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
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