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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I feel different about extra cores on a CPU than I do about heated seats.

The manufacturing price delta between an 8 core CPU and a 16 core, nowadays is functionally meaningless.

The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.

The way I see it, for things like heated seats or CarPlay, I'm already paying for the base hardware cost (plus some margin) as part of the base price of the car, charging me for the upgrade is charging me a markup on what I already paid for. Making it a service is insult to injury.

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> The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.

Citation needed. The way assembly lines and product mix work, it could be meaningfully less expensive to have all the hardware be identical with software unlocks.

Electrical wiring typically involves materials gained through mining, which is carbon dioxide intensive.

> The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful

I don't believe that is the case. BMW determined it was more expensive to have the supply chain, inventory, and manufacturing management to build both heated and non-heated versions of their seats. Rather than just make heated seats a standard feature they saw an opportunity to maintain and even expand their highest margin revenue stream: options.

Also keep in mind that heated seats may not be the only option available. If you add in a few other options like backup camera, self driving/driver assist and maybe a few more you end up making a dozen or so different production lines and complex logistics. If you have a dozen features you are basically making custom cars at this point. It can definitely be cheaper to make a single model of car and lock features instead of dealing with all of that complexity. Sure, for one commonly purchased feature like heated seats it make make sense to have 2 production lines (at least for the seats) once you start adding dimensions to that matrix it gets expensive very quickly.

Congratulations on getting six zeros in your comment id: 37000000.

I believe that the worst thing is the use of natural resources to produce those things without any function whatsoever. Assuming the majority of customers don't pay extra, it just makes it worse.

>The manufacturing cost between a car with heated seats and without headset seats is functioningaflly meaningful.

You could probably buy something that would heat your seat at home for under $4 on Temu. And that includes multiple middle companies and shipping across the ocean. It probably costs them pennies, where the upside is, this owner doesn't want heated seats, but a car can easily have 2-3 owners in its first 10 years. maybe the 2nd and 3rd owners will want the heated seats, worth the money it would take to install it

> The manufacturing price delta between an 8 core CPU and a 16 core, nowadays is functionally meaningless.

Semi yields?

At the time I worked on the IBM hardware, these were not cores that were disabled by default.

They were entire cpus in sockets.

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