Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size) (hackaday.com)
- Reference: 0185858406
- News link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/09/25/0554208/raspberry-pi-stock-jumps-30-as-demand-surges-and-boards-now-locked-to-their-original-ram-size
- Source link: https://hackaday.com/2026/09/22/raspberry-pi-ram-restrictions-no-big-deal-frankly/
> 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, [2]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, [3]Hackaday notes the Raspberry Pi Foundation has "pushed binary-blob bootloader changes that [4]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...
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> 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 [5]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 [6]in 2011 and [7]2016 .
[1] https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/why-is-raspberry-pi-stock-surging-today-93CH-4914528
[2] https://www.thetimes.com/business/companies-markets/article/raspberry-pi-uk-profits-w085s5bfn
[3] https://hackaday.com/2026/09/22/raspberry-pi-ram-restrictions-no-big-deal-frankly/
[4] https://hackaday.com/2026/09/22/raspberry-pi-locks-down-ram-upgrades/
[5] https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2380887#p2380888
[6] https://interviews.slashdot.org/story/11/09/14/1554243/eben-upton-answers-your-questions
[7] https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/09/29/0018255/the-slashdot-interview-with-raspberry-pi-founder-and-ceo-eben-upton
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.
Pi's or Pico's driving this? (Score:2)
Smart home would more likely be pico's I think. And I thought RPI org designed those themselves so maybe a bit more profit (percentage wise) than the broadcom based pi. It also says that RPI can go beyond the board and do chips. I've used the pico's and found them pretty easy to use, and so far quite reliable. In some applications, better than a pi with rock solid timing, near instant on time, much lower power. And bonus, no occasional SD card corruption on a power fail.
My advice (Score:5, 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...
Re: (Score:2)
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...
Re: (Score:2)
Respectfully, no, it absolutely doesn't.
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: (Score:3)
> 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 problem isn't resellers undercutting RPi. It's someone buying a 1GB RPi, doing th
Re: (Score:2)
How much profit margin can there be in something like that?
Re: (Score:2)
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: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 Rasp
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.
Re: (Score:2)
>> 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
Re: (Score:2)
>> 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.
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....
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Binary Blob Bootloaders? (Score:2)
Real geeks boot with the front panel toggle switches.
Re: (Score:2)
You still need a working Raspberry pi to do that :)
[1]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.
[1] https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-11
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.
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: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
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.