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Comment by petesergeant | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but this is a pretty well-established model for computers; if it's more economical for the company to install the hardware on every model, but only charge consumers who want to utilize it a premium, then I don't see the problem. Price competition should keep the market price for any feature reasonable.

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Can you give some examples of computer hardware that are paywall locked?

I don’t like the idea, but CPUs have long been an example (fused at the factory to disable cores, for example).

Often times though, the cores are fused because they are malfunctioning. If the option is between that and just getting rid of the CPU, I'd rather they do that.

Of the to of my head:

* Intel xeon processors have software defined feature sets that are unlocked by a license.

* Nvidia low hash rate GPUs

* Nvidia vGPU on consumer GPUs (there are hacks to enable it)

* hardware video / audio encoders in mobile processors that require licensing to use.

* Sony cameras have licenses that allow you to unlock extra features

* Cisco do this all the time with their router HW.

Features that are locked off permanently are less scummy. It's a bad way of emulating different production lines, but at least it doesn't let them charge ongoing rent.

If I am not mistaken sometimes this is due to yield rates in chip manufacturing. Iirc there were 3 core pentiums at some point that were basically faulty 4 core chips where one core did not pass QC.

This is extremely common on CPUs and GPUs. gx104 from Nvidia was famously identical to gx100 with cache, cores fused out, probably because they were defective. It's a good way to increase yield for monolithic dies.

It's heavily implemented in Cisco and juniper routers for serious ISP applications. In addition to yearly paid support contracts for operating system updates.

TBF though it seems like large companies love paying through the nose for support contracts so managers can point fingers when things go wrong.

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