Surely its an entirely logical progression?
All producers of goods and services want to segment the market so as to extract maximum profit from each level of income group amongst consumers, that is, by getting everyone to pay as much as they can possibly afford for the product. You don't want your poorer customers to not be able to afford anything, nor do you want your rich customers to buy the budget product.
Almost every company does this to some degree, not just CPU makers. Airlines will deliberately choose a really tacky looking paint-job and a naff name for their budget airline spinoff just to dissuade wealthier customers from using it.
To do this for cpus you speed-bin them. But if you have too many good ones you cripple some of them so you have something to sell to poorer consumers without your rich customers buying them instead of your top end product.
This locking/unlocking thing is just the next logical development - you make the crippling reversable for a fee.
It seems to make perfect sense to me. Not at all surprising. Only question is whether it will turn out to be more bother than its worth to Intel to administer the scheme (or if it turns out to be too hackable, of course).
Its true that it seems a ridiculous waste in some ways, this very issue is one of the things socialists point to when pointing out the waste involved in capitalism. Of course the trouble is that socialism has its own horrendous problems, so it seems we just have to put up with this sort of rational-irrationality.
All producers of goods and services want to segment the market so as to extract maximum profit from each level of income group amongst consumers, that is, by getting everyone to pay as much as they can possibly afford for the product. You don't want your poorer customers to not be able to afford anything, nor do you want your rich customers to buy the budget product.
Almost every company does this to some degree, not just CPU makers. Airlines will deliberately choose a really tacky looking paint-job and a naff name for their budget airline spinoff just to dissuade wealthier customers from using it.
To do this for cpus you speed-bin them. But if you have too many good ones you cripple some of them so you have something to sell to poorer consumers without your rich customers buying them instead of your top end product.
This locking/unlocking thing is just the next logical development - you make the crippling reversable for a fee.
It seems to make perfect sense to me. Not at all surprising. Only question is whether it will turn out to be more bother than its worth to Intel to administer the scheme (or if it turns out to be too hackable, of course).
Its true that it seems a ridiculous waste in some ways, this very issue is one of the things socialists point to when pointing out the waste involved in capitalism. Of course the trouble is that socialism has its own horrendous problems, so it seems we just have to put up with this sort of rational-irrationality.
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