> Earlier today there was a thread about e-bike battery prices (tl'dr they're ridiculous expensive) Small rant about those since I missed the earlier thread to

> Earlier today there was a thread about e-bike battery prices (tl'dr they're ridiculous expensive) Small rant about those since I missed the earlier thread today: It's even worse. They are stupidly expensive yes, but even if you source them yourself they will cost you another 100 dollar/euro/pound to "enable". It's DRM for batteries and serves no real purpose except price gouging. If you rip out the 18650 cells (which are in almost all detachable models which is the majority) and replace them you have to re-enable the device. If the battery somehow drains "completely" and you are able to get it out of safe mode, which is quite possible since the battery isn't actually dead, you have to go to a dealer and pay the surcharge as well. There are plenty of good second hand models available which are useless due to the battery DRM since the price of the battery will be about 3-5 times the bike. > So how do you guarantee something third-party will do what it claims to? If you use bad RAM chips in a Macbook, the consumer is going to blame Apple not whoever supplied cheap, shoddy parts (for the record, I hate soldered in RAM). Just like when your car goes to a garage and doesn't work afterwards: the person who 'fixed' it. I can't get it in my head why people think this will be different for other things than cars.