This makes sense. Hear me out. A CM5 is a device designed to be embedded into other devices. I believe most of their sales come from just that- companies that make other things, and build a CM5 into them rather than design their own control board. As you go up through the model tiers, the price increases faster than the added price of memory. IE, if the 2gb one is $20, and the difference between a 2gb memory chip and an 8gb memory chip is $10, the 8gb unit isn’t $30 it’s $60. You pay RPi a premium for the high end products. Desoldering RAM off a production PCB is something no hobbyist is going to bother with. BUT, a company buying 10,000 of these to build into their product MIGHT find it cost effective to setup a production line to do so. And they could probably resell the 2gb chips. Point being- while I don’t like this, and I don’t like the ideas it represents, I also understand why they are doing it. It’s not about us, the hobbyists. It’s about the manufacturers that build compute modules into their products.