Even before Tesla you already had car manufacturers that basically locked out performance behind a pay wall even tho the car itself was identical to the “sport model”.
Many of the German manufacturers had this practice for a decade if not more, the extra price difference is basically their estimated cost to the changes in MTF between when you push your car to 80-90% of its capability to 100%.
And even before Tesla you already had aftermarket products and services that were designed to unlock that extra performance and yes they did often at least in principal voided the warranty.
We also see this in other things too you have differential pricing in say electronics and electronic components too, sure some of it is binning but not only quite often the "enterprise" tax is just the fact that these parts will be run longer and under more stress so their MTF is different.
An HDD in a home computer will be under very different loads than one in a NAS. And quite often there aren't many physical differences between the drives in some of the lower end models there are no differences at all and in some cases non-NAS drives might actually be "better" than their lower-end NAS counterparts.
What you are paying for when buying a WD RED isn't necessarily a more durable drive, you are essentially paying a premium for future warranty claims, it's essentially an insurance scheme in which WD RED NAS drives are defined as higher risk than say their Black or Blue series.
For example same block, heads and intake but different (cheaper) pistons, valves, springs, injectors, etc ... Sure you can easily dial up the power on the cheaper engine to match the expensive one, but at a higher risk of breakdown.
BMW is probably the biggest offender in this regard and you can buy the “unlock cables” for the older (<2015) models on EBay later they switched to a software lock, which you can also hack.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BMW-E60-Sport-mode-unlock-cable-w...
You can also tell there is no difference in the valves, pistons or pretty much anything else since the part numbers in the service manual are identical.
The only difference in parts comes to the trim and the breaks on some of the models.
A more fitting analogy would be Apple charging you to upgrade your BIOS.
Updates to things I trust my family's life and health to should be classified like recalls, a sign of manufacturer failure and not a consumer privilege.
But modern luxury cars also feature many components that have little to do with safety.
To be scrupulously fair, that's true of all software; it's just more important for safety-critical software, because safety-critical software is more important.
If you buy a camera, you get free firmware updates; your phone gets free updates,...
Personally, I would argue that the most important principle to protect the customer is that they should get what they pay for when they choose to buy a product. That product should not then be retrospectively nerfed through software shenanigans, either for them, or for any future owner they sell the product on to. This is one idea that car manufacturers have been flirting with recently, and IMHO we should stamp on it hard.
Another idea, but to me a clearly distinct one, is that a manufacturer of a combined hardware/software product might develop software-only improvements after the product has been purchased. In this case, I would distinguish explicitly between fixes for problems where the product wasn't performing as expected at the time of purchase (things like safety issues or security vulnerabilities that clearly shouldn't have been there in the first place) and enhancements (things like performance improvements or additional functionality). Again IMHO, the former should be supplied free and unencumbered to all customers, as they are essentially fixing a defective product. For the latter, I don't have a problem in principle with the manufacturer charging for the upgrade, as potentially it incurs additional costs and risks, and it brings a genuine benefit to the customer that they didn't have at purchase time.
A third idea is a manufacturer deliberately shipping a product that isn't using the full hardware capabilities because of artificial software limitations. They might also then offer upgrades for sale later, which is really just a special case of the enhancements-after-sale idea above. Once again IMHO, charging for these enhancements is still OK even if they manufacturer knew in advance that they might ship that software later on, as long as they were honest about what the customer was actually buying at the time of purchase and they didn't claim or imply that those enhancements would become available for free or on any other specific terms that they don't then honour.
There are at least two good reasons for taking this view. One is the general principle that if someone has bought a product of a certain specification for a certain price then that transaction is then concluded. Just as I don't think the manufacturer should be allowed to move the goalposts after the sale in a way that harms the owner, I also don't think the owner is entitled to free extras from the manufacturer that weren't part of the sale. The other is the practical reality that hardware+software products are enormously complicated, software is never perfect, and the idea that a manufacturer should be liable for not shipping optimal software from day one or prohibited from continuing to do work that might develop useful improvements that benefit customers in return for further revenue is kind of silly if you think it through.
One very important issue I'm glossing over here is whether the terms of the original sale were fair to the customer. This is a standard problem in any sort of retail environment, and we usually rely on some combination of competitive markets and government regulation to protect the little guy. But these are also separate issues to the ones above that would have to be considered on a case by case basis.
(A similar thing would hold for business models like selling printers for cheap but making the cartridges expensive, etc.)
To my mind, any product sold can have integrity checking, but as the owner I should be able to disable it if I want to.
If they gave you beta motor logic they'd have to fix whatever would burn or fail.
Indeed they're trying to milk the software side. But it's business as usual I believe. You paid for some specs, everything else is off contract. Unless they promised otherwise.
A pure software update fixing an existing issue I would say no. Car companies have recalls all of the time paid for by the company when something doesn't work as expected.
A software recall should be treated the same as a hardware recall.
The question is basically whether it's an issue or something that works as intended but could be better.
To be fair, this doesn't seem to have stopped Tesla before.
I can think of a ton of examples where what you're saying is nonsensical.
I can download games and play them whenever.
If I want phone service I have to hook this phone up to a service provider.
If I want music I have either put an mp3 on the phone, visit youtube, subscribe to a service like spotify or google music.
Apple Music is a seperate service like spotify correct?
Venders will bundle in their own services into the os menus in order to extract additional cash.
Apple Music isn't a feature of the iphone os. It's an ad designed to trick you.
But I wouldn't accept my motherboard supplier locking hardware features behind software updates either. Like if my can do pci express 16x. I wouldn't think it is right that it only does 8x unless I pay for a software unlock
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398555
basically adding or removing a few resistors made card performa like other models costing hundreds of dollars more.
I think the law will only change for worse. It all starts with the DRM/DMCA.
However, some parts of the world are more enlightened when it comes to consumer rights. For example, the EU has at least attempted to make constructive regulatory interventions in the interests of consumers as technologies have evolved, even if their success has been mixed. Here in the UK, aside from EU rules we're inheriting after Brexit, we too have some solid basic consumer rights laws of our own. The EU+UK market is already larger than the US one, so that's a pretty big incentive for Tesla not to try those sorts of games around these parts. And if we get reasonable treatment, maybe that's enough for customers in places like the US to demand the same standards.
No...?
By using Free Software?
And one has not needed to pay a separate fee for OS upgrades in quite some time. Linux has obviously always been free. macOS since at least Mavericks - if not earlier - is also free of additional charge.
I don't think Telsa falls under this unless they let you take a car for free and require you to pay monthly for the car to actually turn on.
That's more of a zipcar.
Surely you did. You just didn't pay attention. You paid for a bigger package (i.e new UI)that included driver updates as well.
In searching for more information, I found https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/POWER5/ipha2_p5/... which talks about activating and deactivating not only processors but extra storage.
It doesn't seem like that would work very well for most laptops and phones, given how people won't pay for online backup or anything above the minimums.
Anyway, IBM had a vision of "computing on demand" many years ago but it wasn't in the cloud, it was in your data center.
only if I want to. In many cases I keep using old version.
>"Everything is going towards subscription models."
That is a wet dream that will not materialize for many vendors or will fail after a while.