This kind of rent seeking is exactly why I bought a Sany excavator recently, rather than replace my old Bobcat with a newer model.
While the existence of an onboard computer bothers me, the rest of my new machine is made with relatively inexpensive and readily available parts. In contrast, US manufacturers usually use proprietary parts that cost far more than they should. Over the course of the lifetime of the machine, I expect to pay half the parts maintenance cost as compares with more US-centric machines.
Software features are not the only way that manufacturers have been extracting unjustifiable profit. Right to repair laws are the only way to rectify this situation, because I fully expect Sany to start heading in the same direction after they have further established themselves in the marketplace. In my experience, it seems that every corporation eventually turns to boiling their customers like frogs.
I'd be interested to read a detailed, balanced, analysis of this practice. We've seen this in cars, farm equipment, and all sorts of other things.
My gut instinct is to see this as a nasty practice used to extract the most from customers. However I am conscious that the costs associated with "features" is not only the hardware, but also maintenance, warranty, support, training, and possibly others. Perhaps this is reasonable?
There’s no balanced analysis, these are all really simple features where the machine is artificially crippled unless you pay extra. One of the features is the thing drives faster. Like buying a car and having to pay to unlock highway speeds. No reason at all for it besides greed.
I'd argue that if this a feature that is added on afterwards, such as newly developed features for software or some kind of hardware addon or similar that this practice is totally fine. However, I would personally not be ok with this if it's just Bobcat locking out and/or crippling features in the released unit and making people pay money to unlock them.
Basically, my argument here is that in scenario 1 Bobcat is selling some value-add improvement to their product, while in scenario 2 they're just unlocking features your machine had the software and hardware for from day one but was artificially restricted from using.
I don't know enough about these types of machines to know for sure, but some of the features in the example video like "high flow hydraulics" sound very suspiciously like the bad "arbitrary lockout" I described.
> However, I would personally not be ok with this if it's just Bobcat locking out and/or crippling features in the released unit and making people pay money to unlock them.
Yeah it’s not like it costs them anymore to manufacture ones with more features, they’re all built in and then artificially shuttered.
Is it any better to make multiple versions of something?
If you add a $500 part to a $10k item, but charge $5000 more, when you could instead make only the high tier device for probably the same price(Economies of scale on the upgrade parts plus not having to deal with the costs of multiple SKUs), almost everyone is worse off.
The only benefit to the existence of low tier items with only small differences from high tier, that i can see, is that the used ones might get sold off cheaply and be available to the lowest income people when they upgrade.
To their credit, I've used these kind of machines in a dusty environment and had to stop work to clean the radiator out. I definitely think it's a cool idea to reverse the fan to clear some debris out.
To your point, I think charging money for the ability to reverse the fan is criminal, considering everything is already built in.
I'm really curious how much they charge to unlock that feature once the machine is already purchased.
I think it's great. Obviously I would prefer everyone just drop the market segmentation and sell the fullest featured item at the lowest tier price, but since that's not how stuff works, this is the next best thing.
Without DLC they just make multiple versions with different feature sets. You often pay the highest amount for features you don't need just to get one important feature. And if you buy something, upgrading often isn't possible.
This should reduce the need to produce more physical artifacts.
The only downside I see is that less upgrading means fewer used items available.
While the existence of an onboard computer bothers me, the rest of my new machine is made with relatively inexpensive and readily available parts. In contrast, US manufacturers usually use proprietary parts that cost far more than they should. Over the course of the lifetime of the machine, I expect to pay half the parts maintenance cost as compares with more US-centric machines.
Software features are not the only way that manufacturers have been extracting unjustifiable profit. Right to repair laws are the only way to rectify this situation, because I fully expect Sany to start heading in the same direction after they have further established themselves in the marketplace. In my experience, it seems that every corporation eventually turns to boiling their customers like frogs.