I hope AMD doesn't copy this. Intel has been on a downwards trend recently and maybe this is just a dumb, desperate move from them. As you say the landscape is getting more competitive, which is a good thing for consumers.
IDK. EPYCs board-lock to boards with Platform by blowing e-fuses. In some ways that's a bit more painful. (I get that it supposedly provides a Secure Boot. OTOH HP has supposedly done similar without having to blow the fuses.)
I understand the sentiment, but Intel will argue you didn’t pay in full for your hardware, so you didn’t pay for the features you won’t be able to use.
I see this as a continuum. At one extreme end, you pay a lump sum for perpetual use of the hardware (“buying”). At the other extreme end, they lend you the hardware as long as you have a subscription to their offerings (“renting”). Somewhere in-between, they offer you some basic functionality or a lower subscription rate if you pay a sum up front.
We have that intermediate with cable subscriptions. You get X channels with the subscription, but have to pay extra for others, or for a higher quality signal.
Again, I understand the sentiment, but I don’t think that you can claim you paid for something if the seller says you didn’t, and the seller advertised that you wouldn’t get what you think you bought for the price.
And yes, I can understand customers not being happy about this.
The moment things started to not ship with programming guides, and everyone started hiding their IC schemata and docs for fear of being sued were the first steps down this path we're going down.
I will not continue to follow it blindly, and I hope more people will join me as well. This has to stop.
I reject your assertion of the supremacy of the contract. The contract is a vehicle subordinate to State regulation , and the State recognizes there are things that cannot be contractually done, selling oneself or another into servitude being one, and I hold, that violation of First Sale rights should be another. To do anything else is to undermine the very concept of private ownership. When industry colludes and makes standard the practice of not offering wares for sale under traditional terms, I hold this as an appropriate circumstance for the State to step in, particularly when it is made as obvious that poor faith is at the root of the business practice. Insult me not with assertions that finding a way to extract multiple payments, or extort out recurring revenue by "unlocking" functionality via firmware delivered over the air is anything but poor faith veneered in the illusion of convenience for the customer in light of the purveyor also gaining the capability to at will degrade the product by definition.
Sounds crazy? Keep in mind, people used to pay money for programming language licenses. How many people are doing that anymore? Are the people who pay for that kind of stuff competitive businesses?
Is this even possible? Revocation is not simple to do especially if the CPU isn't connected to the internet.
I think this is the most concerning possibility... people building servers or devs and gamers will be able to wise up to the shenanigans and then pick a competitor; but punters walking around a computer store are not going to appreciate the differences if Intel get away with making big claims on the sticker (possibly even spinning "software defined silicon" as a way for them to upgrade hardware over the wire) - for the average consumer this would making an already difficult to achieve informed comparisons hopeless.
Reality may be different though, it's easy to assume the worst with the blue chips - perhaps this is just an optimisation on their current practices rather than a squeeze on customers, the concern is of course if they will exploit this new capability to the full potential we are all speculating on.
This. I can already imagine it: "hey, my notebook was getting a bit sluggish, but I upgraded it over the internet with Software Defined Silicon(TM) and just spent $100 instead of $500 that a new one would've costed".
And everyone who knows the "extra" capabilities were already there to begin with would be screaming on the inside.
But it sounds like the pushback was strong enough that it was quickly killed off.
Old laptop would have cost $100 more if they optioned it in at purchase like we currently do.
That'd be a neat trick to be honest, buy a base CPU, and if it works for your usage you saved, if not, buy the upgrade.
Subscriptions getting non technical users are the only way this goes wrong, and not saying it won't, but that's not really where things are at.
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HP is doing that with ink, I was truly deeply horrified to find out my mother pays a subscription for her printer.
The printer won't work without internet, even for local printing.
And you pay per page, not for ink. So they send you ink whenever you're out for "free", but if you run out of pages you can't print anymore...
- IIRC the printer will work without internet for a while (a week?), eventually you'll have to hook it back up though. (Makes sense to me if you're paying by the page.)
- You can't run out of pages. If you overrun your subscription, you just pay a few cents per extra page. Also, you can carry over pages up to a few months (so if your subscription is for 100 pages/month, and you didn't print in the last 2 months, you can print 300 pages this month without having to pay extra).
- Cost-wise, the subscription is actually a pretty good value compared to buying cartridges outright.
> IIRC the printer will work without internet for a while (a week?), eventually you'll have to hook it back up though. (Makes sense to me if you're paying by the page.)
In other words printer doesn't work without Internet.
You know you have a bad point when the creators of the thing don't even agree with it:
https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/terms
If Your printer is not connected to the Internet, then the Instant Ink-activated Cartridges will be disabled and You will not be able to use them to print;
A grace period doesn't change anything about this.
> You can't run out of pages. If you overrun your subscription, you just pay a few cents per extra page.
In other words... you can run out of pages.
When you out of pages you're automatically forced to buy more pages, and if you don't, the printer won't print, regardless of ink level.
And the rollover had me howling with laughter, by capping rollover HP figured out away to literally take ink out of your printer if you don't use it!
Except it's "pages" they claw back of course, and instead of taking ink out, they just require you to pay for an additional month if you plan to use it even though it's sitting in the printer :D
> Cost-wise, the subscription is actually a pretty good value compared to buying cartridges outright.
It's not unless you buy the $20 a month plan and print 4,000 pages a month and they're mostly color...
https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/hp-officejet-pro-9015-all-in-o...
> If you buy the highest-yield XL ink cartridges (2,000 pages monochrome and 1,600 pages color) for this AIO, each monochrome page will cost you about 2.2 cents and each color print will run about 8.8 cents. Subscribing to the company’s highest-yield Instant Ink subscription (700 pages for $19.99 per month, with each additional 20 pages for $1), each page will cost you 2.9 cents… Hence, it is with colorful, content-heavy pages that Instant Ink delivers the best value…
God help you if you're one of the unfortunate souls suckered into an "occasional use plan"...
You pay 6 cents a page
At which point even color prints are more expensive!
And this is literally anything you print! Even a piece of paper that says "the" costs more than a full page full glossy color photo from a cartridge!
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C'mon, you really thought HP would literally lease you an ink cartridge and it'd be a good deal?
Because that's what Instant Ink is btw... they own that cartridge: https://support.hp.com/ee-en/product/hp-photosmart-microlab-...
It's genius really, they invented a program that mostly entices occasional users.
And charges them more than the ink would be worth even at first party prices (let's forget about 3rd party refills lol)
And then caps rollovers so that they can lose value which is an indirect way of... magically stretching ink.
Truly mind bendingly incredible but evil stuff. Kudos to whoever taught of it.
It's also cheaper by your own admission (6 < 8.8) (assuming color prints, because why else buy a color printer?).
Actually they try and predict when you will run out as opposed to waiting for you to run out.
Kind of like buy now, pay later. You can buy this cheap computer now but don't worry, you can always upgrade it later.
The perverse incentives here seem a ton worse. There is direct incentive to be very aggressive with it, because even if they get the balance wrong they can adjust it later and employ all the marketing stuff done with software (50% off sale on vector math acceleration 2 days only!). It'll by definition always be used with features that the chips are fully capable of and thus even further pushes towards tiering capabilities without any connection to yield. The centralized control requirements moving further into underlying hardware are concerning as well from a redundancy and security perspective. I'm a big believer in businesses following the incentive tracks they create long term, for better and for worse. With this development, Intel's are diverging further from their customers'.
About the best that can be said is that at least the market now is a lot more competitive. Between Intel's fab woes, TSMC, AMD and both Arm and burgeoning RISC-V efforts, Intel is more on than I think they've been in a very long time. Maybe ever? Which does make it all the more curious to me why they're trying this now of all times. Seems like 5-7 years ago they'd have really has us. Now though it's just another thing in strong competitors favor. The end of a lot of core x86-64 patents is starting to kick off too. Or maybe Intel thinks this will let them do sticker prices that are drastically lower and thus look better vs AMD et al even as they can still extract more money in the end? It's worrying. In fact now that I think more on it, Intel weakening but using this brings its own extra worries. If they feel the need (or are forced) to juice returns for shareholders and themselves down the road if their competitiveness falters, or even if they regain dominance, they will have an installed base with a capability to squeeze it.