Yeah it’s not like it costs them anymore to manufacture ones with more features, they’re all built in and then artificially shuttered.
If you add a $500 part to a $10k item, but charge $5000 more, when you could instead make only the high tier device for probably the same price(Economies of scale on the upgrade parts plus not having to deal with the costs of multiple SKUs), almost everyone is worse off.
The only benefit to the existence of low tier items with only small differences from high tier, that i can see, is that the used ones might get sold off cheaply and be available to the lowest income people when they upgrade.
One of the extra ‘services’ is a fucking fan.
To your point, I think charging money for the ability to reverse the fan is criminal, considering everything is already built in.
I'm really curious how much they charge to unlock that feature once the machine is already purchased.
Basically, my argument here is that in scenario 1 Bobcat is selling some value-add improvement to their product, while in scenario 2 they're just unlocking features your machine had the software and hardware for from day one but was artificially restricted from using.
I don't know enough about these types of machines to know for sure, but some of the features in the example video like "high flow hydraulics" sound very suspiciously like the bad "arbitrary lockout" I described.