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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock

People's lives are literally in the hands of optional firmware softlock all the time in medical devices that you can find in hospitals. If the hospital doesn't pay for x feature or for support technicians to service them, then some people could actually die.

Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

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I blame companies for creating pricing structures that deny people the full use of hardware they supposedly own. I know it's standard practice. Lots of standard practices are bullshit, and this is one of them.

Wait till you see Apple...oh wait.

100%.

I would like to hijack the comment chain to point to the right to repair movement in agriculture [1]. There will be some hearings in Nebraska [2] about the issue where lobbyists will try to shoot it down again.

[1] https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/repair-maintenance/rig...

[2] https://legiscan.com/NE/bill/LB543/2021

Hmm, that makes me wonder. If right to repair exists, could someone "repair" their tesla in such a way to get full access to their battery legally?

I blame companies for not doing what I want all the time. If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.

> If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.

A beautifully stated maxim I’ve never been able to articulate. As an immigrant from the USSR to the US, I believe this mentality is what separates the First World from the Second.

> If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.

Damn this is heavy.

>Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

Who's fault is it? The person who dies because they couldn't afford a firmware unlock which in most cases is a sunk-cost that's locked purely to produce profit?

Sorry -- that's too much of an ethical/moral opinion -- and honestly edges near victim-blaming; making lots of money in life isn't something that is guaranteed by any shot.

I'm of the opinion that anyone with actionable ability to change a situation -- and then chooses not to act on that ability -- is to blame for the situation progressing.

I hope and wish for public companies to attempt to act altruistically -- and the ones that don't should be held responsible by their audiences. The BioMed profit schemes out there are devious and for-profit-engineereed, no doubt about that; commonality doesn't make those practices morally appropriate, though.

Unless you are telling me that tesla sells cars for a loss (like an inkjet printer), the Tesla owners already paid for the feature. It just has been limited for some extra margin which clearly is not essential else the car would not have been sold to begin with.

Its plain rent seeking and frankly should be illegal.

Walk a mile in manufacturer shoes. Let's say you run a company producing a hardware product. And you invest in developing a software feature which improves your product. It costs money. This software feature also needs tiny modification of original hardware product by replacing couple parts with better ones with price difference of 0.001 cent/per piece . So your options are:

  Start producing two separate models of you product, greatly complicating supply chain and logistics
  Discontinue old product and produce only improved version
  Produce only new HW but introduce software switch, to allow users to keep purchasing cheaper product without new feature, while simultaneously allowing users who need new feature to pay premium to cover your development costs

The Tesla softlock was not a feature, though, it was an artificial limitation being placed upon the operational capacity of your car. It's like Dell selling somebody a laptop with two of its eight processor cores turned off, and then forcing them to pay a fee in order to turn the cores back on.

I agree with the OP that it is a disgusting business practice at best, and totally indefensible.

So companies are not allowed to differentiate product models through software, only through hardware?

I don't think a two or three line IF statement really qualifies as differentiating a product through software.

Seems like a waste of resources to build a car capable of 300-400 miles but software lock it to 200 miles. Ideally not okay but obviously we live in a profit seeking world and Elon and co are no different.

Also look to Boeing 737 Max crashes caused by the "base model" lacking relatively cheap safety indicators and redundant sensors.

Didn't the option just cover the AOA disagree indicator? AFAIK even the planes with that option only read from the pilot flying's AOA sensor before their fix was implemented.

Not to mention that that indicator isn't a physical light with hardware and wiring, but merely an on-screen icon on the central display panel.

> Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

Yeah, you can.

Exactly. There's so many expensive treatments, devices, software, etc. that don't get offered to everyone. Unfortunately everything has a price

My workplace is currently struggling to sell a more expensive device, where in the majority of the cases it will offer no advantage over the original device, but in some cases it will be life saving.

Naturally, many health services are dragging their feet on wanting to buy our device.

Non-payment should be handled by the legal system, not back doors built into software.

I for one am glad Tesla did the right thing and were pro life saving. Thats what makes Elon Musk an of the box thinker.

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