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Good luck. Car manufacturers are dying to become service providers and shift buying revenue into recurring revenue. On top of that, a car that's mostly like a

Good luck. Car manufacturers are dying to become service providers and shift buying revenue into recurring revenue. On top of that, a car that's mostly like a smartphone in terms of how you activate and think about its features is incredibly attractive for the carmakers. They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs (with the difference that in this case it makes a lot of sense from a user perspective too). You can't provide services or set prices this way if the car isn't "smart". If you wanna know more, check what Qualcomm's doing in automotive with the Snapdragon digital chassis concept.

oblio 4y ago
> They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs. This is not an Apple thing... For ages CPUs and I think GPUs, too, are basically the same thing between many different models. Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.
- Otek 4y ago
  Wait… which manufacturers do you have in mind? Because I don’t think this apply to Intel or AMD or NVidia?
  - SigmundA 4y ago
    https://spacehop.com/what-is-binning/ https://spacehop.com/what-is-binning/
    - gruturo 4y ago
      This is an enormous stretch. Binning mostly allows manufacturers to avoid having to throw away ICs with certain defects, selling them instead as a different SKU (fewer cores, lower clock, worse power consumption etc). I think Intel abused this at least once, back in the days when they had ridiculously good yields across the board, but let's not generalize in absence of evidence.
      - kadoban 4y ago
        Binning is a lot of it, but what happens when they have more of the good bin than they want, for the market proportions they're targetting? They'd be fools not to either just sell the good as the bad, when nobody can tell (like when acheivable frequency is the difference), or more likely just make it bad then sell it.
- llarsson 4y ago
  In fairness, it also used to be the case that simply some of the cores were broken on a "dual core" processor. Because it was actually manufactured to be a quad core processor, but testing revealed that only 2 or 3 actually worked, so then it got sold as a dual core. :D But the thing now with "pay to unlock more cores" is... interesting. They'd probably love to turn that into a subscription, too.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    Eh? That’s still the case. The cheaper M1 Pros and so on will generally have one or more defective disabled cores. So will many-cored Intel chips.
  - whatusername 4y ago
    The "Golden Screwdriver" was supposedly a term from the heyday of the IBM Mainframe. (And one of the first links I found - a tesla discussion on HN 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 )
- lloeki 4y ago
  > Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc. That's called binning, the unit goes through some testing and components that don't pass get shunted away (hardware or firmware) because they're known to behave incorrectly. Better that than throwing it into a trash. Blow the fuse/hack the firmware and you can unlock these because the hardware is there, but it's likely that it doesn't operate entirely correctly (especially under duress), even though it may appear to work at first blush.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee: https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918
  - buran77 4y ago
    Sometimes they will sell a perfectly functioning chip as a cut down version because they need to cater for that market segment. This market segmentation is nothing new and can be done in many ways, like permanently shaping the product before sale (HW) or using flexible licensing (SW). The problem with the "permanent" route is that when you sell such a cut down chip it usually stays cut down forever. So the only way to use the cut down features is to buy a chip that is fully unlocked. This is not only a waste of resources but also a waste of money to upgrade the entire chip. A solid mechanism to enable/disable these features on demand would make the situation a lot better. You could pay just for the upgrade instead of the whole chip, either permanently or only when you need it and pay per use. But the reality is that in practice this mechanism will probably not work to the advantage of the end user. It will focus entirely on the company's bottom line and open up new avenues for abuse. If your hardware is linked to a license and to the manufacturer forever, you'll never own it. Unless the legal framework enforces the rights of the consumer under threat of drastic fines for the manufacturer, we're just forgoing real ownership.
  - rapind 4y ago
    I think maybe this is how it started out, but it would be really flakey to match with consumer demand. If everyone is buying the cheaper (binned) option you may not have the volume (or demand from the pricey option to just bin more).
lloeki 4y ago
> set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs Huh? it's not like you pay more for hardware that's always been present. You get exactly the same CPU from entry level M1 to fully specc'd M1. It's not like you could turn a M1 into a M1 Pro or a M1 Max by flicking a switch or blowing a fuse, because the hardware is just not there. Compare that with BMW who builds and sells cars with heater seats that you software unlock, but the hardware is already there, which is ridiculous. At that point all cars could have it enabled and it would barely make a dent in the price as the uniform assembly line that produces economies of scale is already in place. This is what Mazda is doing, basically you have two, maybe three trim levels, sometimes only one, fully specc'd, and that's it.
- rb666 4y ago
  It makes perfect sense for BMW, if indeed it's more expensive to make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized).
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Thanks to JIT and JIS, just-in-sequence the 200 non-heated once actually are cheaper. They cannot be sold as Seats as a service, nor can they be re-sold with heated seats after their leasing period ended. So all the SaaS model has to do is geberating enough profit to off set the higher cost of heated seats installed but not paid for. After that the re-sale value, for BMW, is higher and this whole stunt is a net positive for BMW.
  - lloeki 4y ago
    > make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized) At that point you can spread the cost over 1000 instead of keep selling 800 at a higher price to cover for the 200. I also guess Pareto goes the other way (200 heated + 800 non-heated), which only makes it worse.
  - pegasus 4y ago
    The fact that it doesn't make sense to the buyers should factor into whether it makese sense for the manufacturer. I would feel uncomfortable knowing I'm unnecessarily driving around a subsystem that's ultimately going to end up in the landfill unused. Unless I bite the bullet and agree to a recurring fee. Sure, many won't know or care, but then you're actively selecting for a less discerning clientele.
boneitis 4y ago
Not only that, but perhaps they'll also be able to go in the direction of selling bare models so cheaply at a huge loss and make multipliers in profits from subjecting users to adtech, if they so chose.
- justinclift 4y ago
  We've seen how that goes with printers. Not good for end users (regardless of the printer being cheaper up front), and trashing the reputation of the company who pull that crap. Look at HP. They used to be the go-to "reputable, always reliable" brand for printers. Heck, if you can still find the old Laserjet 4xxx series printers they're still good. But HP in the last decade or so are on most people's shit list.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    HP went to shit because they recognized how short-sighted and price-sensitive consumers are and changed how they sell things to account for it. When people are shopping for an appliance, price is often the largest deciding factor. HP prices their inkjet printers low to lock in that sale. But in order to still earn a profit, they try to make money from the ink, so they lock down the firmware to block 3rd party ink. People hate how expensive ink is, so they created Instant Ink, a subscription model. If you do a decent amount of printing, especially color printing, you'll actually save money. But it's widely misunderstood. You're not subscribing to ink, you're subscribing to printed pages. And so there are people writing nasty articles about HP because they'll pay $3 for their first month of Instant Ink, HP will send them an ink cartridge, they'll cancel their subscription, then have a Surprised Pikachu face when their printer then refuses to print with the Instant Ink cartridge, because for some reason they thought they owned the ink cartridge that they paid $3 for. And of course, someone will take a picture of their printer refusing to print with the Instant Ink cartridge that they're no longer subscribed to and post it to /r/AssholeDesign.
    - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
      And yet, none of this nonsense exists in the EU. You can take your empty cartridges to a lot of local shops and get them refilled. And yet, HP still sell printers in the EU.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I think so as well. Everyone wants to get on the subscription bandwagon and charge you from birth to death of the product. They also prefer lock in rather than standardization. Unfortunately although as engineers we think of this stuff, managers always tell us to STFU. However, eventually consumers will complain and the government will start regulating and making right to repair and other laws with enough rumbling from the public.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > charge you from birth to death, fullstop
tengwar2 4y ago
Can you give any example of an unlockable feature on an M1 Mac? Perhaps the confusion comes from the different mix of performance and efficiency cores on different Macs, but those are physically different. So for instance my M1 MBA has four performance and four efficiency cores, a compromise intended to give very long battery life.

oblio 4y ago

> They dream to be able to set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs. This is not an Apple thing... For ages CPUs and I think GPUs, too, are basically the same thing between many different models. Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc.

Otek 4y ago
Wait… which manufacturers do you have in mind? Because I don’t think this apply to Intel or AMD or NVidia?
- SigmundA 4y ago
  https://spacehop.com/what-is-binning/ https://spacehop.com/what-is-binning/
  - gruturo 4y ago
    This is an enormous stretch. Binning mostly allows manufacturers to avoid having to throw away ICs with certain defects, selling them instead as a different SKU (fewer cores, lower clock, worse power consumption etc). I think Intel abused this at least once, back in the days when they had ridiculously good yields across the board, but let's not generalize in absence of evidence.
    - kadoban 4y ago
      Binning is a lot of it, but what happens when they have more of the good bin than they want, for the market proportions they're targetting? They'd be fools not to either just sell the good as the bad, when nobody can tell (like when acheivable frequency is the difference), or more likely just make it bad then sell it.
llarsson 4y ago
In fairness, it also used to be the case that simply some of the cores were broken on a "dual core" processor. Because it was actually manufactured to be a quad core processor, but testing revealed that only 2 or 3 actually worked, so then it got sold as a dual core. :D But the thing now with "pay to unlock more cores" is... interesting. They'd probably love to turn that into a subscription, too.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  Eh? That’s still the case. The cheaper M1 Pros and so on will generally have one or more defective disabled cores. So will many-cored Intel chips.
- whatusername 4y ago
  The "Golden Screwdriver" was supposedly a term from the heyday of the IBM Mainframe. (And one of the first links I found - a tesla discussion on HN 9 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5472663 )
lloeki 4y ago
> Then more expensive versions just get more cores unlocked, higher frequency allowed, etc. That's called binning, the unit goes through some testing and components that don't pass get shunted away (hardware or firmware) because they're known to behave incorrectly. Better that than throwing it into a trash. Blow the fuse/hack the firmware and you can unlock these because the hardware is there, but it's likely that it doesn't operate entirely correctly (especially under duress), even though it may appear to work at first blush.
- pabs3 4y ago
  Intel are working on CPUs where you enable features after paying a license fee: https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://lwn.net/Articles/884876/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30394918
- buran77 4y ago
  Sometimes they will sell a perfectly functioning chip as a cut down version because they need to cater for that market segment. This market segmentation is nothing new and can be done in many ways, like permanently shaping the product before sale (HW) or using flexible licensing (SW). The problem with the "permanent" route is that when you sell such a cut down chip it usually stays cut down forever. So the only way to use the cut down features is to buy a chip that is fully unlocked. This is not only a waste of resources but also a waste of money to upgrade the entire chip. A solid mechanism to enable/disable these features on demand would make the situation a lot better. You could pay just for the upgrade instead of the whole chip, either permanently or only when you need it and pay per use. But the reality is that in practice this mechanism will probably not work to the advantage of the end user. It will focus entirely on the company's bottom line and open up new avenues for abuse. If your hardware is linked to a license and to the manufacturer forever, you'll never own it. Unless the legal framework enforces the rights of the consumer under threat of drastic fines for the manufacturer, we're just forgoing real ownership.
- rapind 4y ago
  I think maybe this is how it started out, but it would be really flakey to match with consumer demand. If everyone is buying the cheaper (binned) option you may not have the volume (or demand from the pricey option to just bin more).

lloeki 4y ago

> set car prices based on unlock-able features, basically what Apple has achieved with M1 on Macs Huh? it's not like you pay more for hardware that's always been present. You get exactly the same CPU from entry level M1 to fully specc'd M1. It's not like you could turn a M1 into a M1 Pro or a M1 Max by flicking a switch or blowing a fuse, because the hardware is just not there. Compare that with BMW who builds and sells cars with heater seats that you software unlock, but the hardware is already there, which is ridiculous. At that point all cars could have it enabled and it would barely make a dent in the price as the uniform assembly line that produces economies of scale is already in place. This is what Mazda is doing, basically you have two, maybe three trim levels, sometimes only one, fully specc'd, and that's it.

rb666 4y ago
It makes perfect sense for BMW, if indeed it's more expensive to make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized).
- hef19898 4y ago
  Thanks to JIT and JIS, just-in-sequence the 200 non-heated once actually are cheaper. They cannot be sold as Seats as a service, nor can they be re-sold with heated seats after their leasing period ended. So all the SaaS model has to do is geberating enough profit to off set the higher cost of heated seats installed but not paid for. After that the re-sale value, for BMW, is higher and this whole stunt is a net positive for BMW.
- lloeki 4y ago
  > make 800 cars with heated seats plus 200 without, over 1000 with heated seats (standardized) At that point you can spread the cost over 1000 instead of keep selling 800 at a higher price to cover for the 200. I also guess Pareto goes the other way (200 heated + 800 non-heated), which only makes it worse.
- pegasus 4y ago
  The fact that it doesn't make sense to the buyers should factor into whether it makese sense for the manufacturer. I would feel uncomfortable knowing I'm unnecessarily driving around a subsystem that's ultimately going to end up in the landfill unused. Unless I bite the bullet and agree to a recurring fee. Sure, many won't know or care, but then you're actively selecting for a less discerning clientele.

boneitis 4y ago

Not only that, but perhaps they'll also be able to go in the direction of selling bare models so cheaply at a huge loss and make multipliers in profits from subjecting users to adtech, if they so chose.

justinclift 4y ago
We've seen how that goes with printers. Not good for end users (regardless of the printer being cheaper up front), and trashing the reputation of the company who pull that crap. Look at HP. They used to be the go-to "reputable, always reliable" brand for printers. Heck, if you can still find the old Laserjet 4xxx series printers they're still good. But HP in the last decade or so are on most people's shit list.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  HP went to shit because they recognized how short-sighted and price-sensitive consumers are and changed how they sell things to account for it. When people are shopping for an appliance, price is often the largest deciding factor. HP prices their inkjet printers low to lock in that sale. But in order to still earn a profit, they try to make money from the ink, so they lock down the firmware to block 3rd party ink. People hate how expensive ink is, so they created Instant Ink, a subscription model. If you do a decent amount of printing, especially color printing, you'll actually save money. But it's widely misunderstood. You're not subscribing to ink, you're subscribing to printed pages. And so there are people writing nasty articles about HP because they'll pay $3 for their first month of Instant Ink, HP will send them an ink cartridge, they'll cancel their subscription, then have a Surprised Pikachu face when their printer then refuses to print with the Instant Ink cartridge, because for some reason they thought they owned the ink cartridge that they paid $3 for. And of course, someone will take a picture of their printer refusing to print with the Instant Ink cartridge that they're no longer subscribed to and post it to /r/AssholeDesign.
  - disgruntledphd2 4y ago
    And yet, none of this nonsense exists in the EU. You can take your empty cartridges to a lot of local shops and get them refilled. And yet, HP still sell printers in the EU.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I think so as well. Everyone wants to get on the subscription bandwagon and charge you from birth to death of the product. They also prefer lock in rather than standardization. Unfortunately although as engineers we think of this stuff, managers always tell us to STFU. However, eventually consumers will complain and the government will start regulating and making right to repair and other laws with enough rumbling from the public.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> charge you from birth to death, fullstop

tengwar2 4y ago

Can you give any example of an unlockable feature on an M1 Mac? Perhaps the confusion comes from the different mix of performance and efficiency cores on different Macs, but those are physically different. So for instance my M1 MBA has four performance and four efficiency cores, a compromise intended to give very long battery life.