As someone that just lost everything I own to fire I think this is a bad idea. The fire is a problem, certainly, but a secondary problem that killed all my paperwork was the fire service putting out the fire. That high pressure water is getting into literally everything, even things that seem like they are totally and fully water resistant.
I understand the technical part: they are unlocking the extra power electronically.
What I don't understand is what is different between the headline saying that you can pay $60 for your car to go faster (true) and parent poster saying "pay an extra $60 monthly your already-expensive vehicle will not give the full outstanding performance that your particular hardware was engineered to do"?
Those two statements seem to say the same thing? What am I missing?
Perhaps you are more comfortable with this approach than others, and are part of the tartget market Mercedes may be fishing for, which is just fine.
You straightforwardly don't seem deceived at all here either way.
OTOH I would estimate the majority of the target market is expected to be much more responsive to their marketing stance than my also-realistic interpretation.
BTW, congratulations on your coronation today, glad you took the time to comment with all the festivities surrounding the event.
It is too vague and suggestive towards some sort of active enhancements being performed during your subscription, whilst in reality all they do is flip some "is_castrated" boolean value in a database.
Paying doesn't make the machine perform better than it already could; Not paying makes the on-board software limit the machine to perform worse than what it's actually capable of.
The perspective. It makes customers think that the software update is tuning the engine or doing something special to get non-standard performance, which is a lie. Mercedes (and I know many other companies) will intentionally nerf their cars and LIMIT their performance, and in this case Mercedes is flat out saying they will limit their customers' performance unless they pay $$.
So it's really about who is saying what. Mercedes is trying to make customers think in their head that this is a value-added bonus that's not there by default, but it IS there by default, and it's locked behind a paywall. Rewriting the statement in OP's voice helps the customer recognize the scam that is taking place. In my opinion, at least.
Binning is completely different, an i5 may be able to perform as fast an i7 if you overclock it, but it depends on your luck on how your i5 was, and it will almost certainly be unstable. Binning is the equivalent of making really fancy chocolates, and selling the slightly worse-looking chocolates for worse.
TBF - this depends how well they streamlined their manufacturing process. As yield goes up; getting a perfectly stable 3ghz chip binned as a 2ghz before a flash lock becomes increasingly common. It became common to hunt for specific chips for this reason back when I actually had time to pay attention to it.
That is true, I'm sure there have chips that have been purposely down-binned because they needed more i5s instead of i7s (probably not right now, but back when Intel was dominating and slacking).
But even that unique case is very different from literally blocking features in a chip for extra money per month (you couldn't pay Intel to up-bin an i5 to an i7, except for the 1 or 2 times they actually tried that)
Binning of electronic components goes back about a century to their initial commoditization.
So it's really matured in the same direction only further.
The most effective & consistent mass-production processes do not always produce components as identical as would be ideal, and not all equal in ultimate performance capability, especially in the most demanding applications.
This can be expected to be more problematic when production is first initiated, whether there are bugs to be worked out, or optimizations have yet to be accomplished.
With resistors the percent deviation from the target ohm value is a simple tolerance rating.
Not everyone needs resistors within 1 percent of their labeled value, but those that do can not settle for anything less.
When initial production results in a maximum deviation of 20%, during QC/QA each component (or batch) can be measured and binned into the 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% tolerance ratings.
And most importantly priced accordingly.
Interestingly, if the binning is most comprehensive, then the consumer of the 20% parts never gets a component closer than 10% of the nominal value.
Vacuum tubes are not quite so simple as resistors, but it was well-established that the military would gladly overpay for the very top-performing tubes meeting the tightest tolerances.
In earlier decades military tubes were often physically enhanced and produced separately from the lesser consumer versions.
By the 1950's things were very mature in this respect.
And it can be a lot less costly to manufacture everything the same.
So binning it was, to select the closest conformers, which were then labeled with military part numbers destined for a supply chain where price is not as significant as it is for consumers.
The remaining tubes then were marked with everyday consumer part numbers.
This really became prominent for dual-use items like radio tubes.
Once the manufacturing process was fully optimized and every tube met the most stringent specifications, the cost to make each tube can decline dramatically.
At the same time, freshly made tubes were no longer individually labeled, they then all went into one bin.
So the most overspending customers could be supplied the same parts at higher prices than everyone else from that point without anyone knowing the difference.
Unless the customer really checked the performance independently in great detail.
Depending on the customer ordering the parts, they would be labeled accordingly right before shipping, sometimes with a little more QA and/or written guarantee but not any additional costly manufacturing QC which might have been necessary at the begining of production. They could then better meet fluctuating demand between premium payers versus consumer usage from the same manufacturing line and a single ultimate bin. And with a different part number to inhibit direct substitution even after identical performance could be recognized in some cases.
So this was well underway before solid-state semiconductors became a commodity.
As the processes improve it ended up with price-sensitive consumers who figured out when the lesser-priced CPU's had become as high-performance as the premium-labeled "alternative".
With the complexity of modern CPU's it was basically trivial to circumvent this consumer effort with the last-minute fusing & labeling approach seen today.
We've come such a long way it's not like the 1950's at all.
Lots fewer consumers expect to get their money's worth, and some vendors are only looking for these type customers any more.
Eventually all they make is i7's and if you don't want to pay the price, they further customize the component to be especially crummy, just for you.
Not quite the same, but those are also being worked around by everyone and their mother. In many cases with dirty and damaging hack solutions, which only have to be that way due to the fact that no relevant technical documentation is published by the manufacturer.
And then there are plenty of people who will happily download and load a custom bios onto their $2k GPU that they found on some or other foreign-language forum without even the slightest clue as to how it works or what the possible consequences might be.
This will now also start being a thing with non-technical people and their cars.
You might never get a chance to wipe it. I had a cop whip out a loaded gun and point it at my head to take my phone out of my hand. I didn't even have a lock code as there was nothing to hide, but if I had been a criminal I would not have had time or opportunity to do anything without my brains leaving my skull.
> People are confusing bulky headsets with the general concept of VR.
True, and it's still entirely reasonable to criticize Facebook on this count, because they have absolutely no plans beyond VR headsets. Any technology to take VR to the next level isn't even a glimmer on the horizon; we are still decades too early.
That's not really true at all. Quest Pro is technically an AR headset with full color pass through. It's extremely limited to be sure, but it's not like meta is ignoring AR.
I've been a web designer since 1993. It was nice in 1993 because you didn't even have a background color. The color of your page was the default color of the window on your OS. Usually grey.
Then we went through 25 years of dark ages where there were plenty of really great ideas for layout which were completely lost to horrible and competing and half-assed executions.
We are now finally in the golden age of layout where I can make something that looks great on all displays if I have the time and talent to do it. Sadly that is in short supply.
I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design. Once the browser competition was completely and utterly crushed and everyone was forced to sign on to The One True Layout Engine the benevolent dictators at Google set things on the right path.
There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.
> I think we have Chrome to thank for modern web design.
I think it's less the dominance of Chrome itself and more the demise of Internet Explorer. The problem was that it didn't get updated like normal software, it was somehow tied to the OS, so old outdated versions lingered around for far too long, limiting what technologies web developers could use.
> There are still edges cases (which JPEG replacement will win?!), but they are now blessedly few and far between.
Last I heard was that the Benevolent Dictators at Google decided that AVIF shall win.
>The problem was that it didn't get updated like normal software, it was somehow tied to the OS, so old outdated versions lingered around for far too long, limiting what technologies web developers could use.
Now that mantle is taken up by Safari, especially on mobile.
They're a bit more separated on macOS but still not really separate. On iOS, it's very much tied to the iOS/iPad OS version.
There's perfectly functional iPads out there that are stuck on an iOS version and are thus e-waste as more and more Internet becomes inaccessible to them.
If you discover law enforcement or prosecutors committing crimes, who do you report it to?
This is a serious question.
You can only report it to their peers, and I promise you, from personal experience, that you will get absolutely nowhere except, like Snowden, have an entire world of hurt come down on you instead.
I can not recommend whistleblowing to anyone. If you see the government going wrong, ignore it. Walk away. You only have one life. How many years of it do you want to write off?
What we actually need is better and better procedures for anonymously reporting misconduct to a body that will actually hold people accountable. Many investigative bodies end up being staffed by those somewhat related or associated with the persons under investigation and therefore guaranteed to produce no meaningful results.
I don't know how to construct a body that actually works effectively, but I would love links to any good studies or articles on this.
I've been thinking about some kind of "regular human inspector" where companies have to pay a government inspector to just ask common sense questions and be a place to bring issues that can't be dealt with internally.
Since they change regularily, bribing becomes unrealistic, we don't need high salaries or expertise. It's a very coarse idea still.
If it's local, report it to the state, if it's the state report it to the feds, if it's the feds your only real option is to do it and run to another country, or keep your mouth shut and just find a new job. This process has repeated itself many times in the news if you research it.
In theory that is how it should work. I promise in practice that you will get absolutely nowhere. Most prosecutors seem local, either municipal or county, but in actuality are State workers, and the State is generally completely disinterested in investigating its own staff.
The feds are even less interested in investigating matters that should be handled by the State.
I say this from practical experience of trying to move the State Attorney General's office and the FBI to investigate and getting absolutely nowhere at all.
My next plan is to simply take a local friendly reporter with a video camera and perform a sit-in at the prosecutors office until they promise to do something or they have me arrested for trespass.
