[mokus]

I understand about the frustration of not being able to source the part, but a change in a single IC or connector’s pin mapping absolutely can be a performance improvement alone.

I’m lobbying at work now for one such case. Sometimes the existing pin assignments are just bad, and that can destroy signal integrity, increase layout complexity (and thus board cost) and negatively affect EMC performance. I don’t know whether that is the case here but I wouldn’t automatically trust someone’s judgment on it without knowing their level of expertise on high speed layout design.

[josephcsible]

But don't forget this part of the post: "and they have secured exclusive production of this chip, so you can't buy this for a dollar any more". There may have been a legitimate reason to change the pinout, but there was no reason other than greed to prohibit the vendor from selling the new chip to anyone else.

[mokus]

Absolutely agree, but that’s a whole new can of worms and outside the point I was making (which was that it is not obvious that they made this change for the SOLE purpose of preventing repairs). Do we force them to sell the M1 module as well? Individual chips from that module? I’m all for that, personally, but good luck getting that passed. And assuming we can’t make them do that, what is the line between those parts and the less special ones like this one?