Bobcat DLC
bobcat.com
bobcat.com
While the existence of an onboard computer bothers me, the rest of my new machine is made with relatively inexpensive and readily available parts. In contrast, US manufacturers usually use proprietary parts that cost far more than they should. Over the course of the lifetime of the machine, I expect to pay half the parts maintenance cost as compares with more US-centric machines.
Software features are not the only way that manufacturers have been extracting unjustifiable profit. Right to repair laws are the only way to rectify this situation, because I fully expect Sany to start heading in the same direction after they have further established themselves in the marketplace. In my experience, it seems that every corporation eventually turns to boiling their customers like frogs.
My gut instinct is to see this as a nasty practice used to extract the most from customers. However I am conscious that the costs associated with "features" is not only the hardware, but also maintenance, warranty, support, training, and possibly others. Perhaps this is reasonable?
Basically, my argument here is that in scenario 1 Bobcat is selling some value-add improvement to their product, while in scenario 2 they're just unlocking features your machine had the software and hardware for from day one but was artificially restricted from using.
I don't know enough about these types of machines to know for sure, but some of the features in the example video like "high flow hydraulics" sound very suspiciously like the bad "arbitrary lockout" I described.
Yeah it’s not like it costs them anymore to manufacture ones with more features, they’re all built in and then artificially shuttered.
If you add a $500 part to a $10k item, but charge $5000 more, when you could instead make only the high tier device for probably the same price(Economies of scale on the upgrade parts plus not having to deal with the costs of multiple SKUs), almost everyone is worse off.
The only benefit to the existence of low tier items with only small differences from high tier, that i can see, is that the used ones might get sold off cheaply and be available to the lowest income people when they upgrade.
One of the extra ‘services’ is a fucking fan.
To your point, I think charging money for the ability to reverse the fan is criminal, considering everything is already built in.
I'm really curious how much they charge to unlock that feature once the machine is already purchased.
Without DLC they just make multiple versions with different feature sets. You often pay the highest amount for features you don't need just to get one important feature. And if you buy something, upgrading often isn't possible.
This should reduce the need to produce more physical artifacts.
The only downside I see is that less upgrading means fewer used items available.