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From manufacturer's perspective, to make a user-refillable detergent/rinse container is against own interests all round: - Give up on additional revenue; - Co

From manufacturer's perspective, to make a user-refillable detergent/rinse container is against own interests all round: - Give up on additional revenue; - Costly to make machine more robust/tolerant to variations in composition/pH/viscosity/etc. of 3rd-party detergent; - No good way to enforce rinse/calcite removal inside machine - without DRM, user can just pour water as "rinse" liquid, and then lie when RMAing the washer that eventually clogged up and broke.

DangitBobby 5y ago
Have you ever noticed at the pump that the nozzle for diesel doesn't fit in your car if it uses a gasoline engine? Try it some time. This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car. It would be trivial to sell large commerical-grade detergent containers with similar protections to provide an affordable, fool-proof mechanism to refill their own cannisters. The best thing about this approach is that you could still provide the subscription based model to anyone who truly values the model (instead of being simply forced to use that model due to lack of a suitable alternative), giving your customers the best of all worlds. Obviously, that doesn't quite rake in the money the way that the "razor and blades" approach to gouging your customers in the name of convenience does. Obviously anything that means you rake in less money is against the short-term interests of the sales department, but not necessarily the long-term interests of the company.
- julianlam 5y ago
  > This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car. FWIW this also protects against ignorant drivers who through no fault of their own have never filled up gas. Many countries are full service, as I believe are some US states? Beats me why filling up gas is made out to be such a difficult task...
simias 5y ago
Per TFA: >Credit where credit's due, Daan Tech didn't completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually. If that was the true concern they'd have locked that up as well. They want you to pay for convenience, not for the warranty's sake.
- shard 5y ago
  I think noucermane is correct. Your point that there wasn't any software DRM does not mean that they did not intend it as DRM. I expect that they did a cost benefit analysis of additional electronics for SW DRM vs revenue lost due to hackers like this one for this version of their product, and found the tradeoff acceptable. This does not mean that if this hack became easily available and widely used, that they would not implement SW DRM on a later revision. Who knows, maybe the current version is already ready for SW DRM, it's just that they haven't felt the need to release the DRM version of the cartridge yet.

DangitBobby 5y ago

Have you ever noticed at the pump that the nozzle for diesel doesn't fit in your car if it uses a gasoline engine? Try it some time. This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car. It would be trivial to sell large commerical-grade detergent containers with similar protections to provide an affordable, fool-proof mechanism to refill their own cannisters. The best thing about this approach is that you could still provide the subscription based model to anyone who truly values the model (instead of being simply forced to use that model due to lack of a suitable alternative), giving your customers the best of all worlds. Obviously, that doesn't quite rake in the money the way that the "razor and blades" approach to gouging your customers in the name of convenience does. Obviously anything that means you rake in less money is against the short-term interests of the sales department, but not necessarily the long-term interests of the company.

julianlam 5y ago
> This is to prevent people who aren't paying enough attention from ruining their day by putting diesel in their car. FWIW this also protects against ignorant drivers who through no fault of their own have never filled up gas. Many countries are full service, as I believe are some US states? Beats me why filling up gas is made out to be such a difficult task...

simias 5y ago

Per TFA: >Credit where credit's due, Daan Tech didn't completely lock down the machine with Bob cassettes. Once empty, you can leave it there and add detergents manually. If that was the true concern they'd have locked that up as well. They want you to pay for convenience, not for the warranty's sake.

shard 5y ago
I think noucermane is correct. Your point that there wasn't any software DRM does not mean that they did not intend it as DRM. I expect that they did a cost benefit analysis of additional electronics for SW DRM vs revenue lost due to hackers like this one for this version of their product, and found the tradeoff acceptable. This does not mean that if this hack became easily available and widely used, that they would not implement SW DRM on a later revision. Who knows, maybe the current version is already ready for SW DRM, it's just that they haven't felt the need to release the DRM version of the cartridge yet.