[iso1631]

Someone buying one doesn't care if it's $898.54 or $898.84.

However the price point is set to $899 regardless

Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.

"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.

[Humperdunkel]

Who is to say that all 'features' on a SoC won't have the licensed variants coming out of the woodwork. If Intel and AMD didn't think they were worth paying for themselves then they shouldn't have put them in silicon to pass on a few times to the consumer with a bundled copy, possibly buying it in the store anyway, maybe not even using windows or multimedia, etc.

The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.

[miki123211]

Also keep in mind that, for a $999 laptop, Dell and HP aren't getting $999 in profit.

Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).

I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.

[rasz]

>$5 worse experience

lets all calm down, its about h.265 nobody sane uses anyway

[phantasmish]

Looks at folder on ZFS array with ~16TB of video files, at least half of which by bytes-stored are h.265

Haha, yeah. Haha. Nobody sane.

Sweats

[dylan604]

Yeah, just because some data hoarder on the internet has TBs of videos doesn't mean that's normal. So weird call out.

It is however a call out of the GP as well for not knowing how ubiquitous something can be while not being shoved in your face that it is being used. The GP is evidently unaware that most streaming services will offer an h.265 encode for those users that can use it as the bandwidth savings make it very worthwhile. Mobile devices are using HEVC by default now as well as at least iOS using a still image variant. From reading elsewhere in these comments, clearly MS Teams uses it as well.

So just because you don't know it is being used does not mean it is not being used the way you might think.

[mapontosevenths]

Literally every decent video application uses h.265. What are you even talking about?

Is this some Linux bigot thing?

[adgjlsfhk1]

no. youtube and netflix both use h264+av1 as their codec options. Netflix seems to use x265 for a small subset (but it's somewhat unclear).

[mapontosevenths]

That's incorrect.

Youtube detects your capabilities and sets it automatically. Unless you're using an obsolete potato network or watching low resolution stuff you'll likely get x265.

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2853702?hl=en#:~:t...

Netflix is similar. It defaults to h265 for Netflix content (because they want it to look good). Partner/licensed content uses the inferior codecs that use more bandwidth to achieve worse quality.

[GAl10s]

youtube has never and will never come to support x265 they even tried to block support from chrome becuase they hate it that much they support x264,vp8/vp9, av1 and soon av2 they literally started and entire organisation to take on mpeg called aomedia

[mapontosevenths]

Ahh. You're right, sort of.

Users can choose h265 for live streams and they allow hevc uploads, but they then transcode it to worse codecs before broadcast.

I wonder how they would save on bandwidth by switching to hevc? I think its something like 40% more efficient on average.

I guess av1 is even better, but what percentage of hardware supports it?