Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

To me this says "we make such huge margins on these welders that we can intentionally cripple them and sell them at a lower price. Someone out there could produce our top end model for the low end price." It logically follows that maybe I should start looking into other manufacturers who sell at closer to manufacturing cost, like Everlast.

I realize that big welding shops aren't going to drop the big two (Lincoln and Miller) overnight, but I think practices like this are really going to hasten the rise of Chinese upstarts making high quality IGBT welders. Once they (or a third party) starts offering good support and warranty guarantees it's going to be hard to compete with them when you employ sales practices like this.

For example, the Miller Syncrowave 210 shown in the video is $2,700, base price. I use one weekly, and it's a decent welder. Alternatively, one could get an Everlast PowerTig 250EX for $1,700 that comes with features missing from the Miller at a price that's $1,000 less. The Chinese manufacturers know their price point, and they're not going to leave out features supported by their hardware because they're hungry for the business. I think the way Miller is behaving is a sign of complacency, and it's going to come back to bite them.

I already find myself using the cheaper IGBT welder day to day because we don't have the SD card upgrade for the Miller and I like features like up-slope and down-slope that have been left out for product segmentation reasons.

Have you seen the AHP AlphaTIG 200X? It's a 200A AC/DC tig/stick welder with nearly all the features of the PowerTig for $700. The only real difference I can see is that it only goes to 200Hz on pulse vs 500Hz for the PowerTig. Comes with everything for TIG and stick, including a flex head torch and a ball flow meter and dual 120/240 voltage. Supposedly it uses high quality components internally and it has an American company supporting it. It gets great reviews from everyone who tries it.

I've thought about buying one just to try it. I've only welded TIG on an ancient transformer 400A L-TEC. I really want to see what it's like to use one of these modern inverter machines.

I know someone who just got the Eastwood TIG and it looks like an older version of the AHP without pulse and AC freq adjustment. I'm hoping to try it out soon.

I can see why Miller is getting scared and trying to lock in businesses using DRM with these Chinese coming in at 1/4-1/3 the price and getting cheaper every year. The Chinese welders really got a bad name from Harbor Freight, and for good reason. But these new inverter machines are really starting to hold their own.

I hadn't heard of the AHP, thanks for sharing it. I really like the idea of dual voltage flexibility, which you lose on the higher power Everlast.

Can you explain why does a welder needs an SD card?

I'm guessing it's purely for DRM purposes. In that sense, it's a case of "We'd like to price this physical item at two different price points, and control it in a soft fashion".

Playing devil's advocate, I guess there are certain situations where you could justify this type of thing. Let's say that a product has an additional capability which 90% of the market doesn't need, but required significant research to accomplish. It's a soft-capability, so there's nothing additional that you need to manufacture to enable it. You have a couple of options - you can make two different models (essentially identical underneath, except for the cheaper one disabling the extra capability), but this is inefficient. You can of course have one product, one price. But this is also less than perfect, as you have everyone paying for a feature 10% want, and you can be outcompeted at a cheaper price for the basic product. Another option would be to DRM the product and soft-enable the feature for the 10% who want it, at a higher price.

I mean, it's a bit of a stretch, but it's plausible in some situations.

The problem is you're not making the case for DRM, you're just making the case for copyright.

Laws against circumventing DRM have a simple fatal flaw: If the DRM is strong enough to prevent a given user from circumventing it then you don't need a law to prohibit it, but if it isn't then it still isn't any easier to get the user for circumventing the DRM than it is for the underlying copyright infringement. The law is utterly useless for its stated purpose.

But it still causes all kinds of grief for innocent people when companies abuse it for things other than its intended purpose.

I donno, I thought I made a (rather far fetched) case for when it's actually physically cheaper / more efficient / beneficial to have DRM, for all parties involved. I.e. a case where we'd actually want to have DRM, I'm not sure how it relates to copyright by itself.

In the general case though, I'm also relatively strongly against DRM for everyday consumer goods, but mainly from an experience and cost efficiency perspective. Companies seem to spend large amounts of money on heavy DRM, and it seems to cause products to be inferior (persistent connectivity, etc).

> I donno, I thought I made a (rather far fetched) case for when it's actually physically cheaper / more efficient / beneficial to have DRM, for all parties involved. I.e. a case where we'd actually want to have DRM, I'm not sure how it relates to copyright by itself.

Your argument seems to be that the seller is only going to go to the effort of designing the extra feature if they can charge a premium for it to the market segment that wants it. That is the traditional argument in favor of copyright (and patents). Those things do what you're asking for without a separate law prohibiting circumvention of DRM. The seller can copyright the enabling software or patent the feature (depending on whether the difficult part of implementing the feature is part of the enabling software or the hardware).

It doesn't. The drm needs it as a very simple way to tell the chip inside that you've paid for it. SD cards can be trivially bit-banged from almost any processor, unlike other protocols such as USB.

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