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You could imagine it, but that's not what actually happens! There are cases where a higher spec product is sold as a lower spec in the CPU world, but there are
by reitzensteinm 7y ago
You could imagine it, but that's not what actually happens!
There are cases where a higher spec product is sold as a lower spec in the CPU world, but there are no lasting situations where every single lower spec product could have been sold as higher.
For the analogy to fit, that would have to be the situation. It's not.
I'm not arguing that Tesla is doing anything wrong, just that you can't point to CPUs to justify it.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoIf you or anyone else reading this doubts what I'm saying, the statistics are plain as day on Silicon Lottery. Most SKUs can be overclocked, but there is no case where a higher binning isn't superior. https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics https://siliconlottery.com/pages/statistics
- alkonaut 7y agoI'm not saying it happens a lot. Or that it ever happened in a sustainable way for CPU's. I'm saying it's a valid business strategy that can happen and does happen for many many products. The CPU was just an analogy I thought would be working for this particular site. It may be that the best actually occurring example is tooth brushes or bicycles, I don't know.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoParent was pointing to a real world analogous situation which we don't get upset about, and accusing OP of hypocrisy. But it was a flawed argument, because CPU binning is not at all like Tesla software limiting battery packs. It's totally valid to be upset about one but not the other (personally I'm fine with both). You coming up with any sort of theoretical scenario to continue the analogy doesn't counter my argument or boost theirs. We don't need help understanding what Tesla is doing.
- alkonaut 7y agoI wasn't talking about CPU binning, that's the practice of producing items with variying quality and selling the higher quality parts for a premium. I'm talking about making 1000 widgets at the same production cost and then making half of them worse (disabling a feature) and selling them cheaper - because it is cheaper to produce 1000 of the same widget than making 500 simple widgets and 500 more complex widgets and sell the complex widget at a premium, and in order to not let the cheap widget cannibalize the sales of the better one, it needs to be made worse after production. This has happened very rarely in the case of CPU's but it's not unheard of, and it's not the same as binning. It's a very valid and very real business strategy for other areas, where it is more common than for CPU's. Edit: Perhaps a better example for CPU's is making a single CPU die in manufacturing but producing a more expensive enterprise/pro part and a cheaper consumer part, where the difference is disabling some feature (an instruction set extension for example) in microcode.
- reitzensteinm 7y agoI get the strong sense you're not reading what I have written. I don't disagree with what you're saying, but I don't understand why you're saying it to me.