It doesn't seem like that. It is like that.
Welcome to modern tech, where the management, perception, control and tactical destruction of real value is the only place left to eek out a profit margin. We build 8 core CPUs and blow e-fuses in the factory to make them 4 cores. As resources dwindle and the planet fills with e-waste this disgusting, unethical wanton destruction of value continues because we've normalised it.
This is a bad follow-on example because artificial price differentiation is sometimes what it takes to make a business viable. Making an actually worse model in the processor case has far more fixed costs than re-using the existing pipeline. The business wouldn’t be viable selling all of the processors at lower nor would it be as strong leaving out the lower income segment.
The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all and the 8-core version costs 200% more due to the volume lost.
Finally, this ignores that processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch. So if they had proceeded to treat it as an 8-core it would have had thermal issues and an 80% reduced life.
No, you are making up a false dichotomy. There are many alternative worlds, including the ones where CPUs have no proprietary "intellectual property".
Sometimes wage theft is what it takes to make a business viable, so I don't really buy this as an argument.
> processors selected for lower tiers can be chosen precisely because they didn’t meet the bar for the high performance batch
This is a better argument
> The alternative world is you get no affordable processor at all
You probably do, just maybe their performance doesn't double every year. I would say that's probably an interesting tradeoff to make, depending on how catastrophic one thinks the state of the world is today.
It's almost as if there's a consistent economic process that leads companies to do this kind of thing again and again. We could call it "the tendency of the rate of profit to fall".
Not "deliberately". We build 8-core CPUs, discover four of them are a bit sub-spec, and blow e-fuses to disable those and sell it as 4-core. It's possible that those four disabled cores would be just fine, but I'm not selling you a chip that gets its sums wrong sometimes.
I guess people complained about how chip manufacturers sold CPUs rated at 25MHz that could be overclocked to 33MHz, but they too were not guaranteed to meet spec even if they worked.
I mean, you make a good point on reliability/quality, but there are surely cases where to create a product differential perfectly good (and known to be good) devices are crippled.
That seems ever less ethically defensible as we move into scarcity.
This is why overclocking used to work - if even a small proportion of the chips tested were good to 25MHz, that was a 25MHz batch, guaranteed good to 25MHz. If you got a "lucky penny" that'd go to 33MHz as per the design spec, then good for you! But it wouldn't be guaranteed to do that.
Which is why some of us were rooting for the somewhat-more-consumer-friendly HD-DVD. In retrospect, given the choice, there was no way in hell the industry was going with a "more consumer-friendly" anything.
https://aacsla.com/aacs-specifications/
Ultimately, if all the manufacturers decide to stop sale, there's nothing you can do about that. I'm not too worried about Blu-ray yet, as it is still in the PS5 and Xbox Series X, and I don't think gamers will be excited about losing physical media as an option (considering PS5 with Disc has outsold the Disc-free version, like, 4-1).
Even then, I'm still not 100% confident that I'll be able to access everything in 25 years time.
I have no reason the believe that Sony and Microsoft won't shut them down like they already have done with the PS3 store.
It would almost seem like most of the engineering for the Blu-ray format went into things which very specifically doesn’t act in the interest of the buyer.
Given the current state of things, I wouldn’t count Blurays as media you actually physically own.
You’re permitted to watch them, for now, but there’s no guarantee that will remain true 20+ years in the future.