I won't ever buy a gopro if this is true. Why the hell would they do this?
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.
Maybe the only difference is Tesla let's you pay to upgrade and not buy a new Tesla to get some feature?
Besides, Tesla will know the moment you connect to the ethernet port.
So yes, people do accept this even if they don't realise they're accepting it.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.