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Comment by knolan | Hacker News Reader

I was gifted a Hero 2018 when I left my last job. I use it for recording my cycle commute because I guess my death at the hands of a homicidal taxi driver should at least be recorded.

It comes with a basic set of features. 1080p video and some simple time lapse options. Pretty barebones.

Anyway it occasionally freezes when disconnected from the charger so I went and checked if there was a firmware update and it turns out that the Hero 2018 is the previous year's high end Hero 5 Black crippled by software. Someone put together a tool to load that camera's firmware onto it and now I have a 4K camera with GPS, a wide range of time-lapse and high frame rate features, stabilisation, wind noise reduction...

https://gethypoxic.com/blogs/technical/latest-gopro-hero-is-...

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This is common company strategy. IBM used to sell upgrades to their hardware that would take a technician visit to upgrade the machine. The thing was that the tech would only have to make a small change to the machine to upgrade it. Tesla does this as part of their offerings.

It's not a bad thing. As a consumer I can buy a cheaper product and not have to buy features I don't need.

People seem to forget that companies need to make a profit to stay in business. I don't care if GoPro stays or goes but it has to at least break even to stay around to produce their products.

The base cost of a Keysight Field Fox spectrum analyzer is $6k. You then enable $60k worth of licenses on it, but all the hardware is already in there. Pretty crazy.

The price of things is not always related to the cost of it's components.

>The price of things is not always related to the cost of it's components.

that's besides the point entirely - we all already know that an item's price isn't just a reflection of BOM. here the point is that they're literally just inflating the price arbitrarily.

I used to work at Keysight's spectrum analyzer R&D group. They do this to simplify their manufacturing logistics and to try to get volume production efficiencies.

The monthly volume of any one particular SKU is so low that if they didn't combine all the models together, they would essentially be custom making everything.

Another advantage of selling crippled high end products as low end is that they can sell defective hardware.

For example, if there is a bunch of cameras with defective GPS units, they can still be sold on the low end segment, where that feature is disabled.

I won't ever buy a gopro if this is true. Why the hell would they do this?

Market segmentation? The same way Tesla limits its car battery capacity in software.

Can you hack your battery to use its full capacity?

It is unclear if anyone has broken through the crypto on the battery pack firmware (at least for newer cars, Model 3 and Model Y). Similar for the motor controller firmware.

Was gonna give the same example. It’s common industry practice sadly. Tesla and gopro are hardly the only two offenders. It used to be a common tactic among cpu manufacturers also.

What is the problem? You get what you paid for. A lot of costs are R&D. If they wouldn't do this they most likely wouldn't sell at this many price ranges.

This is generally done to protect battery cell health. Much like SSD memory one cell in the battery failing will ruin an otherwise fine battery.

Yes, many electric cars have a buffer. Not all Tesla though. That's why it's not recommended to charge a Tesla to 100% everyday while it's fine with many other brands.

But Tesla did sell a few cars with different battery capacities and exactly the same hardware. If you got the smaller capacity then you got a buffer. Tesla could unlock the buffer remotely, if you give them more money or if you need to evacuate before an incoming hurricane or similar.

Yeah I think fair to charge the customer more to access more of the total battery capacity because Tesla is now assuming more warranty risk on the battery.

> We can surmise that GoPro created this cheaper version of the GoPro HERO5 to reduce component inventory without having to pay pricing reimbursements to their dealers. With very little firmware changes, and a two resistor Bill of Material change, they came up with a very sneaky way to reduce inventory before the launch of the GoPro HERO6+ / GoPro HERO7 Black / GoPro HERO7 White.

There is a good chance the CPU on the device you used to write this comment was market segmented in a similar way.

In fairness, CPU segmentation is not just disabling working hardware. Silicon is a lottery and a many dies will be only partially working, or have worse performance than other dies, so you fuse off the bits that don't work and sell the die as a particular SKU. However, if you don't have enough defective dies for a particular low-end SKU, I assume that does result in working parts of dies being fused off.

Somewhat infamously, Intel once sold some low-end CPU models primarily to PC OEMs and then turned around and offered end-users a $50 software patch to unlock the other half of their L2 cache. Meaning that the whole cache passed QA even for the low end parts and half of it was disabled purely to prop up the price of mid-range parts.

Maybe they heard about how Sennheiser was able to sell the same headphones $150 apart by removing a piece of foam.

http://mikebeauchamp.com/misc/sennheiser-hd-555-to-hd-595-mo...

I suspect a number of Garmin watches at different price points using the same chips, yet each price point has a different range of features enabled. Some are clearly artificial differences. Like my wife's watch can't "resume a run later" if she pauses it in the middle, but mine can. She either has to save the run, or listen to reminder beeps every five minutes until she starts again.

Imagine you're the CEO of a hardware company that refreshes their products every year. Last year, you overestimated the demand for your premium product and end up with thousands of extra units.

Now, you're planning to launch this year's line of products. You have a brand new premium product that's slightly better than last year's, and it's priced $50 higher. What do you do with all your extra stock of last year's premium offering? You can't sell them side-by-side, otherwise everyone will just buy last year's stuff and you'll have the same problem next year. You can't throw them away because you can't afford the losses (GoPro was trading at $8 in 2017).

So you take last year's premium product, and install some software to turn it into this year's entry-level product. You have to sell it for way less, but hey — you might break even. Consumers are content because they're getting what they expect: entry-level features at a reasonable price.

It's not necessarily evil. Perhaps it was mismanagement. Ultimately, GoPro found out that the market for action cameras isn't as big as they hoped.

Depends on your definition of evil. IMO taking an already-produced product and spending actual resources to weaken it / rebrand it as inferior is worse for everyone as a whole overall, and looks like a really selfish move. It's a stereotypical "late-stage capitalism" meme that betrays the good parts of capitalism and its place in public opinion.

I mean... this is what Tesla does? All their cars come crippled if you don't pay them more money?

Maybe the only difference is Tesla let's you pay to upgrade and not buy a new Tesla to get some feature?

How hard is it to jailbreak a Tesla?

Cars are expensive and have warranty. I wouldn't mess with that.

Besides, Tesla will know the moment you connect to the ethernet port.

It is a bit odd for a car though, you have to admit. Imagine buying an ICE car with a fuel tank that had an artificial limiter. Add 4 gallons to the tank for $x (120 miles). Would people accept that?

I cannot find it, but a few years back I saw a car hack whereby you could buy a basic model car and enable some premium trim features (I think it was underbody LEDs) via CAN bus hacking - the hardware was present in the basic model car but disabled.

So yes, people do accept this even if they don't realise they're accepting it.

Having only one model would mean you can streamline everything since you’re always doing the same.

The cost of every car is the same in terms of hardware and Human Resources. Easier to work with.

If you ever decide to upgrade, you’ll just pay them. 0 effort on their part.

Repairs are also easier regardless of upgrades since there’s only one model.

If the car is resold, they can enable more features too.

If the actual functionality is dependent upon Tesla’s systems, sure. Otherwise you’re just enabling a jailbreak market. There’s even precedent for this with Malone tuning.

People will accept that. Pair it with a trendy automotive themed name that ends with the suffix 'ly' and pass it off as "a different type of car company".

> You have a brand new premium product that's slightly better than last year's

If it's better then it will sell just fine alongside the previous generation. If it's not actually better they shouldn't have made the next generation to begin with.

Lots of good reasons. In hardware your costs go down and quality control goes up if you can re-use parts. It's better to have one circuit board for everything, and enable or disable features as needed. Sometimes this means an end customer can enable hidden features, but sometimes they are left disabled for good reason (for example, too much heat for a particular mechanical design)

Very common in the car industry, where engine power is often limited by the ECU chip only. I know the BMW Minis did this when they were first launched (the One and the Cooper had the same engine mechanically, just with a different ECU flash). It ends up being cheaper for the manufacturer as they only have to produce castings and parts for one engine which they can product en masse, lowering unit production costs.

And Tesla does it today, many examples of this in the Model 3. Most directly, the Model 3 Long Range and the Model 3 Long Range Performance are almost entirely exactly the same car, with some firmware differences. The thing is, though, Tesla is proving this is a viable way to extract a profit from the market in the EV space (as others did before in the ICE space) so don't expect it to change. Is it morally wrong? I don't think it really is, this is the manufacturer getting the most out of the market that they can, and that helps fund the great technology those manufacturers are then providing and even allows more people to access the lower-cost versions of the product.

Reducing it to just engine power is very simplistic. Electronic fuel injection is controlled by software and that software can optimize two out three metrics at the expense of the third. Performance, efficiency and emissions. During dieselgate VW detected whether the car is being tested and simply reduced efficiency or performance to optimize emissions. This is the reason why the recall resulted in cars that perform worse than before the recall even though the engine is still the same.

A lot of manufacturers do this. Many of the Flir thermal cameras share the same sensor and limited only by software. There are tons of hack for Rigol oscilloscopes to flash better firmware. On the recent ones, the manufacturer lets you unlock features with a software key. Tesla Model S has its battery capped by software. John Deere limits its tractors HP in software, and the list goes on.

The hardware itself is cheap. 50-80% of the price is R&D. It's cheaper for them to only develop one hardware version and limit the features in the software, than develop multiple versions of the hardware.

Hence why closed source firmware should be illegal

Why? If that would be the case they would only sell in the higher price tier. Currently, the more expensive product covers most of the R&D of the cheaper product.

Because by allowing companies to market segment through software they inherently have to cripple the ability to repair products/right-to-repair.

Yes, from a user perspective I would like more repairable hardware. I also see that developing hardware is hard. These things are complex and any modification could cost thousands of dollars. It's not black and white.

Most user doesn't care about repairability. I don't see a lot of people buy the Fairphone. They complain about John Deere but don't look for alternatives. They always chose the cheaper alternatives.

If we could somehow separate the development cost and the manufacturing cost, we could get super repairable hardware. Just like with OSS. If someone sponsors the development the product is great otherwise commercial software wins.

And forcing companies to make the of their firmware source code available would fix all of this.

The market will always steer everyone to the lowest common denominator and as a result fails when the externalities of pollution and e-waste are concerned.

And with the FLIR stuff, I think there are actual strong laws governing what happens between firmware that outputs 9fps and 30fps. It (probably) wouldn't make sense to make two different sensors with two different readout rates, you just lock it in firmware or with a laser at the die level.

Speaking as someone who bought a FLIR camera _because_ that hack made reasonable features available at a reasonable price, I think it's important to consider the market effect that such a hack, if properly managed, can have.

Corporations aren't gonna buy a camera and hack it. If a professional thermographer is telling her customers that she's using an E8, the bezel had better say E8 on it. But today's hobbyists may be tomorrow's corporations (My employer bought a C2 after I got sick of bringing in my E4/8), and brand recognition and experience have value.

And as has been said, if they have more of the high-spec units than they're selling (or the low-spec ones were a way to use up crap-binned sensors but might get good sensors too), then selling "the same" hardware cheaper might make good market sense. As long as they're not losing money on it...

I do wonder if someone might've wink-wink-nudge-nudge hinted that these units can do more than they're specced, Mike, you should tear one down... and then sales of that unit went absolutely through the roof. I know tons of people who have one now, and not a single one of us would've paid the E8 MSRP for it, and maybe only two of us would've found the E4 crap resolution useful.

Rigol took a different tack, and started simply giving away the decoders that everyone was hacking them to enable anyway.

Can anyone tell me what Rigol I should buy and to what I can turbo-charge it through firmware hacks? Is it possible to buy something entry-level (say, $500) and make it into something that I can decode Modbus messages with, and also look at the exact waveform of my house 230V electrical installation?

(these questions probably show how little I know about these things and I know how someone who doesn't know anything shouldn't be messing with electrical installations. Humor me.)

I remember seeing this a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnhXfVYWYXE

That one is probably obsolete now, but if you search around you may find that this is still possible for whatever is Rigol's current entry-level scope.

The DS1054Z is currently the cheapest, but it is a few years old. If you have the money I would buy the MSO5072 it came out last year. Look for tests. Dave's EEVBlog is a good point to start.

Because you extract most money from the market if you have products at a range of price points. If you only have good expensive products you only get money from rich people. If you only poor cheap products you get money from everyone but not a lot. If you have both you get lots of money from rich people and some from poor people. It's called price differentiation.

The reason they make their cheap product by crippling an expensive product, is because it is cheaper to do that than to manufacture an entirely separate product.

This is a very common strategy of camera hardware manufacturers Nikon and Cannon had similar firmware crippling.

> Why the hell would they do this?

Is the basis to half of the software industry.

e.g. The cost of developing and installing the full Enterprise version of Windows is the same that to develop and install the Home version. Still, Microsoft took the time and effort to create the different versions, to test them, etc.

For some reason, it seems more outrageous when it applies to hardware.

I have no answer if this is an ethical move or not. But, it seems a moral paradox that requires some extra though even if market segmentation makes monetary sense.

Exactly this.

If you think that proprietary software should exist and that companies are free to license their software under a proprietary license, why wouldn't a "hardware company" be allowed to do the same with their firmwares?

When you buy a certain model (gopro or something else), you also buy the corresponding license. Changing the firmware to another one is probably illegal without having a proper "license" to the latter (just like you can't install Windows "Corporate Edition" on your Windows "Starter Edition" legally without paying).

Of course one can disagree that this model should exist at all, but let's not pretend it's any different from proprietary software companies, there's nothing specific to hardware companies here.

> Why the hell would they do this?

I held the same perspective until I worked for a manufacturing company. Many of that company's products, and indeed many products throughout the world, _would not exist_ without market segmentation. Selling the same hardware with different software often makes the company more money than only having one model. In some cases, that extra money is the difference between the product, or even the company, existing or not existing.

R&D and manufacturing are hard and expensive.

Here's a secret: sometimes generic products are just repackaged name brand products. For example, my friend's business produces a generic Trader Joe brand product, the only difference between his brand and the Trader Joe brand is the packaging and the price (Trader Joes brand sells for much cheaper)

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