I think this is not about his music per se, but more about him being a producer (and marketing guy) as you need specifically (de-)constructed music tracks for this feature to work. The CES demo featured other artists as well.
The way I understand this works, is that there are specifically constructed tracks that can be mixed dynamically depending on sensor input. Imagine hearing a low-key backing track while idling, and as you start to accelerate, more and tracks get mixed in - maybe lyrics start to kick in with highway speeds and so on.
This would be similar to how adaptive soundtracks work in some games.
It is no accident that this feature debuts from Mercedes-AMG. The main selling point of these cars has been emotion, stemming from their roaring V8 engine. In a future where this breaks away due to emotionless EV drivetrains, how do you appeal to drivers' emotions and make it more "fun"?
> Does anyone have a reasonable explanation for why this is done?
It‘s cheaper. That’s all there is to it.
Automotive design is heavily influenced by bill—of-materials cost, there are committees upon committees deliberating and ultimately deciding on saving cents per unit.
Authorities care. Yes it's your property and you can do whatever you want with it. The question is whether you're allowed to operate the vehicle on public roads afterwards. Cars go through thorough certification processes (homologation) and that includes software.
Can you prove that your change does not negatively affect a certification-relevant function?
Add one variable to your example: imagine that having variations increases cost such as increased development cost (you need to develop each component, test and certify possible combinations, incur increased logistical complexity, etc..)
This additional cost however is less than just adding the higher trim to every configuration, e.g. the additional room, so it doesn't make economic sense to do so.
But let's assume you now get the ability to sell and unlock a higher trim after the initial purchase. Let's say that 20% of your customers would be willing to purchase such an unlock at a later point in time, resulting in increased revenue.
If that revenue plus the reduced lifecycle expense exceeds the cost of adding the higher trim as baseline you would have a business case, which wouldn't be the case if you just add the room for everybody (where you'd have to raise the base price and lose buyers on the lower end).
I understand all of that. If it isn't economical for BMW to produce cars with and without heated seats as two separate models then I guess all of their cars should have heated seats as standard. Having them but locking them behind a software unlock is profiteering, even if technically making a model without the seats would have been more expensive.
i love s-expressions, but they have closing tags, so to me they are precisely not what the parent example shows. i prefer writing html with closing tags because then i can use any xml parser and my editor can jump from opening to closing tag and back.
Well, sorta. XML style syntax already has open and closing marks for the tags. They just additionally have marks for the end of non-attribute children. s-expressions not having that is still a win.
yes, s-expressions are a win (that's why i love them) but i don't see the xml structure that way. for me the tags themselves are very elaborate opening and closing markers. that's simply how i perceive it. if a closing tag is missing when there should be one, the structure looks broken to me.
the example s-expression matches that structure and i perceive it as the same because the first element in any list has a special meaning (in lisp itself it is the function name, while the rest are arguments)
to replicate the html5 structure in the top comment without closing tags as s-expressions i would come up with something different:
(table
(tr)
(td) one
(td) two
(td) three
(tr)
(td) another table
(td) with more stuff)
I think I see your point, but it feels weird to see this form, to me.
To your point, I can see the opening tag as ( and the closing as ), but then that would lead to something more like:
(table
(tr
(td one
(td two
(td three
(tr
(td ...
Which really just highlights how odd it is to see the opening tags without the closing ones. Which probably goes a long way to explaining why I don't like it. :D
Probably more natural to have something like:
(html
table
tr
td "one"
td "two"
tr
td "...")
In this way, you could optionally have the closing tags of /td and such. Still looks very weird to me.
> To be fair when the iPhone 1 came out nobody really said they need it in their lives vs a Nokia or BB
That's not how I remember it, that original keynote was magical. The benefits of the iPhone over current devices (both phones and MP3 players) were crystal-clear, the only damper being high price together with tying it to an AT&T contract.
While impressive technologically, this on the other hand gives rather creepy vibes - the whole presentation looks like a Black Mirror episode.
Agreed, I think they may struggle to overcome the whole “Black Mirror” effect. Feedback from my brother and parents (veritable Apple-philes) this morning amounted to “sounds kinda cool but I’d probably think someone was a grade-A weirdo if I showed up at home and saw they had a AR/VR headset / I’d take that $3500 and go on a nice weekend trip, play some golf, have a nice dinner, etc.”
While HN may be more “the target market”, I’m still fairly certain we’re a vanishingly small contingent of consumers, and apparently we’re not even completely onboard with AR/VR ourselves.
>The benefits of the iPhone over current devices (both phones and MP3 players) were crystal-clear,
I don't remember that at all. Windows phones could do essentially everything the first iPhone could do, and in 3G. What they couldn't do was do it seamlessly and quickly like an iPhone and that made all the difference.
If I remember correctly, weren't most of the original Windows Mobile devices similar to PDAs in that they required a stylus to use them? I joined Microsoft around that time before the iPhone, working in the codec team, so we had several test devices. I just remember how clunky they felt to use. Kind of laggy and the UI was a bit ugly. Windows Phone came out to try to fix that and we got the whole Metro UI thing.
Even as a college student, watching them use that capacitive touch screen vs the clunky resistive screens was magical. I'd owned an iPod for a couple of years and had already seen the smoothness of the clicky wheel thing. Every single person I knew was looking forward to this phone
I asked people that are close to my age at the time about this headset and the reaction is pretty visceral. May be my crowd is more "tech focused" but strapping a headset just elicits a completely negative reaction, especially with those creepy eyes. "Black Mirror" and "RPO" were frequent references, explicitly as negatives
What benefits exactly? Touch screens were not well regarded pre-iPhone, I remember a lot of people not wanting to ditch their keypads. And there was no app store at first so it was just a phone with music which many could already do.
Take a look at the profit margin (and market valuation) of automotive companies and compare them to tech companies. Now also make a comparison of average developer/engineer salaries at both.
Is it not OK for the automotive folks to get to the same level as their FAANG brethren?
I have zero fucks to give for the profits of corporations, and the idea that any of this money will make it into the hands of engineers is ludicrous. If you want higher salaries start a union, otherwise the people at the top (executives + shareholders) will just use any extra profits to pay themselves more. There's no incentive for them to do anything else.
And as a software developer whose income is propped up by adjacency to FAANG: we're paid an inordinate amount compared to our contribution to society. The vast majority of software development makes rich people richer at the expense of everyone else. I've managed to avoid the most egregiously harmful companies my entire career, but the idea that FAANG pay or any pay is meritocratic is just wrong. I'm paid well because my work pays my clients well, not because of anyone involved "deserves" our high salaries.
It's fine for automotive companies to maximize their profit margin. If they have smaller margins than google, that's probably because google is nearly a monopoly, and there's fierce competition in the automotive space.
A key difference here is a car is a product that we buy and own. It doesn't cost Mercedes an ongoing cost every month to support these hardware features they change a monthly fee to unlock, and so the monthly fee doesn't provide additional value. To the extent it does, it's because the manufacturers are artifically limiting their product. Compare this to, say, and Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. With that, you're getting access to cloud services that costs Adobe to keep running, it also gets you access to new features and security updates. Whether or not you like Adobe's business model, this provides a justification for the subscription model that is simply absent in the automotive space.
Going back to the competition point, even if you just look at the monthly fee as cost shifting, it lets the manufacturers advertise a price that's lower than what the consumer is going to pay.
> You’re completely ignoring the customer (people like you) in favor of the (already mega rich) corporations. What a mindset.
No, I want the company I work for to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation. Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?
>to have similar profit margins as FAANG and thus increase my compensation
Why would they do this? They have enough labor working for the money they give already. If their profits doubled, why on earth would their labor costs go up too instead of them just keeping the money?
High prices require both a buyer to be able to pay and the buyer to have to pay (due to lack of sufficient sellers). High profit margins provide the first condition.
Car companies already and always have made money from continued support of their products. Car maintenance and repairs and spare parts and the work already cost money. So, not even remotely the same.
You can complain about any company that wants to continuously make money for nothing in return. Just look at ink printers. Rent seeking sure is attractive, yes.
Nobody owes you anything. There are MANY jobs that deserve such high salaries far more, just try anything related to caring for sick and/or old people. It's just that "deserve" has got nothing to do with anything!
Also, look at all the other countries and companies. That kind of complaint to me sounds more like a multi-millionaire looking at the even grander mansion next door and claiming they deserve at least that much too and that the world is so unfair to them. You picked the very, very few where some people make even more. It's hardly all the tens of thousands of employees of the FAANGs that all make a few hundred thousand, just a small fraction.
Cars also are not nearly as innovative. They are much farther along their product cycle. Oh sure, they did a lot of work, but the car still uses about as much fuel as it always did, and gets you barely any faster than it always did from A to B. But all the entertainment you get now! And all the electronics! Yeah okay. But the end product still doesn't deliver that much more value compared to a 1970s car. Some of them were actually more comfortable, easier to use, and easier to look out of. I do understand that there's been a lot of work on safety too since then, and that deaths went down. But I didn't claim there was zero innovation, did I? Only that you compared yourself with the latest and greatest new tech, such as AI, and in that elevated niche you again picked their highest paid people, and that seriously is your chosen comparison?
Oh and when we are looking at all the innovation in cars, may I point to the discussions - right here on HN too - about software, UIs, and cheating German car makers (I'm German too by the way), and how German car makers are big losers in China, and quality issues in German cars (https://newsingermany.com/german-car-manufacturers-fail-us-s...)?
If you want a higher salary, find a job and a company that will give you one. Don't advocate for your company to charge their customers for something that costs them $0 to provide. I guarantee that things like that will turn the world into a place none of us want to live in over the long run.
Also, if you think that your employer is going to increase your compensation due to anti-features like this... well, hate to break it to you, but they won't. They'll pocket that money and/or distribute it to shareholders. Your salary is, roughly, the smallest number that they can offer you to get you to do the job, and has very little to do with their profit margins.
> Do you also attack those employees because their companies are charging extra for pure software unlocks or subscriptions?
I would attack any company that charges customers extra for nothing.
What does that have to do with anything? If you sell a product and then try to put a subscription on hardware that is already in the customer's hands, that's scummy.
If you put a subscription on something where you have to continuously maintain server capacity and build and distribute new features, then that... seems fair?
Not gonna claim that there's no rent-seeking going on in the software industry, certainly. And they're scummy.
But once I'm sold a car, every bit of hardware in that car should work without artificial limits (well, modulo safety and legal concerns). Sure, it's fair for a car maker to charge for map updates for the navigation, real-time traffic information, remote functionality, etc. -- stuff that requires on-going cost to the manufacturer. But charging a subscription to send a few bits of information to the software in the car to give the motor more power? Robbery.
I think it might be if automobiles weren’t such a necessary item in many parts of the world. Or, for many people in North America you require a car to engage in society.
Is charging for a feature unlock in a piece of software also rent-seeking?
The feature has already been developed, I have already downloaded the software to my device. It would cost the developer nothing, deny them the use of nothing, require none of their resources for me to use the feature and yet they charge for it.
This would make more sense as a comparison if adding two or more modes of operation hadn't taken more work than just having one.
I think the "it's rent-seeking" position would be weaker for toggling entire features on and off—the specific example of unlocking better acceleration was them adding a worse mode just so they could charge a subscription for the better one.
