GoKawiilRaspberry Pi confirms firmware locks boards to original RAM capacity
Raspberry Pi engineer PhilE revealed on the company's forums that firmware updates rolled out since late 2024 lock devices to their factory-set RAM size, preventing chip swaps. The company says this stops sellers from fraudulently upgrading boards with mismatched RAM and reselling them as higher-capacity devices, while also citing other device attributes programmed into firmware that block simple part swaps even of the same size.