this is standard for a lot of server products: sell the exact same chassis with the same specs and then feature-gate the hardware to under perform
yes, it’s shit… but also, you’re not buying the physical thing: you’re buying the r&d… it’s either that, or they say suck it buy the expensive one we don’t have another option
that’s very different to what’s being expressed in the original image
It’s not though. Only under capitalism would be literally throw away an item and replace it with the exact same item in the same condition. The only reason for this behavior is capitalism and profit incentives. It’s a waste of labor and resources and only benefits the profits of capital.
i agree that it’s wasteful; i just think it’s far closer to paying a contractor (complete this work and i’ll pay you $X and i don’t care what tools you use) than it is to buying hardware from a consumer perspective
Ok. You bring up an important point. And I hope I can take a minute to convince you of something.
What you’re saying is correct. But it relies on fundamental falacy of the way people try to view economics. When we say “capitalism” we’re obviously talking about the entire economic structure; the “rules” for which an economy is organized and the government that enforcess those rules.
The issue with your comparison is that is is not at all comparable to the economic insensitives of massive companies. There is absolutely no valid way to compare a small business or individual hiring a contractor to what I was previously discussing.
I think our economic education suffers in this country because people tend to think of massive economies of scale as just a “bigger” small business. This is not at all comparable. And the waste that this produces is absolutely non trivial.
The “run the country like a business” people have this same flawed logic. They image that any business is just a “coffee shop” but with more employees and customers. But these things are just not comparable. It would be like everyone deciding about how to build an airplane but they assume that the physics are in a frictionless vacuum.
well, i’m from australia so our “this country” is probably different
in general i agree, but economies of scale and things like that apply no matter what - they’re logical conclusions rather than theories
no matter your system you have to allocate resources, and cease to allocate resources to things that aren’t useful
providing a single big product is likely the most efficient thing to (why would they do it otherwise? all other arguments aside big companies are fairly decent at squeezing every $ out of their sales. even if it’s not, i don’t think we have the data to discuss further in that direction), so no matter the system i’d argue this is probably the correct decision
what then follows that? if you’re allocating resources, and there’s only a single $100 item available and you only have $80 to spend on it, you’re SOL: you’d probably prefer there to be an $80 product that’s half as powerful (and in this scenario, the $100 product would likely cost more as well)
either way you’re wasteful - either in discarding performance by artificially limiting the item, or by making smaller products in an inefficient way that makes the whole range more resource intensive to produce
i think there’s no good answer, and as frustrating as it is to know that the big powerful thing is right there, i don’t think it’s as obviously big bad corporate as it seems on the surface
it should also be noted that it’s likely with those products that all the hardware actually doesn’t work - when you produce things like CPUs, some of the cores just fail to pass QA. rather than throwing them out, you can just artificially disable some of the cores and sell it as the smaller products… technically, yes the whole chip for the bigger product is there, but it’s partially faulty (or at least not up to the quality that the company is willing to guarantee)… this also sometimes happens with returns
this is standard for a lot of server products: sell the exact same chassis with the same specs and then feature-gate the hardware to under perform
yes, it’s shit… but also, you’re not buying the physical thing: you’re buying the r&d… it’s either that, or they say suck it buy the expensive one we don’t have another option
that’s very different to what’s being expressed in the original image
It’s not though. Only under capitalism would be literally throw away an item and replace it with the exact same item in the same condition. The only reason for this behavior is capitalism and profit incentives. It’s a waste of labor and resources and only benefits the profits of capital.
i agree that it’s wasteful; i just think it’s far closer to paying a contractor (complete this work and i’ll pay you $X and i don’t care what tools you use) than it is to buying hardware from a consumer perspective
Ok. You bring up an important point. And I hope I can take a minute to convince you of something.
What you’re saying is correct. But it relies on fundamental falacy of the way people try to view economics. When we say “capitalism” we’re obviously talking about the entire economic structure; the “rules” for which an economy is organized and the government that enforcess those rules.
The issue with your comparison is that is is not at all comparable to the economic insensitives of massive companies. There is absolutely no valid way to compare a small business or individual hiring a contractor to what I was previously discussing.
I think our economic education suffers in this country because people tend to think of massive economies of scale as just a “bigger” small business. This is not at all comparable. And the waste that this produces is absolutely non trivial.
The “run the country like a business” people have this same flawed logic. They image that any business is just a “coffee shop” but with more employees and customers. But these things are just not comparable. It would be like everyone deciding about how to build an airplane but they assume that the physics are in a frictionless vacuum.
well, i’m from australia so our “this country” is probably different
in general i agree, but economies of scale and things like that apply no matter what - they’re logical conclusions rather than theories
no matter your system you have to allocate resources, and cease to allocate resources to things that aren’t useful
providing a single big product is likely the most efficient thing to (why would they do it otherwise? all other arguments aside big companies are fairly decent at squeezing every $ out of their sales. even if it’s not, i don’t think we have the data to discuss further in that direction), so no matter the system i’d argue this is probably the correct decision
what then follows that? if you’re allocating resources, and there’s only a single $100 item available and you only have $80 to spend on it, you’re SOL: you’d probably prefer there to be an $80 product that’s half as powerful (and in this scenario, the $100 product would likely cost more as well)
either way you’re wasteful - either in discarding performance by artificially limiting the item, or by making smaller products in an inefficient way that makes the whole range more resource intensive to produce
i think there’s no good answer, and as frustrating as it is to know that the big powerful thing is right there, i don’t think it’s as obviously big bad corporate as it seems on the surface
it should also be noted that it’s likely with those products that all the hardware actually doesn’t work - when you produce things like CPUs, some of the cores just fail to pass QA. rather than throwing them out, you can just artificially disable some of the cores and sell it as the smaller products… technically, yes the whole chip for the bigger product is there, but it’s partially faulty (or at least not up to the quality that the company is willing to guarantee)… this also sometimes happens with returns