Except that they have to deal with angry people who bought a dodgy chipped unit.
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.
Replacing a part voids warranty, this is common and well understood by everybody.
I can't help thinking that they want to sell maxed out devices to max out margin.
What a world we live in that hot air reworking RAM on a SBC makes any sense. I can kind of understand shanzhai GPUs to get around export restrictions, but RPis?
Why they want or don't want something doesn't matter at all.
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.
I seriously doubt that is any more than a theoretical problem, and even if it isn't, so what? People start a warranty claim, send the boards to RPi, they run diagnostics, detect the changed RAM and deny the claim.
this is such a lousy excuse
They could permanently mark the board when they install the RAM on it.
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.