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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

Good luck. Car manufacturers are dying to become service providers and shift buying revenue into recurring revenue. On top of that, a car that's mostly like a smartphone in terms of how you activate and think about its features is incredibly attractive for the carmakers. They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs (with the difference that in this case it makes a lot of sense from a user perspective too). You can't provide services or set prices this way if the car isn't "smart". If you wanna know more, check what Qualcomm's doing in automotive with the Snapdragon digital chassis concept.

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> set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs

Huh? it's not like you pay more for hardware that's always been present. You get exactly the same CPU from entry level M1 to fully specc'd M1. It's not like you could turn a M1 into a M1 Pro or a M1 Max by flicking a switch or blowing a fuse, because the hardware is just not there.

Compare that with BMW who builds and sells cars with heater seats that you software unlock, but the hardware is already there, which is ridiculous. At that point all cars could have it enabled and it would barely make a dent in the price as the uniform assembly line that produces economies of scale is already in place. This is what Mazda is doing, basically you have two, maybe three trim levels, sometimes only one, fully specc'd, and that's it.

Sort of related. BMW has been doing something similar for some time. I bought a certified 2012 3 series back in 2013. New, the car had an optional package for something called Comfort and Convenience Package or something similar to that. It was mostly lighting - footwell ligting, door handles lights, some other stuff. That package was not purchased on the car I bought but all the actual lights were there and someone created a way to turn those things on using a bluetooth/OBDII connector and a laptop. I think the program was called BMW What App?? Not certain of that. Anyway, I added all the lighting stuff...

I hope people don't buy these subscriptions and auto manufacturers give up on them.

edit: words...

> auto manufacturers give up on them

Unlikely. 20+ years ago I was working for a manufacturer of high end office machines and they were doing the same thing. It's been popular for a long time, just now trickling down to consumer hardware.

The app is called Bimmercode ($50)

Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee:

https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918

Raspberry PIs have had a similar thing with VC-1 and MPEG-2 decoding requiring a small fee for about a decade now. In this case, to cover the patent licensing cost so as to not add it into the base hardware, but paying a fee to unlock features resident in the hardware is not new in computing. (I realize there are likely other/older ones I'm sure, but that was the first in my mind)

Yes and even with MPEG-2 patent expired, they are still offering that https://codecs.raspberrypi.com/mpeg-2-license-key/ so not sure how that cost breaks down today.

Raspberry probably isn't profiting from it though, they're legally obliged to do it, and they are also trying to make their hardware cheap as possible, so making it optional in a device like RPi makes sense.

I don't think the big players have the same intentions though.

IBM been doing that with their CPU's for a while. Current flavour of doing it is bannered under capacity on demand - https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/power8?topic=features-capacity-d...

In the field of physically-large CPUs I don't find this surprising. DEC 10's came in a wide range of models, and a KA10 variant for example could be field upgraded to a better variant, e.g. certain byte-access instructions added to extract bytes from 36-bit words, hardware floating point, and so on could be added. A technician would come and stick in some boards and wire-wrap them to the rest of the machine, and the machine's owner would pay for that. I only know of this with IBM and DEC but I would not be surprised if all the expensive machines were field-upgrade-able.

Companies are really trying to take money from everything now...

Yes the whole pay extra to unlock a feature that is already there is a big erk and whilst I can see both sides of the coin, it still has an edge too it that erks.

I shudder self driving cars and the prospect that companies would pay to nudge driver routes past their shops is perhaps another future concern, one in which would be a bit evil. Just as well some companies say they will do no evil, though non spring to mind thesedays.

Still, in tech the earliest type of paying to unlock a feature goes back to the 60's iirc and some storage drive that you would pay to upgrade and entailed an engineer comming out and flipping a dip switch to enable the extra capacity. Think it was some ICL kit, though was such a long time ago and never personaly experienced that beyond past down anicdotes.

It makes perfect sense for BMW, if indeed it's more expensive to make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized).

The fact that it doesn't make sense to the buyers should factor into whether it makese sense for the manufacturer. I would feel uncomfortable knowing I'm unnecessarily driving around a subsystem that's ultimately going to end up in the landfill unused. Unless I bite the bullet and agree to a recurring fee. Sure, many won't know or care, but then you're actively selecting for a less discerning clientele.

> I would feel uncomfortable knowing I'm unnecessarily driving around a subsystem that's ultimately going to end up in the landfill unused

Person from Minnesota drives their car down to Florida and sells it. Buyer has no need for the car's heated seats & steering wheel, so it goes unused. Are you saying this is a problem?

Thanks to JIT and JIS, just-in-sequence the 200 non-heated once actually are cheaper. They cannot be sold as Seats as a service, nor can they be re-sold with heated seats after their leasing period ended. So all the SaaS model has to do is geberating enough profit to off set the higher cost of heated seats installed but not paid for. After that the re-sale value, for BMW, is higher and this whole stunt is a net positive for BMW.

> make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized)

At that point you can spread the cost over 1000 instead of keep selling 800 at a higher price to cover for the 200. I also guess Pareto goes the other way (200 heated + 800 non-heated), which only makes it worse.

> They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs.

This is not an Apple thing... For ages CPUs and I think GPUs, too, are basically the same thing between many different models.

Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.

> Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.

That's called binning, the unit goes through some testing and components that don't pass get shunted away (hardware or firmware) because they're known to behave incorrectly. Better that than throwing it into a trash.

Blow the fuse/hack the firmware and you can unlock these because the hardware is there, but it's likely that it doesn't operate entirely correctly (especially under duress), even though it may appear to work at first blush.

Sometimes they will sell a perfectly functioning chip as a cut down version because they need to cater for that market segment. This market segmentation is nothing new and can be done in many ways, like permanently shaping the product before sale (HW) or using flexible licensing (SW). The problem with the "permanent" route is that when you sell such a cut down chip it usually stays cut down forever. So the only way to use the cut down features is to buy a chip that is fully unlocked. This is not only a waste of resources but also a waste of money to upgrade the entire chip.

A solid mechanism to enable/disable these features on demand would make the situation a lot better. You could pay just for the upgrade instead of the whole chip, either permanently or only when you need it and pay per use.

But the reality is that in practice this mechanism will probably not work to the advantage of the end user. It will focus entirely on the company's bottom line and open up new avenues for abuse. If your hardware is linked to a license and to the manufacturer forever, you'll never own it. Unless the legal framework enforces the rights of the consumer under threat of drastic fines for the manufacturer, we're just forgoing real ownership.

Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee:

https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918

I think maybe this is how it started out, but it would be really flakey to match with consumer demand. If everyone is buying the cheaper (binned) option you may not have the volume (or demand from the pricey option to just bin more).

Price differences between SKUs are a tool manufacturers can adjust to try and shape demand to match their yield curves.

In fairness, it also used to be the case that simply some of the cores were broken on a "dual core" processor. Because it was actually manufactured to be a quad core processor, but testing revealed that only 2 or 3 actually worked, so then it got sold as a dual core. :D

But the thing now with "pay to unlock more cores" is... interesting.

They'd probably love to turn that into a subscription, too.

Eh? That’s still the case. The cheaper M1 Pros and so on will generally have one or more defective disabled cores. So will many-cored Intel chips.

The "Golden Screwdriver" was supposedly a term from the heyday of the IBM Mainframe. (And one of the first links I found - a tesla discussion on HN 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 )

Wait… which manufacturers do you have in mind? Because I don’t think this apply to Intel or AMD or NVidia?

https://spacehop.com/what-is-binning/

This is an enormous stretch. Binning mostly allows manufacturers to avoid having to throw away ICs with certain defects, selling them instead as a different SKU (fewer cores, lower clock, worse power consumption etc).

I think Intel abused this at least once, back in the days when they had ridiculously good yields across the board, but let's not generalize in absence of evidence.

Binning is a lot of it, but what happens when they have more of the good bin than they want, for the market proportions they're targetting? They'd be fools not to either just sell the good as the bad, when nobody can tell (like when acheivable frequency is the difference), or more likely just make it bad then sell it.

I think so as well. Everyone wants to get on the subscription bandwagon and charge you from birth to death of the product. They also prefer lock in rather than standardization. Unfortunately although as engineers we think of this stuff, managers always tell us to STFU. However, eventually consumers will complain and the government will start regulating and making right to repair and other laws with enough rumbling from the public.

> charge you from birth to death, fullstop

Can you give any example of an unlockable feature on an M1 Mac?

Perhaps the confusion comes from the different mix of performance and efficiency cores on different Macs, but those are physically different. So for instance my M1 MBA has four performance and four efficiency cores, a compromise intended to give very long battery life.

Not only that, but perhaps they'll also be able to go in the direction of selling bare models so cheaply at a huge loss and make multipliers in profits from subjecting users to adtech, if they so chose.

We've seen how that goes with printers. Not good for end users (regardless of the printer being cheaper up front), and trashing the reputation of the company who pull that crap.

Look at HP. They used to be the go-to "reputable, always reliable" brand for printers. Heck, if you can still find the old Laserjet 4xxx series printers they're still good.

But HP in the last decade or so are on most people's shit list.

HP went to shit because they recognized how short-sighted and price-sensitive consumers are and changed how they sell things to account for it.

When people are shopping for an appliance, price is often the largest deciding factor. HP prices their inkjet printers low to lock in that sale. But in order to still earn a profit, they try to make money from the ink, so they lock down the firmware to block 3rd party ink.

People hate how expensive ink is, so they created Instant Ink, a subscription model. If you do a decent amount of printing, especially color printing, you'll actually save money. But it's widely misunderstood. You're not subscribing to ink, you're subscribing to printed pages. And so there are people writing nasty articles about HP because they'll pay $3 for their first month of Instant Ink, HP will send them an ink cartridge, they'll cancel their subscription, then have a Surprised Pikachu face when their printer then refuses to print with the Instant Ink cartridge, because for some reason they thought they owned the ink cartridge that they paid $3 for.

And of course, someone will take a picture of their printer refusing to print with the Instant Ink cartridge that they're no longer subscribed to and post it to /r/AssholeDesign.

And yet, none of this nonsense exists in the EU. You can take your empty cartridges to a lot of local shops and get them refilled.

And yet, HP still sell printers in the EU.

EU probably requires the allowance of 3rd party cartridges and refills by law.

In America, corporations run the government and the propaganda machine. They've convinced half the country that any restrictions on corporations are attacks on the Free Market™ (and your freedom!) and are a slippery slope to SOCIALISM!!.

Yeah. A whole bunch of other printer manufacturers would have picked up a lot of business, from the next time those people needed to buy a printer. eg "Anything other than HP".

Unfortunately, several of the other printer manufacturers seem to have copied HP's approach. With similar results.

The Epson EcoTank range (eg specifically refillable ink tanks) seems like a good idea, not that I've used them yet. :)

Dymo recently trashed their entire business reputation (hopefully) pulling the same crap.

They even went to the point of modifying their Amazon listing for their old label printer, so it has all the good reviews for the old product, but selling the new crap DRM-locked garbage product.

So all the newer reviews are people complaining, but the star average is still high for the moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzSDJRC0F6c

Point taken on the HP printers (and wow, re: "Instant Ink" mentioned by sibling; had to search it myself to believe it), but heck. Everyone seems hell-bent on trashing their reputations in my eyes (or at least earning my eye-roll), anyhow.

Moreover, I seem to recall reading here on HN a fair bit about smart refrigerators and Samsung smart TVs with ads, and I can't see those revenue models going away anytime soon.

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