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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. |