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Title: Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked
to Their Original RAM Size)

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/09/25/...

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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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