Hacker News Reader

Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

> make special SKUs

If your company is set up for it, special SKU's can be really cheap. Some can be software-only changes that even get applied after the product gets into the hands of the users.

eg. during the setup process, the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer and figures out which features to enable.

There might even be more SKU combinations than products have ever be produced.

Not saying hard drive manufacturers do it, but it is both possible and done in some industries.

View on HN

I was impressed in the 1980s when I heard about how 390 mainframes had a modem in them so IBM could phone in orders to unlock extra capacity if the customer needed it for a short time.

Today I think that's a sign to sell the stock of the company involved. It costs money to build hardware that is locked out, either the customer pays for it or the stockholders of the vendor pay for it, if the customer doesn't get to use it it just wasted. A vendor that even considers value subtraction is on thin ice and can only get away with it because there are barriers to exit. (This is particularly true of "fused off" features in Intel chips.)

When you look deep enough, nearly all 'tech' products costs are IP. For IP, it costs nothing to include a feature locked out.

Even real hardware is usually like this. An expensive camera is probably only expensive because it had more R&D go into it and all of its components. The actual sand to make the silicon chips didn't cost any extra.

Unfortunately, the way todays capitalist society works, it's pretty hard to say "I'd like to buy 1 million of your camera sensors please, and I'd like to have 200k of them be high performance and 800k be kinda noisy, but I'll let you know which are the high performance ones after I sell them".

A really vertically integrated company like Apple could do it though - and they do, selling super high performance chips in cheap iPads, but software locked to not run a decent desktop OS - for that you have to buy a macbook with the same chip for triple the money.

The sensors are physically very different in the latest Sony α7, α7R (high resolution) and α7S (high sensitivity) cameras.

In an early minicomputer, the $500 power fail interrupt feature was field installed by clipping a jumper.

There were mainframe line printers that implemented a different lines per minute feature depending on which gear set was installed.

On-demand scaling is still a feature of zSeries mainframes, now called Elastic Capacity on Demand .

To non-corporates it might look like wasted resources or gouging the users, but from the enterprise perspective it's a marvellous feature. It's basically on-premises cloud-scaling.

> the hardware phones home, and some server side component matches it up to the original sale at the retailer

laughs in linux

my drives have physical extra pins that make it disable itself with a normal SATA connector that's left unplugged in its plastic case

If a normal SATA power connector disables your drives, that just means your power supply is old.

It wasn't the best idea to reuse the deprecated 3.3v pins for controlling drive power, but it's easy enough to deal with.

> the hardware phones home

ah, nothing like Windows-only hardware that is being purchased for Linux usage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com