Maybe I'm reading between lines, but isn't it ridiculous to talk about license prices when the affected machines are $900 pro laptops?
I mean, I understand that in a cheap single board computer, but this is nonsense.
I mean, I understand that in a cheap single board computer, but this is nonsense.
However the price point is set to $899 regardless
Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.
"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.
The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.
Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).
I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.
lets all calm down, its about h.265 nobody sane uses anyway
Haha, yeah. Haha. Nobody sane.
Sweats
It is however a call out of the GP as well for not knowing how ubiquitous something can be while not being shoved in your face that it is being used. The GP is evidently unaware that most streaming services will offer an h.265 encode for those users that can use it as the bandwidth savings make it very worthwhile. Mobile devices are using HEVC by default now as well as at least iOS using a still image variant. From reading elsewhere in these comments, clearly MS Teams uses it as well.
So just because you don't know it is being used does not mean it is not being used the way you might think.
Is this some Linux bigot thing?
Youtube detects your capabilities and sets it automatically. Unless you're using an obsolete potato network or watching low resolution stuff you'll likely get x265.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en#:~:t...
Netflix is similar. It defaults to h265 for Netflix content (because they want it to look good). Partner/licensed content uses the inferior codecs that use more bandwidth to achieve worse quality.
Users can choose h265 for live streams and they allow hevc uploads, but they then transcode it to worse codecs before broadcast.
I wonder how they would save on bandwidth by switching to hevc? I think its something like 40% more efficient on average.
I guess av1 is even better, but what percentage of hardware supports it?
Pretty much everything modern except Apple. Intel since 11th gen (2021), AMD since Zen4 (2022), Samsung phones since 2021, Google phones since 2021, Mediatek since 2020.
With modern lifecycles the way they are, that's probably ~60-80% of everything out there.
Also software decoding works just fine.
IMHO the fact that this wasn't visible on any product page was pretty awful, especially when this was a near globally included feature before. Maybe in an ideal world the customer would be able to pick which licenses they want individually when purchasing the device (or add them on at a later time). But that is beyond the knowledge of most consumers and has other downsides.
So while I do consider this choice to be pretty silly. I do find it hard to draw the line of at what point it is clearly ridiculous.