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Comment by rrr_oh_man | Hacker News Reader

Then it will still cost less than $1 on a $1,000 laptop?

Worth pointing out that their laptops cost you $1,000, and they probably cost a fair bit to make. A quick google says generally they make 10-20% margin on most products, and after accounting for other expenses involved, walk away with 50-75$ per unit. That's consumer, mind you, it's probably much more complicated for enterprise.

To be clear, I agree with you that it's fucking ridiculous. Avoiding taking a "loss" of 4 bloody cents on your margin to make your product unable to decode via hardware one of the most popular codecs on the planet is classic value engineering horseshit, and is exactly what I expect from a penny pinching corporation. I'm just saying let's be accurate in calling them out: Dell has made your Teams and other apps experience demonstrably much worse to retain 0.08% of their profit margin.

HEVC is far from being the most popular codec on the planet in the context of video conferencing. Most implementations are using WebRTC and as it is unevenly supported and AV1 support is becoming more prominent and stable, most implementations are going from H264/VP8 -> VP9 -> AV1 and skip HEVC entirely.

Each new codec to support is adding a lot of complexity to the stack (negotiation issues, SFU implementation, quality tuning, dealing with non conformant implementations...), so it's never quite as easy as toggling a switch to enable them.

So add $1 to the retail price? No customer is going to balk at that.

You are right that a customer won't balk at a $1 price increase, but -- customers balking at $1 isn't the reason why value engineering has won in the marketplace.

Or just eat it. As a company you lose magnitudes more money when one of your executives dings a rental car.

If they ship, say 20m laptops a year that's $800k. I can't imagine what cars their executives are dinging if their repair is orders of magnitude more than that. How many orders is it?

And if you've made $50 on each, that's literally a BILLION dollars in profit, and if their financials are true, that would be 1/22nd of their FY2024 profits. So you would be responsible for the bottom line going down by 0.0036%.

I don't know why you're saying this. Doesn't seem related. The point is that if the price goes up now then it can go up again, and where does it end? This process is how prices are kept in check, and is why laptops don't cost $1m each.

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