in 2010 Intel launched something truly
extraordinary the first user upgradable
processor the Pentium g69 51 and thank
goodness they did because now just a short 13 years later I'm finding it a
little sluggish for my daily Computing and I can't wait to unlock
hyperthreading and that sweet sweet
megabyte of extra cash only little
confused here I've got Windows 7 then I've got my upgrade card I just can't
seem to find the Intel upgrade program
uh hi Intel what do you mean you don't offer
upgrade service for my CPU anymore this
is a more common situation than you might think where you buy into a service
or a hardware product that has add-ons
available only to discover that one day when you go to use them they vanished
without so much as a oh sorry about that
why does this happen who is responsible and is there any justification for this
business practice the only way to know
is apparently to scan this barcode to
our sponsor MSI MSI's back to school sale is on now looking for a new laptop
for next semester they got those what about a desktop PC yep got those too
components for an upgrade yeah they do got them check out MSI's back to school
sale below there's no question that the G6 951 was bad but that doesn't mean
that all Hardware as a service products are equally bad extended warranties for
example can be costly but if they're fairly priced and you read the fine
print they can be an effective way to ensure that your expensive TV or laptop
will be serving you for years to come even if something goes wrong then
there's service contracts which are kind of like extended warranties on steroids
that net apppp storage appliance that we picked up recently ly comes with ongoing
maintenance costs which sucks for your wallet but ensures that your business
won't experience unnecessary downtime another example of Hardware with ongoing
costs that make sense is anything that requires periodic calibration like a
home theater projector or a scientific instrument our colorimeters for testing
displays for example need to be checked
and certified against a known good or you wouldn't be able to trust our
results in all all of these cases though the after purchase costs at least add
potential value to our Hardware let's
shift gears back to the Pentium G nice 51 for a bit though here's how Intel's
pitch went back in 2010 you could pick up the chip either by itself or in a
system from let's say Best Buy and out of the box you'd have two cores and two
threads running at 2.8 GHz all for the attractive price of just 90 bucks which
yeah that's not actually that cheap but hey that's what happens when one half of
your duopoly is busy seeing how many Winchester rounds it can fire into its
own foot don't worry about that though said Intel for when you get tired of
your entry level performance you can simply purchase a card with an unlock
code on it for $50 more ours here is
obviously fake but the idea was that you would scratch the scratch card film
install Intel's activation software plunk in your code and Bam you just
doubled your red count from 2 to 4 and
added extra cash all without ever breaking out the thermal compound or a
screwdriver it's pretty good thing these things didn't take off or how would I
sell these things LTT Store.com but why didn't it take off I
mean on the surface it's actually kind of a cool idea it did come with some big
problems we'll touch on later but first the supposed benefits a major one is the
theoretical lack of e-waste think about all the GT 1030s out there they start
their life on the Shelf they end up in your computer until inevitably they're
too slow and ultimately end up at the recycler If instead we just had fewer
products within the stack physically which could then have performance
features turned on or off based on the price you paid we'd have a lot more one
card fits-all Solutions this would also alleviate the need to purchase a brand
new product when you want a performance uplift you could just just save up a few
bucks and Abracadabra your 4050 is now a
4060 TI how cool would that be I mean
knowing NVIDIA that would still be an expensive upgrade but socially anxious
people around the world would Rejoice over not having to list their old card
on Facebook marketplace hegle with some jackass sell it then go pick up a new
card from the local retailer it's kind of like a layaway except you get to use
the cheaper but worse product while you wait to afford something better don't
get me wrong though guys I can I can hear you shouting at me through the screen if the product can physically do
X then that capability should be unlocked out of the box and to be clear
I agree with you but there are a plethora of situations where we accept
these kinds of practices already look at NVIDIA's workstation gpus for example
they are often literally the exact same
Hardware as their consumer ones but they
might include features or especially certifications
that cost NVIDIA extra time and money
certifications that will only be used by a small subset of their customers so
those customers who care get to pay extra and there was a significant amount
of backlash against me when I called out Tesla for pay Walling the heated rear
seats in the model 3 I mean my argument
was hey the hardware is present in every
single unit that Tesla builds so if they can afford to deliver it to the people
who don't pay for it then surely they can afford to just include it but the
reasons that they do that are because it streamlines production at the factory
and then they just kind of massage the pricing so that the people who do want
that feature subsidize those installs for the rest of the people who don't and
even though again for me I was like really many Tesla owners were stoked on
being able to just change their mind later and activate the feature
so it is an idea that can work without
taking off your customers but that is
not the sentiment that surrounded our little Pentium here for one thing the
value of this product was uh pretty
questionable I mean why buy this thing at all when you could have gotten a core
I3 530 a chip that includes hyperthreading by default for just $25
more and making matters worse the upgrade was actually tied to the
motherboard so if you wanted to sell the
upgraded version of your CPU down the
line good luck that also means that if
your motherboard happened to die or you wanted to replace it with something with
more IO you would have to request a new activation code and rerun the upgrade
cuz yeah that's the first thing I want to do after changing up my motherboard
thanks Intel of course that's a relatively minor issue compared to what
we encountered which was the inability to perform the upgrade at all I mean
sure this is a 13-year-old CPU that is not getting security updates anymore and
realistically nobody wants to spend 50 bucks to make it ever so slightly less
slow but Intel actually discontinued this program well within the reasonable
lifespan of this product just three short years later what recourse do we
have when companies especially publicly traded ones are f ickle profit hungry
entities that can alter the deal on us at a moment's notice let's look at
another example that's from Intel but
today earlier this year they announced
that vck virtual raid on CPU which is an
Enterprise raid Solution that's featured on Zeon scalable processors would be
discontinued but then 4 days later oems
were advertising v-rock support on freshly announced products so which one
is it Intel they did quickly backpedal
and say ah the feature is under evaluation and uh since there's a
significant demand we'll continue to support it but it's like someone's head
was on the chopping block and the Executioner raised his axe and it was
only because someone noticed and went oh wait hold on don't chop off that head
that it got a short stay of execution I mean until when Intel personally I'm
also just tired of this post sales nickel and diming did you see the that
GM is dropping support for Android auto and apple carplay that's right soon
they're going to be using their own flavor of Android automotive which is
completely integrated within the vehicle nothing to do with your phone and it'll
be complete with subscription services and potential micro or who knows macro
transactions all so they can keep their hand in your pocket after the initial
sale and potentially gets even worse the
support timelines on Android automotive are certain generous compared to what we
get in our phones supposedly in the 10 to 15 year range but this is a car I
expect it to last longer than 15 years before it just oh yeah sorry I guess
you're just uh not getting software updates anymore ongoing Revenue models
like subscriptions aren't always just
bad I mean people used to Pirate the heck out of adobe's Creative Suite
because they wanted Photoshop and Lightroom but they didn't want to spend
thousands of dollars on a onetime license well now you can get them for 10
bucks a month which is a lot more reasonably priced for smalltime
creators the flip side of that though is companies like ours who need a lot of
licenses for years on end well it
obviously sucks for us because we don't necessarily need the new features that
they're developing and we would have actually preferred to just buy the
software once and use it until Adobe releases a feature that really compels
us to upgrade we made a whole video about that a little while back and the
truth is I don't really know where I'm going with this um I'm not sure if
anything that I'm saying is going to change anything I just want us all to be
on the same page that if we don't do something if we don't make noise if we
don't stop supporting the companies who engage in these business practices we
will end up in a dystopian future where
suddenly your GPU underclock itself
because you forgot to pay your monthly bill to Team Green or on a whim your
gaming console could decide oh uh that online store that we had well that's
closed because it's much more profitable to sell our backat catalog on a new
console at a higher price than to just leave the old one open oh wait that's
that's already totally a thing oh hopefully I haven't given NVIDIA any
ideas for the future as for today anywh who um
unfortunately our Pentium g69 51 will
remain a g69 51 and never reach its
final form the g69
52 sorry little guy you're stuck like
this with no hyperthreading like this
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