Why is it okay for Apple to legally restrict OS X from running inside a VM or on a PC?
Welcome to price differentiation.
In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and I use hacks to get my 1080 support virtualization and pass-through.
It's also not okay for Apple to restrict what hardware I can run their software with. I have run hackintoshes and OS X VMs.
I voice my support and concern for these vendors' policies appropriately by using my wallet. The policies you listed are not okay.
Voting with your wallet would be not using anything from NVidia and Apple to start with, including the business opportunities it might entail.
That's RMS thinking. If you don't mind, I'll expand on it. Voting with your wallet includes not paying into third party workarounds because their existence depends on the bad actors to exist (in some cases).
However, I think NVIDIA is still leading the industry (AMD is catching up fast, but still lags behind) and I want to support their hardware development. However, I make it clear what kind of relationship I expect from them by virtualizing my Geforce instead of buying a Quadro. I also support open-source driver initiatives and abhor NVIDIA's practice of not releasing hardware schematics if they aren't going to open source the driver. It's a complicated issue.
In fact, it's so not okay, that I don't play ball and buy Radeon. Vote with your wallet.
(1) rent a VM with a license bundled into the per-minute/per-hour rate
(2) bring-your-own-license on "dedicated hardware"
(3) pay for software assurance
Looks like Microsoft is now phasing out (2), so now basically anyone who isn't large enough to have software assurance has only one price: the all-inclusive per-vm per-hour/minute rate.
It's not okay.
How is this anti-competitive? How is this customer-unfriendly?
In Universe A they sell only the most powerful version of the product for 1x price and them make some money.
In Universe B they sell the most powerful for 1x AND a slightly less powerful version for 0.9x price and they make MORE overall profit.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There are customers who will want to pay less and not need the most powerful product.
I fail to see how the company in Universe B is morally worse than those in Universe A. One could argue they are superior, in that they offer more choices.
Breaking up the total price of a product by it's component features and then creating variants of the sold product with certain features enabled vs disabled and hence having different total prices is one fair way of create products that are tailored to customers needs.
When pricing individual features, the prices may not correlate relative to each other. There may be factors like which features are most used by which segment of customers and how valuable the feature is to that segment customer and hence how much they are willing to pay.
Demanding that all the features should be sold at the lowest total cost doesn't make sense. We don't do this in any other domain.
But profits are somewhat besides the point: I'm saying simply that some policies are not customer friendly. Whether or not you consider that to be good or bad may very well depend on whether you are a customer or a shareholder.
Btw obviously I’m not talking about software. Im not talking about pricing things with no marginal cost.
Even if that were true, so what? Some customers are willing to trade less features for less money. It doesn't matter that other features are present but disabled. Those customers got exactly what they paid for. They're not getting cheaped out on.
The second part sounds kinda like “They don’t know they got screwed, so it’s completely fine”.
Scenario 1: Product has 3 features at x Price. New license is created with 4 features at price x+y
Scenario 2: Product has 3 features at x+y Price. Slimmed down license is created for a product 3 features at x price.
People applaud the former order, and cringe at the latter, but (at least in this artificial description, after the second option is available, the scenarios are equivalent. But something about loss aversion seems to trigger a moral sentiment.
As to what something is worth, surely the cost of production is not the sole factor.
Of course they would lose profit on the customers that would pay for X instead of .8X. "if i can buy the same hardware at 20% less cost why would I buy it at the full cost?"
But yes, the EULA restricts running macOS on non-Apple hardware.
They have not addressed or fixed this "bug", and instead point consumers to their ridiculously expensive Quadro cards, which are prohibitively expensive not to mention overkill for most consumers.
This "bug" can be fixed in some hypervisors, for example in KVM, by spoofing certain system information.
> Some vendors will sell chips with reduced function because it permits them to sell chips with defects that disable only specific functions, where the rest of the chip is fine.
If one is able to get a less expensive, albeit less powerful, device for cheaper, is there any difference?
But that was never what was really going on, all these were the same CPU design, except that when yield rates for the FPU weren't so good Intel disabled it and sold those as the 486SX. When sales of the 486SX outstripped supply of dodgy FPU 486DXs Intel removed the FPU altogether from new ones. Meanwhile the 487DX wasn't "upgrading" anything, it just disabled the 486SX and replaced it with a full CPU.
A customer is buying X features for Y dollars. It doesn't matter if certain other features are there and disabled, because that's not what the customer paid for.
Software does this all the time as well. Say you get the first three levels of a game for free. You have to pay to get an unlock code for all ten levels. Is it unfair that you really got the whole game for free and that you are being kept from accessing it unless you pay?
If you get the features you pay for, then the transaction was legitimate. Fin.