alt Hacker News> Currently a minority would want to
By themelves or in general? If it's the latter, it's because currently rpi offers relatively fair pricing. If they started charging 10x that amount, more would be interested in 3rd party upgrades..
> at the expense of opening up the vast majority of other customers to potential problems
Who forces you to take the risk and buy from a 3rd party supplier at a cheaper price? You did not address my point about trust, brands and reputation handling these problems for years.
> On the topic of choice, perhaps YOU could choose to buy a thing that does what you want
That's precisely why I care. I'm not taking away your ability to buy original products from authorized sellers.
But you accepting ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer, paired with the economics of scale means that I'll lose my choice soon, as those companies will learn consumers are mostly fine with being screwed like that.
I'll be hit first, yes. But when they go so far that you'll start to complain, it'll be too late because no consumer friendly alternatives will exist on the market by then, thanks to economics of scale and extremely weak antitrust enforcement.
All of the above arguments rely on very unlikely hypotheticals and unrealistic assumptions, sorry.
10x price increases? RPi will have bigger problems than "people want to re-solder new RAM chips on our boards" if that happens. Ironically the amount of competition in this space would put them out of business if they did that.
As for third-party sellers, it's pretty clear to me, if not to you, that the issue is not people knowingly buying from third-parties but rather un-knowingly doing so. The self-evidence of this should be apparent based on what RPi is choosing to do (being the ones with all the data on this).
The entire e-commerce industry is now fragmented with tens of thousands of sellers, huge third-party marketplaces (where it's hard to even tell who you are actually buying from), and online stores that constantly come and go.
You cannot manage counterfeit concerns through "brand and reputation handling" alone. That ship sailed so long ago we don't even know where it is anymore.
> "ever increasing enshittification and contempt for the consumer"
You're making a ridiculous leap here by equating the above with one small company making a pragmatic choice to protect its business and consumers.
I believe in customer choice and I do think it's important to protect it, but I'm not a selfish maximalist who thinks it should be done to my benefit at all cost and in ways that are not realistic or economically feasible for the other parties involved.
That nuance is sorely lacking from your position here.