Wasteful and unethical: why we hate crippled products

I somehow missed hearing about this, before now...

http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/18/intel-wants-to-charge-50-...

https://retailupgrades.intel.com/FAQ.aspx

I just heard about this, Un-F'in-believable. Buy a PC, then pay extra for a little card (paper, not PCB) with a special PIN code that "magically" makes your CPU faster!

Are they still pulling this stunt?

What's the fuss?

This approach is old as the hills. IBM was doing it 50 years ago on mainframes.

Here's the funny thing:

It may actually benefit consumers...and here's why:

It might not be economically feasible to offer a lower-powered version of the chip itself.

The software lock allows intel to offer vendors a lower price without cannibalizing the full-powered chip AND still provide a low-cost, low-effort path to upgrade.

AND -- Hey guys! Sounds like a hacking opportunity to me.

I don't know if Intel still does this, but this was Intel trying to bring an enterprise feature to consumers. It doesn't really work of course.

Consumers buy hardware lock, stock and barrel. They don't buy performance levels as needed.

If I purchase a thing, I expect that thing to go as fast as it can, for the price that I paid. Artificially cripling the speed on the chip with a modifiable "software lock" is not selling me the top of performance, for the price set. It is charging me an arbitrary amount for an arbitrarily set performance limit. The question for me then becomes how arbitrary the pricing and limitations are.

Is it you get 75% of the performance for 75% of the listprice or is it your get 75% of the performance for 85% of the list price and get to spend another 30% of the list price to unlock the last 25% of perfomance? It opens up too much avenues to fleece the customer and that makes consumers wary. We simply don't have Fortune 500 budgets to blow on these shenanigans.

My guess is that Intel abandonned it. I've not heard of "pirated" processors and pin numbers and that would probably have materialised if Intel was pursuing this in large quantities.

I don't see how this would work in practice. Mainframe and consumer markets are totally different; with consumer items, you purchase them, and they're yours. If Intel tried this, some hackers would figure out how to break it, post it on the net, and not many people would end up purchasing the upgrades, but instead tons of people would buy the lower-end version and use the hacked upgrade code to upgrade it themselves, and there's absolutely nothing Intel could do about it (because it's the consumers' property).

This practice only works in mainframes because when you get an IBM mainframe, you don't actually buy it, you lease it. It still belongs to IBM in a way, and they can dictate what you're allowed to do with it (and penalize you if you break the agreement, which stipulates that you don't hack the unlock codes). Besides, with such a small market, and hardware that isn't accessible to (or interesting to) hackers, there's not many people who would care about spending their spare time trying to hack these things, unlike a consumer-level CPU that you can buy at Newegg for $100. With these Intel CPUs, there'd be legions of Russians working to hack them as soon as they become commonplace.