[andrewstuart2]

Not that I really agree with their decision, but to play devil's advocate: they are essentially creating multiple products without having to waste effort and resources on creating separate dies, and without you having to throw away money (e.g. selling your used board) to get new features.

My money says that they were probably set on multiple product levels, and some engineer said "hey, we can be less wasteful here by creating only one board." So now you can pay $100 to unlock RAID 1 whereas before you would've had to either pony up before you needed it, or sold your used $500 board for $350 to buy the new $600 board with RAID.

Again, not saying I agree with the decision to charge for RAID when it's obviously included already, but that it's probably at least less wasteful than the alternative of actually having separate dies.

[infogulch]

You have this backwards. Well, mostly. Having a separate die is definitely not the other option. A separate die would cost millions of dollars to develop, test, and produce separately, even for a smallish feature like this. The resulting price hike to cover the R&D would push the product even farther out of the competitive market than they are now.

No, the only two options are the ones Intel and AMD have already taken: artificial segmentation via feature flags, or just opening it up entirely.

I don't really like the artificial segmentation thing but I can't seem to reconcile that feeling with my feelings on software licensing, which doesn't bother me but can be the exact same thing.

[tdb7893]

The artificial segmentation I don't like because I view it as a market failure. In a more competitive market they probably wouldn't be able to segment it like that