This is why open, unencumbered standards are needed (e.g. AV1). This strikes me as HP and Dell just trying to be extra sneaky about it as they don't publish th

This is why open, unencumbered standards are needed (e.g. AV1). This strikes me as HP and Dell just trying to be extra sneaky about it as they don't publish their reasons behind this (saving a bit of cash and pushing back against licensing the codec) and just leave it to the customer to discover that their new machine is hobbled after they've bought it. If they had any respect for their customers, they would mention it in their advertising and allow customers the choice of whether they want the hardware encoding enabled or not - presumably that would entail having two different models of the same hardware which I bet would be more expensive than just paying the HEVC licensing in the first place.