it difficult.
I'm not asking for help to figure this out, and of course RP is allowed to shoot themselves in any foot they like.
Consider Europe where such reverse engineering is perfectly legal for compatibility purposes. Let's consider an idealized scenario, there were no security bugs or other issues with the product that would justify reverse engineering RP blobs in public. When they do something like this, they are GIVING CARTE BLANCHE to public reverse engineering efforts to attain compatibility with other RAM chips. Why would you provide legal cover in some jurisdictions for others in publicly reverse engineering your own products by introducing artificial incompatibility?
Also from a consumer perspective, RP tries to place itself front and center in maker communties, emphasizing modularity, not just hobbyists, also companies build and design end products using RP units. All of these companies must now be wondering where RP Foundations exact red line resides: can we resell an RP board in a Kiosk we made? or only for as long as it doesn't compete with RP's future Kiosk modules? Today its the RAM upgrade, but tomorrow RP modules may refuse to boot some popular Kiosk hardware intentionally. What prevents RP Foundation from eventually "not copying" end-application hardware like a Kiosk design from their customers, and then enforcing compatibility only with RP Kiosks?
So not only are they providing legal cover for public reverse engineering efforts, they are scaring part of their customer base.
> There’s generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like hardware lockdowns of this nature illegal, especially for companies that are not in regulated industries or are not monopoly/oligopoly players.
That's a very shallow interpretation of law, looking only at what RP is or isn't allowed to do.
There's generally not a lot of jurisdictions out there that make stuff like reverse engineering for compatibility or security applications illegal either.
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It's unfortunate, but given that there are so many ways you could end up with a poor quality knock-off (i.e. Amazon, sorry, 'third party marketplaces') it's probably something that skews the tradeoff quite significantly.
I guess there are more individuals who will be upset when they can't run something on their equipment as it was advertised to them than will be upset that they can't re-solder the RAM.
There are probably even fewer individuals who'll do due diligence in their own supply chain. Whilst those that suffer are technically suffering from some kind of crime / civil wrong - the chance of them getting a remedy for this is going to be non-existent.
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You're framing this as if no reputable vendor is willing or able to source cheaper parts.
If they can get a better deal in more RAM, why can't they upgrade the boards? As a consumer, doesn't that benefit you as well?
> Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, (...)
That's specious reasoning and blatant fear-mongering. Consumer protection laws require vendors to support their products. If RAM is faulty, whether it was hand soldered by Eben Upton himself or hacked from a Soviet fridge, vendors are compelled to support customers. This means vendors ultimately have an interest in minimizing faulty equipment, because it hurts their bottom line.
So why can't people have the right to upgrade their hardware? I thought we already went through this battle in the 1980s.
Sure - if that vendor was proposing a solution, a modified EEPROM perhaps, then all is dandy. But they aren’t.
I wouldn't mind buying a 16GB board even though the official models at most ship with 8gb.
I'd even wouldn't mind buying the kit and taking a stab at resoldering it myself.
I mean, think about it. what is the whole point of a raspberry pi?
Even if you might not, why would your opinion prevent others from doing what they want with their hardware?
Don't fall for it.
Just like the idea that you “can’t” rip a Blu-ray Disc was only a matter of time and energy to thwart.
I also don’t think this device is one that has ever been sold with the expectation that it would be upgraded. It is (or was) a cheap single board computer.
Like it’s kind of funny to me how this is becoming a controversy among people who probably didn’t even think raspberry pi memory could be replaced in any semblance of an economically sensible way as of yesterday.
It's fair to say that the Pi Foundation goes beyond the bare mminimum. But it's far from the only option for Linux on a SoC.
You're also implying that Kiwi Electronics sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 with SD card, housing, cable, power supply and fan for 5 euros less than they sell an 8GB raspberry pi 5 without any of those things: https://www.kiwi-electronics.com/en/raspberry-pi-5-computers...
> Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!
With 85% less storage, and nowhere near as powerful. The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?
The raspberry pi's day as cheap hobbyist computing has long gone.
Even if I'm off by 100%, 410GBP is 41% less than 699. Quite a discount!
> The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?
I think a lot more kids, etc. have 200 GBP than 700.
> Umm, yes...?
Ok, and so that trade then means Raspberry Pis don't exist, because the conditions are such that the company doesn't have the incentive to produce the device in a way that makes sense to them.
Congrats, you now live in a world where you are theoretically free to swamp the RAM on a device that never got made.
Also tone down the freedom sob story: if you don't like the limitations of this device, buy a different one. Your "freedoms" are not at risk just because this small company trying to put out an affordable device is making trade-offs to protect the vast majority of their customers (who will never swap the RAM chips on their board) at the expense of a small minority who wants to do a thing their product is not intended for.
The occasional unlicensed and secret RAM upgrade isn't going to kill the business. It's also a small minority!
Your questions have already been answered.
I can fall victim to scams if I willingly take the risk and buy something cheaper than official authorized sellers offer. Thanks to this risk I haven't yet lost all my brain cells or critical thinking yet.
But if I do, I can always complain about pretty much everything to Raspberry Pi which'd undoubtedly increase support burden for them since they apparently can use AI or post copy-paste responses only when it's not the user complaining (or they just complain about locked hardware = no support burden then, these complaints are ok).
Doesn't me losing my brain due to corporations treating me like a toddler count as a broader systemic risk to you? Probably not, but how about me AND YOU losing consumer choice?
Giving that tiny minority that freedom, at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems, is a dumb choice to make (IMO), which is why they didn't make it.
On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want, rather than expecting every product to cater to your needs, regardless of whether it makes sense for it to do so or not.
By themelves or in general? If it's the latter, it's because currently rpi offers relatively fair pricing. If they started charging 10x that amount, more would be interested in 3rd party upgrades..
> at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems
Who forces you to take the risk and buy from a 3rd party supplier at a cheaper price? You did not address my point about trust, brands and reputation handling these problems for years.
> On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want
That's precisely why I care. I'm not taking away your ability to buy original products from authorized sellers.
But you accepting ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer, paired with the economics of scale means that I'll lose my choice soon, as those companies will learn consumers are mostly fine with being screwed like that.
I'll be hit first, yes. But when they go so far that you'll start to complain, it'll be too late because no consumer friendly alternatives will exist on the market by then, thanks to economics of scale and extremely weak antitrust enforcement.
Between current inaction and eventual action, it settles the position of RP foundation, so they can't switch back and forth between "these people are circumventing security" vs "its just an unintended incompatibility", as long as they don't reveal their position its neither here nor there.
You can still solder your own 16GB and you can do your own support.
Maybe if the Rasp Pi was an unassembled kit "the whole point" would make sense.
You can do what ever you want with your hardware. Have fun. Other people don't have to support you.
10x price increases? RPi will have bigger problems than "people want to re-solder new RAM chips on our boards" if that happens. Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.
As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so. The self-evidence of this should be apparent based on what RPi is choosing to do (being the ones with all the data on this).
The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go.
You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
> "ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer"
You're making a ridiculous leap here by equating the above with one small company making a pragmatic choice to protect its business and consumers.
I believe in customer choice and I do think it's important to protect it, but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost and in ways that are not realistic or economically feasible for the other parties involved.
That nuance is sorely lacking from your position here.
You answered it on your own. The amount they can increase their margins by depends on things such as competition, barrier to entry et al. By convincing your customers that "it's all for your good", they can increase their margins making it harder to compete for those not employing these practices. Eventually we might end up with just a few players in the market like in the DRAM space, and then they absolutely can increase their margins by such amounts..
> As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so.
This is getting hilarious.. batteries in smartphones can be replaced, does that mean when I go to store.google.com or motorola.com (and choose one of their retailers) I can buy a product with unoriginal battery? Wow, why haven't those evil stealth 3p sellers figured it out yet? Such a great evil business model!
(or maybe battery prices haven't increased by such amounts that manufacturers wanted to sneak their margin increase by blaming rising battery costs?)
> The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go. You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
Relying on brands and reputation is precisely what I'm doing when buying electronics. Successfully. If you can't do it on your own, perhaps you might also want to contact some humans (those people who provide real answers instead of copy-paste corporate non-responses), this is how my relatives avoid falling for scams. By trusting humans, not for-profit corporations.
And this even works on the darknet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15989148), so you simply can't convince me all these mechanics went away, that's ridiculous corporate BS..
> but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost
Ok then, let's see where things go.