That's not amoral. It's missing a market opportunity, but conflating that with morality is an interesting way of looking at it.
Businesses don't owe you a product (before you pay for it) any more than you owe them loyalty after you pay for something. They will suffer when someone else offers what you want and you leave. That's the point of markets and competition.
Maybe 'amoral' is a bit strong, but I think there is something wrong with an economic system where producers destroy wealth, rather than distribute all that is produced.
If it's wrong for the government to pay farmers to burn crops during a depression, then it's wrong for a monopoly to disable chip capabilities during a chip shortage.
I think you're framing the supply chain in a very personal (strawman) way.
The problem is just one of "efficiency". The production is not perfectly aligned with where people are willing to spend money. A purely efficient market exists only in theory / textbooks / Adam Smith's Treatise.
The chips that roll off a fab are not done. They aren't "burning crops". Perhaps they are abandoned (not completed) perhaps because they need to recoup or save resources to focus on finishing and shipping the working (full core) products. They aren't driving their trucks of finished products into the ocean.
> The problem is just one of "efficiency". The production is not perfectly aligned with where people are willing to spend money. A purely efficient market exists only in theory / textbooks / Adam Smith's Treatise.
Destroying wealth is not appropriate the market mechanism to deal with disequilibrium. Producers should either lower the price to meet the market or hold inventory if they anticipate increased future demand. However, the latter may be harder to do in the CPU business because inventory depreciates rapidly.
Intel has hitherto been minimally affected by market pressures because they held an effective monopoly on the CPU market though that is fast changing.
So, there is nothing necessarily "efficient" about what Intel is doing. They're maximising their returns through price discrimination at the expense of allocative efficiency.
> The chips that roll off a fab are not done. They aren't "burning crops". Perhaps they are abandoned (not completed) perhaps because they need to recoup or save resources to focus on finishing and shipping the working (full core) products. They aren't driving their trucks of finished products into the ocean.
That may be true in some cases, but not in others. I'm speaking directly to the case where a component is deliberately modified to reduce its capability for the specific purpose of price discrimination.
> Businesses don't owe you a product (before you pay for it) any more than you owe them loyalty after you pay for something.
This is itself a moral claim. You may choose to base your morals on capitalism, but capitalism itself doesn't force that moral choice.
> That's the point of markets and competition.
And the point of landmines is to blow people's legs off, but the existence of landmines does not morally justify blowing people up. Markets are a technology and our moral framework should determine how we employ technologies and not the other way around.
So, if I had changed to preface with "In today's western society, it is generally accepted that ... ", we'd be on a level playing field? That's reasonable.
No, the scenario is that there are massive price differences even for the same class of seats. Traditionally, the major long haul airlines sold seats weeks/months in advance at rates that were basically losing money but made almost all of their per flight profit on last minute bookings at higher rates. These were usually business flights, but not necessarily (not usually, even) business class.
Business models for budget airlines (RyanAir, etc.) are a bit different but that's not relevant here.
Because if they're capable of making plenty of good 4-cores but have more demand for 2-cores so are cutting good 4c, they should just make the 4-cores a little cheaper. But maybe they already do this.
Anyways, agreed ECC should be standard, but it requires an extra die and most people can do fine without it, so it probably won't happen. But an ECC CPU option with clearly marketed consumer full ECC RAM would be nice. DDR5 is a nice step in this direction but isn't "full" ECC.
I don't know if mobile cores factor into the same process, but if you have a lot of demand for 2 core system for cheap laptops that can't supply the power or cooling for a 4 core then having more 4 cores, even if they're cheaper doesn't help.
Fuse off the broken one? Sure, makes sense.
Fuse off a good one? That's arguably amoral and should be discouraged.
Three cores can be better than two. Let the consumer disable the runt core if they need.