[unethical_ban]

It's interesting how we the people (broadly) accept this practice in software and even some hardware, but not in other areas. Note how frustrated people are when you hear about "unlocking" sensors and services available on cars.

If a product is made, and the cost to provide that product is the same one way or the other but you cripple it to create segmentation, then that is greed. Period. Objectively. And if you're okay with that, then fine, no problem. Just don't try to tell me it isn't maximization of profit.

There are no heroes in the megacorp space, but it would be nice for AMD and Intel to bring Nvidia to heel.

[GuB-42]

Maximization of profit is what all companies do. For publicly traded companies, it is considered a duty to their shareholders and not doing so will result in executives getting booted out and even lawsuits.

With that out of the way, market segmentation is often good for budget customers, who, in the case of Nvidia GPUs, are gamers. They get GPUs that run their games just as well as the uncrippled model, for a much lower price. Without market segmentation, all the GPUs would go to Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc... since they are the ones with the big budget, gamers will be left with GPUs they can't afford, and Nvidia with less profits as they will lose most of the market for gamers.

With market segmentation, Nvidia wins, gamers win, AI companies and miners lose. And I don't know about you, but I think that AI companies and miners deserve the premiums they pay.

It sounds stupid to pay for crippled hardware, but when buying a GPU, the silicon is only a small part of the price, the expensive part is all the R&D, and that cost is the same no matter how many chips they sell, and it makes sense to maximize these sales, and segmentation is how they do it without sacrificing their profits.

Of course, should AMD or Intel come back, they would do their own market segmentation too, in fact, they already do.

[dredmorbius]

Aside from possible technical explanations (e.g., the binning of products based on defects which permit sub-optimal performance as creato describes: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42435397>), there's market segmentation.

French polymath (economist, engineer, bureaucrat) Jules Dupuit famously described this concerning railway carriage accomodations and the parlous state of third-class carriages:

It is not because of the several thousand francs which they would have to spend to cover the third class wagons or to upholster the benches. ... [I]t would happily sacrifice this [expense] for the sake of its popularity.

Its goal is to stop the traveler who can pay for the second class trip from going third class. It hurts the poor not because it wants them to personally suffer, but to scare the rich.

<https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/why-does-air-travel-suck-...>

More on Dupuit:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_Dupuit>

Market segmentation by performance is a long-standing practice in the information technology world. IBM would degrade performance of its mainframes by ensuring that a certain fraction of CPU operations were no-ops (NOPs), meaning that for those clock cycles the system was not processing data. A service engineer would remove those limits on a higher lease fee (IBM leased rather than sold machines, ensuring a constant revenue stream). It's common practice in other areas to ship products with features installed but disabled and activated for only some paying customers.

Another classic example: the difference between Microsoft Windows NT server and workstation was the restriction of two registry keys:

We have found that NTS and NTW have identical kernels; in fact, NT is a single operating system with two modes. Only two registry settings are needed to switch between these two modes in NT 4.0, and only one setting in NT 3.51. This is extremely significant, and calls into question the related legal limitations and costly upgrades that currently face NTW users.

<https://landley.net/history/mirror/ms/differences_nt.html>

[wmf]

People have wrong intuitions about a lot of things and price discrimination is one of them. That's the modern world for you.

[stuckkeys]

How is this modern world? LOL