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by coldtea 3355 days ago
Who said we aren't milked as consumers too?

Those are two segmented markets. If Intel's revenue is above their R&D and other expenses, then whatever profit they make milking enterprises/server companies is independent of what they make milking us.
1 comments
brianwawok 3354 days ago
Why is this any different from tesla selling you software locked batteries?
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coldtea 3354 days ago
Well, it could be, who said it isn't? Though i'm not familiar with the Tesla case.

But selling "locked batteries" in a product where the batteries are 80% of the innovation/feature set, and where after-market batteries could cause all kinds of issues, is one thing.

Whereas selling memory at triple or more the price just because you switched on some feature (ECC) that would have costed nothing to switch on for everybody is another thing.

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brianwawok 3354 days ago
In Tesla, they literally sell everyone the 75 KW battery. Some people pay 80k for the car, some people pay 75k for the car, but the battery is software limited to 60KW. You can later pay 6k to software unlock the extra part of the battery sitting in your car.

Product market segmentation is a very reasonable thing to do. Why do people make it out like a bad thing? If you ever run a business, you will want to find a way to get big enterprise to pay X, and small business to pay X/4. ECC is something businesses care way more about than gamers, so why not charge more for it?

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coldtea 3354 days ago
>Product market segmentation is a very reasonable thing to do. Why do people make it out like a bad thing?

Because most of us would rather pay a price that mostly reflects costs + some reasonable profit, not some artificially created segment, not fuel extravagant profits, not pay for future research, not pay for the company to have cash reserves, etc etc.

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brianwawok 3354 days ago
As a consumer, your only choice is binary. Vote yes and buy, vote no and don't buy.

If it offends you that your device has some enterprise feature that you don't really need turned off unless you pay $x... sorry? But you don't really have a right to the feature for some margin % that you deem fair.

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