this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I'm amazed that it's legal for a car company to sell you something, and then after you own it, remotely disable xyz aspects of the functionality unless you pay them more. How can that be legal? I own the car, it's MINE now, how can I not use every single thing that's in it?
It's a bit inevitable. There's a market for a range of features - i.e. some people don't want to pay extra for extra features. But it's simpler (i.e. cheaper) to produce all models with the same hardware. So, to fill the market, some features are simply disabled in software.
Imagine buying a house but you didn't want to pay extra so one room is padlocked, or several windows boarded up, or a pool walled off.
If it brought down the price of the house, people who didn't need those things would absolutely take the deal, and that's the point.
do you think it'd be right for people to break into the room
Were the terms of the purchase in the contract that the purchasers weren't allowed in the room? If so, then no. That would be breach of contract and wrong.
To be clear. I'm not a fan of paid upgrades for things that are already physically included but inaccessible without payment. But I get it because it still brings the price of the thing down to those who don't care about having the extra thing.
The point is being locked out of something you own is immoral. People being will to take the immoral deal doesn't make it okay.
So, when Tesla installed a rear seat heater module that's unusable by the car owner because they didn't pay for it, is the heater module actually legally owned by the car owner (even though it doesn't work), or is it still owned by Tesla? If the module is legally owned by the car owner, does Tesla in this case only sell ability to turn on the heater module?
Oftentimes it's done because it's cheaper, though oftentimes it's actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.
Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It's a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.
Companies have owned your hardware for decades. Apart from a few open hardware systems like x86, everything comes software or mechanically locked to the price you pay.