The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while. Which in this climate is highly probably faulty memory, or memory that runs at a different speed/spec to the one advertised to come with the RPi. That is fraud.
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.
Given the how overpriced the high RAM models sold by the RPi foundation are, I think they just can use good RAM and still make a nice profit. Like you know RPi foundation could, if they were not greedy.
> The memory that they are placing in it has to be cheap enough to be worth their while.
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.
This is classic gaslighting technique corporations use to extract more profit. Modifications or upgrades made by small business = fraud, OEM selling different SKUs = legitimate business.
If a small business is modifying the product and not telling the eventual customer they've done so how is that not fraud? I don't want to buy a Raspberry Pi with a memory chip from who knows who which might have not passed QA modified by people who may or may not do a decent job at soldering it to the board.
