Heated seats disabled in software?!
"The car has detected someone sitting in the passenger seat, but you haven't paid for that option, so the car will refuse to move." or "the rear doors cannot be opened, because you've only paid for the front door." WTF.
Anyway, price differentiation without a hardware delta is how you meet your margin forecasts. Legitimate business strategy.
If you're going to do the sarcastic reply thing, at least make it insightful. Or funny.
Sometimes, sometimes not. What you are getting is a chip that passed more rigorous tests. That the lower end products have (or would have) failed those tests is not guaranteed. Companies can and do sell identical silicon as less capable products.
Intel at one stage dipped their toes in the water of what would be a close analogy; your chip comes with half of its cache software disabled, and you pay $50 to unlock it.
They stopped pretty quickly, but I don't think it was from the inevitable tech community backlash. It was that it economically made no sense at Intel's scale - the alternative was to fab a new line of chips with less cache to start with.
https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50...
There are cases where a higher spec product is sold as a lower spec in the CPU world, but there are no lasting situations where every single lower spec product could have been sold as higher.
For the analogy to fit, that would have to be the situation. It's not.
I'm not arguing that Tesla is doing anything wrong, just that you can't point to CPUs to justify it.
But it was a flawed argument, because CPU binning is not at all like Tesla software limiting battery packs. It's totally valid to be upset about one but not the other (personally I'm fine with both).
You coming up with any sort of theoretical scenario to continue the analogy doesn't counter my argument or boost theirs. We don't need help understanding what Tesla is doing.
I'm talking about making 1000 widgets at the same production cost and then making half of them worse (disabling a feature) and selling them cheaper - because it is cheaper to produce 1000 of the same widget than making 500 simple widgets and 500 more complex widgets and sell the complex widget at a premium, and in order to not let the cheap widget cannibalize the sales of the better one, it needs to be made worse after production. This has happened very rarely in the case of CPU's but it's not unheard of, and it's not the same as binning. It's a very valid and very real business strategy for other areas, where it is more common than for CPU's.
Edit: Perhaps a better example for CPU's is making a single CPU die in manufacturing but producing a more expensive enterprise/pro part and a cheaper consumer part, where the difference is disabling some feature (an instruction set extension for example) in microcode.