> Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.

That's called binning, the unit goes through some testing and components that don't pass get shunted away (hardware or firmware) because they're known to behave incorrectly. Better that than throwing it into a trash.

Blow the fuse/hack the firmware and you can unlock these because the hardware is there, but it's likely that it doesn't operate entirely correctly (especially under duress), even though it may appear to work at first blush.

Sometimes they will sell a perfectly functioning chip as a cut down version because they need to cater for that market segment. This market segmentation is nothing new and can be done in many ways, like permanently shaping the product before sale (HW) or using flexible licensing (SW). The problem with the "permanent" route is that when you sell such a cut down chip it usually stays cut down forever. So the only way to use the cut down features is to buy a chip that is fully unlocked. This is not only a waste of resources but also a waste of money to upgrade the entire chip.

A solid mechanism to enable/disable these features on demand would make the situation a lot better. You could pay just for the upgrade instead of the whole chip, either permanently or only when you need it and pay per use.

But the reality is that in practice this mechanism will probably not work to the advantage of the end user. It will focus entirely on the company's bottom line and open up new avenues for abuse. If your hardware is linked to a license and to the manufacturer forever, you'll never own it. Unless the legal framework enforces the rights of the consumer under threat of drastic fines for the manufacturer, we're just forgoing real ownership.

Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee:

https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918

I think maybe this is how it started out, but it would be really flakey to match with consumer demand. If everyone is buying the cheaper (binned) option you may not have the volume (or demand from the pricey option to just bin more).

Price differences between SKUs are a tool manufacturers can adjust to try and shape demand to match their yield curves.

In fairness, it also used to be the case that simply some of the cores were broken on a "dual core" processor. Because it was actually manufactured to be a quad core processor, but testing revealed that only 2 or 3 actually worked, so then it got sold as a dual core. :D

But the thing now with "pay to unlock more cores" is... interesting.

They'd probably love to turn that into a subscription, too.

Eh? That’s still the case. The cheaper M1 Pros and so on will generally have one or more defective disabled cores. So will many-cored Intel chips.

The "Golden Screwdriver" was supposedly a term from the heyday of the IBM Mainframe. (And one of the first links I found - a tesla discussion on HN 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 )

Wait… which manufacturers do you have in mind? Because I don’t think this apply to Intel or AMD or NVidia?

This is an enormous stretch. Binning mostly allows manufacturers to avoid having to throw away ICs with certain defects, selling them instead as a different SKU (fewer cores, lower clock, worse power consumption etc).

I think Intel abused this at least once, back in the days when they had ridiculously good yields across the board, but let's not generalize in absence of evidence.

Binning is a lot of it, but what happens when they have more of the good bin than they want, for the market proportions they're targetting? They'd be fools not to either just sell the good as the bad, when nobody can tell (like when acheivable frequency is the difference), or more likely just make it bad then sell it.