291–300 of 555 posts
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Seems fine. Always go for Sir Mix-A-Lot nostalgia drips whenever I can get them. Why do you think it is strange?
I thought simp stood for "someone idolizing mediocre pu__y", a slur for guys commiting and caring too much about lower tier women. Doesn't really seem to fit a discussion about people agreeing with a corporation.
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In some ways, they do have costs - the on-going extra wear / load on everything in the vehicle, which presumably is covered by the warranty if you pay for this. That's not free, nor zero.
Sure, but that should be baked into the one-time fee. The warranty period is known. The rate of failure is know. Etc. And by your argument, once the warranty is done, the go-fast software should be free (or nearly so).
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That's absolutely false. You are painting the picture as if the car maker will sell you a high performance model (with all the necessary parts for performance) at a lower cost. No they will sell you that model with all their profit margin and then charge you extra monthly for the performance.
this is untrue in a competitive market
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> You might not like it, but it's actually a better deal than before. So if Apple would ask you for a nice $10/m to use their famous iPhone camera features you would be okay with that, because otherwise you would be fine with 8MP photos or pay additional $10 * 12m * 3y = $360 upfront? Of course, no changes in hardware at all. And the price of iPhone is the same, not $360 cheaper.
Try looking at it from the other side: you're getting a product at a lower base price and can upgrade to a higher model at a later point in time. It's more like buying, and paying for, an iPhone 14 and then having the possibility to upgrade the camera to the iPhone 14 Pro version afterwards. There's ton of precedent for products that are artificially locked to a lower version. The difference between a NVidia GeForce…
Do you really think what you pay less?
If we talk about software unlocked hardware this is a moot point, the manufacturer still needs to spend money to produce and install the thing in the product, so you are paying for the hardware anyway. BMW heated seats subscription is a good example. And again you are taking the manufacturer words for it, despite they would never show how exactly they manage to drive the price down.[0]
> It's more like buying, and paying for, an iPhone 14 and then having the possibility to upgrade the camera to the iPhone 14 Pro version afterwards.
Which implies the change to the hardware. We are now discussing when there is no change in the HW, only some SW lock on that hardware.
> The difference between a NVidia GeForce and the much more expensive Quadro used to be just a bunch of ID resistors. Processor speeds are locked in a similar way.
Yes, and that forced NVidia to actually implement something useful for CAD (or degrade CAD performance on consumer products, alas). CPUs doesn't fit here, because again, nobody gives you an option to "unlock" more cores or speeds (but Intel tried and IBM did this for ages for their mainframes and POWER systems, but these are not a consumer products).
> Same thing with software. There's many cases where you purchase a piece of software and can later buy a feature or "Pro" unlock. You already downloaded all the bits & bytes to you device. Are you not OK with that?
There is no additional costs, waste and carbon footprint to produce a different software. You, as a vendor, spent money one time on R&D/development, now you support it for a tiny fraction of the cost. You don't spend money and resources on never be used part of software.
For a heated seats you spend the resources to actually manufacture and install it, even if it would be never used.
> I'm a bit surprised that the people on Hackernews of all places has such a reaction to this. Subscription models and SaaS have been practically invented here.
Sorry, but leasing and subsidizing were invented centuries before Internet and HN. And what you mix software with hardware and protecting the poor capitalistic companies are quite telling.
[0] Hint: those who pay for the feature pay not only for themselves, but for the others, who did not pay, too. Even the manufacturer never actually lowered the cost of the product.
PS automotive manufacturers are well known for charging absurd prices for things what costs peanuts. How can you believe them what 'they are reducing the base price' is beyond me.
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Yeah, the market doesn't decide when there are only a few major players. The "market" didn't decide to exclude headphone jacks and SD cards on mobile phones. Apple went that direction and other companies followed suit. Customers had no real choice in those matters.
> Customers had no real choice in those matters. Yes they did, they could vote with their wallet. And they voted for ear buds. There's still plenty of phones with jacks out there by the way.
I want to see this legislated out of existence. To be clear, because every time this comes up some dickfucks come in here and start making excuses about how it's better to rent in some cases and that this is just amortizing the whole payment, and there are some people who want this: No. This is a fucking terrible deal even just using mercedes numbers. It takes a whopping 30 months (2.5 years) for the monthly payment…
Regardless... based the info in the article, you can bypass this particular monthly cost, and pay upfront. Nothing unusual about charging for options... other than this is an option already built into the car, that you pay extra to enable.
From the article: Buyers can bypass the monthly subscription completely however, and opt for an annual subscription payment or simply pay a one-time flat fee. For instance, a buyer could take an all-wheel-drive Mercedes-Benz EQE 350 sedan from its standard 288 horsepower to 348 permanently for $1,950."
This type of option add is similar to Tesla, who charges $2k (no monthly option) for "performance boost" on their model 3 and Y, and $15k for their FSD (don't get me started on this feature), which has a $200/mo option.
I grew up around cars, and car builders. I've worked on quite a few very famous cars. My father built custom cars and ran "Barris Kustom" for years. I learned how to build custom cars, including race cars. I also spent years designing and building cars (vans) that quadriplegics could drive and lots of those were for guys who crashed, or got ran into by cars/motorcycle, at high speeds. Personally, I think if anyone cr…
It's easy to demonize "irresponsible" drivers, but the fact is that everyday Joes hurt and kill people with their cars all the time. My good friend's son was killed by a hit-and-run and even though the driver was arrested and went to trial, a jury let him off of all major charges. We imagine that the people who kill others with their cars are always driving like asshats, but this guy was just driving like other regular people do: he was "speeding," but only 35 in a 25, and he had "been drinking" but only a beer.
We have to recognize that regular people doing regular driving are very deadly behind the wheel. Because otherwise, society embarks on this wild goose chase of trying to stop "the bad guys" rather than making data-driven decisions on how to reduce traffic fatalities.
So no, I don't agree with you. I think your line of thinking mirrors the likes of "satanic panic." It's an emotional argument used to point blame at a specific "bad" group, rather looking at the data and realizing that everyone bears responsibility. There are plenty of dads in Camrys out there running red lights, looking at their phones, and driving too damn fast.
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Even with the best programmers and safety measures in the world NASA still had to update the space shuttle. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature...
I expect a car manufacturer to do extensive real world testing in all possible conditions- heat, traffic, etc. before selling it. A spaceship needs to work perfectly the first time, the actual use is also the only real world test of the prototype. It’s also a much harder problem… cars are much simpler and well understood “mature” tech where we have over a century of real world experience on what type of failures are…
A mechanical engineer can lose their license if their work results in deaths.
A software engineer can't lose their license because they don't have one.
Perhaps a professional license may improve software development and thus better software in consumer products like cars where bad software design can result in deaths.
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Sure, but that doesn't mean a subscription is the consumer-friendly way to manage those costs. If a buyer wants 500hp instead of 300hp, there should be a 1-time fee assessed at the time that feature is unlocked (traditionally at purchase because it required a whole different engine; now via app/cloud/magic because it's all software). The only reason a subscription model should be foisted on the consumer is when the v…
In some ways, they do have costs - the on-going extra wear / load on everything in the vehicle, which presumably is covered by the warranty if you pay for this. That's not free, nor zero.
>You can make your Mercedes EV go faster for $60 a month Umm, no. Allow me to correct this misprint. Unless you pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do.