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Comment by IheartApplesDix | Hacker News Reader

anti-feature is just bad engineering, no matter how marketers spin it.

Maybe the other way round. I consider it good engineering (why waste an entirely separate production process to make a lower-grade version, when most of it can be shared?), but people are irrationally led to believe they are entitled to the full thing, just because it's potentially there. Proof of this is that if no one told you, you would not even suspect anything at all. If you want to "unlock" your car to get that extra 20kWh go ahead, the car is yours after all, but then do not try to ask for any form of warranty or support from the manufacturer.

People don't like to be reminded that price is decoupled from cost.

This is not about entitlement, and destroying value is not a wise thing to do for short term economic gains. I think it's pretty obvious and intuitive that even in CPUs, this kind of design is a failure of imagination and exploitative to the market, both supply and demand.

I couldn't say that it's something to make illegal in this exact execution, but the same actions could be a huge negative PR hit in different circumstances, and it's certainly wasteful and arrogant. The fact that these companies are even doing it shows that it's about time for someone to challenge them in their market. It's a huge market failure sign. Basically, because of Intel's and Tesla's near monopoly, they can do this kind of thing.

It would have not cost anyone more ink or paper to make this 1$ bill into a 100$ bill, and I would have been happier if that were the case, oh why is everyone in the world so against me? In other words, the process that leads to the production of a good or service is not what you pay for, what you pay for is the end product: if you pay for a battery with a capacity of 40kWh, that's what you get, and if you have the option of increasing its capacity later on, well even better! Or, you can get the extra capacity from the beginning, perhaps with a small discount on top of it. Proof of this is that, if they didn't tell you (or you hacked the system), you wouldn't even know about the possibility of the increased capacity. Then if you find out, you feel entitled to that extra capacity, just because "it's there" and part of the thing you bought.

I'm not sure you have a point here. You pretty much reasserted my point with your currency example. Last time I checked, currency isn't a free market.

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