Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy”.
In 2010, Intel launched something truly extraordinary: the first user upgradable processor, the Pentium g69 51, and thank goodness they did because now just a short 13 years later, I’m finding it a little sluggish for my daily Computing, and I can’t wait to unlock hyperthreading and that sweet Sweet megabyte of extra cash only little confused here I’ve got Windows 7. Then I’ve got my upgrade card. I just can’t seem to find the Intel upgrade program. Uh hi Intel.
What do you mean? You don’t offer upgrade service for my CPU anymore. This is a more common situation than you might think, where you buy into a service or a hardware product that has add-ons available only to discover that one day when you go to use them, they vanished without so much as a oh sorry about that. Why does this happen? Who is responsible and is there any justification for this business practice? The only way to know is apparently to scan this barcode to our sponsor.
Msi msi’s back to school sale is on now looking for a new laptop for next semester. They got those. What about a desktop PC yep got those too components for an upgrade yeah. They do got them check out. Msi’S back to school sale below. There’S no question that the G6 951 was bad, but that doesn’t mean that all Hardware as a service products are equally bad. Extended. Warranties, for example, can be costly. But if they’re fairly priced – and you read the fine print, they can be an effective way to ensure that your expensive, TV or laptop will be serving you for years to come. Even if something goes wrong, then there’s service contracts, which are kind of like extended warranties on steroids, that net apppp storage appliance that we picked up recently ly comes with ongoing maintenance costs which sucks for your wallet but ensures that your business won’t experience unnecessary downtime. Another example of Hardware, with ongoing costs that make sense, is anything that requires periodic calibration like a home, theater, projector or a scientific instrument. Our colorimeters for testing displays, for example, need to be checked and certified against a known good or you wouldn’t be able to trust our results.
In all all of these cases, though, the after purchase costs at least add potential value to our Hardware. Let’S shift gears back to the Pentium G nice 51 for a bit, though, here’s how Intel’s pitch went back in 2010. You could pick up the chip either by itself or in a system from let’s say, Best, Buy and out of the box. You’D have two cores and two threads running at 2.8: GHz all for the attractive price of just 90 bucks which yeah that’s not actually that cheap but hey! That’S what happens when one half of your duopoly is busy seeing how many Winchester rounds it can fire into its own foot? Don’T worry about that, though, said Intel for when you get tired of your entry level performance, you can simply purchase a card with an unlock code on it for $ 50. More ours here is obviously fake, but the idea was that you would scratch the scratch card. Film install Intel’s activation software plunk in your code and Bam. You just doubled your red count from 2 to 4 and added extra cash all without ever breaking out the thermal compound or a screwdriver.
It’S pretty good thing. These things didn’t take off or how would I sell these things, LTT store.com, but why didn’t it take off? I mean on the surface. It’S actually kind of a cool idea.
It did come with some big problems we’ll touch on later, but first, the supposed benefits a major one is the theoretical lack of e-waste. Think about all the GT 1030s out there. They start their life on the Shelf. They end up in your computer until inevitably they’re too slow and ultimately end up at the recycler. If, instead, we just had fewer products within the stack physically, which could then have performance, features turned on or off based on the price you paid. We’D have a lot more one card, fits-all Solutions.
This would also alleviate the need to purchase a brand new product. When you want a performance uplift, you could just just save up a few bucks and Abracadabra. Your 4050 is now a 4060 TI. How cool would that be? I mean knowing Nvidia, that would still be an expensive upgrade, but socially anxious people around the world would Rejoice over not having to list their old card on Facebook marketplace hegle with some jackass sell. It then go pick up a new card from the local retailer, it’s kind of like a layaway, except you get to use the cheaper but worse product. While you wait to afford something better, don’t get me wrong, though guys I can. I can hear you shouting at me through the screen. If the product can physically do X, then that capability should be unlocked out of the box and to be clear, I agree with you, but there are a plethora of situations where we accept these kinds of practices.
Already look at nvidia’s, workstation gpus, for example. They are often literally the exact same Hardware as their consumer ones, but they might include features or especially, certifications that cost Nvidia extra time and money certifications that will only be used by a small subset of their customers. So those customers who care get to pay extra and there was a significant amount of backlash against me when I called out Tesla for pay Walling the heated rear seats in the model 3. I mean my argument was hey. The hardware is present in every single unit that Tesla builds, so if they can afford to deliver it to the people who don’t pay for it, then surely they can afford to just include it, but the reasons that they do that are because it streamlines production at The factory and then they just kind of massage the pricing so that the people who do want that feature subsidize those installs for the rest of the people who don’t and even though again for me, I was like really many. Tesla owners were stoked on being able to just change their mind later and activate the feature, so it is an idea that can work without taking off your customers, but that is not the sentiment that surrounded our little Pentium here.
For one thing, the value of this product was uh, pretty questionable. I mean why buy this thing at all, when you could have gotten a core I3 530, a chip that includes hyperthreading by default for just $ 25 more and making matters worse. The upgrade was actually tied to the motherboard, so if you wanted to sell the upgraded version of your CPU down the line, good luck! That also means that if your motherboard happened to die or you wanted to replace it with something with more IO, you would have to request a new activation code and rerun the upgrade cuz yeah. That’S the first thing I want to do after changing up my motherboard thanks Intel. Of course, that’s a relatively minor issue compared to what we encountered, which was the inability to perform the upgrade at all. I mean sure this is a 13-year-old CPU that is not getting security updates anymore and realistically, nobody wants to spend 50 bucks to make it ever so slightly less slow, but Intel actually discontinued this program well within the reasonable lifespan of this product. Just three short years later, what recourse do we have when companies, especially publicly traded ones, are f ickle, profit hungry entities that can alter the deal on us at a moment’s notice? Let’S look at another example: that’s from Intel, but today, earlier this year they announced that vck virtual raid on CPU, which is an Enterprise raid Solution. That’S featured on Zeon scalable processors would be discontinued, but then 4 days later, oems were advertising. V-Rock support on freshly announced products so which one is it Intel? They did quickly backpedal and say. Ah, the feature is under evaluation and uh since there’s a significant demand, we’ll continue to support it, but it’s like someone’s head was on the chopping block and the Executioner raised his axe and it was only because someone noticed and went. Oh wait hold on don’t chop off that head that it got a short stay of execution. I mean until when Intel personally, I’m also just tired of this post sales.
Nickel and diming. Did you see the that GM is dropping support for Android, auto and apple carplay? That’S right soon, they’re going to be using their own flavor of Android automotive, which is completely integrated within the vehicle. Nothing to do with your phone and it’ll be complete with subscription services and potential micro or who knows macro transactions all so they can keep their hand in your pocket after the initial sale and potentially gets even worse. The support timelines on Android automotive are certain generous compared to what we get in our phones, supposedly in the 10 to 15 year range.
But this is a car. I expect it to last longer than 15 years before it just oh yeah, sorry, I guess you’re just uh not getting software updates anymore. Ongoing Revenue models like subscriptions aren’t always just bad. I mean people used to Pirate the heck out of adobe’s Creative Suite because they wanted Photoshop and Lightroom, but they didn’t want to spend thousands of dollars on a onetime license. Well now you can get them for 10 bucks a month, which is a lot more reasonably priced for smalltime creators. The flip side of that, though, is companies like ours who need a lot of licenses for years on end.
Well, it obviously sucks for us, because we don’t necessarily need the new features that they’re developing and we would have actually preferred to just buy the software once and use it until Adobe releases, a feature that really compels us to upgrade. We made a whole video about that a little while back and the truth is, I don’t really know where I’m going with this um, I’m not sure if anything that I’m saying is going to change anything. I just want us all to be on the same page, that if we don’t do something, if we don’t make noise, if we don’t stop supporting the companies who engage in these business practices, we will end up in a dystopian future, where suddenly, your GPU underclock itself, Because you forgot to pay your monthly bill to Team Green or on a whim, your gaming console could decide. Oh uh, that online store that we had well that’s closed because it’s much more profitable to sell our backat catalog on a new console at a higher price than to just leave the old one open. Oh wait! That’S that’s already totally a thing.
Oh, hopefully I haven’t given Nvidia any ideas for the future, as for today, anywh who um, unfortunately, our Pentium g69 51 will remain a g69 51 and never reach its final form. The g69 52. Sorry little guy you’re stuck like this with no hyperthreading like this non hyper segue to our sponsor delete me.
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