tuaw.com — Manufacturers often swap out various components for similar or near-identical parts during a production run. Occasionally manufacturers, like Apple, will use a part which has a slightly higher build quality or performance than its counterpart in other machines and simply throttle down the performance of the superior part through firmware
Oct 7, 2006 View in Crawl 4
theantakristOct 8, 2006
Hasn't Intel been doing this sort of thing (off and on) for years? Shipping the same processor with certain features simply disabled for less money? I wish I had a good example to give you off the top of my head.
cazabamOct 8, 2006
One example is early 486 SX chips that were identical to the DX versions, but had the FPU disabled and ran at a lower clock speed. Most of these simply failed the DX testing but passed the SX testing, but there is some speculation that fully functional DX chips were crippled to meet the low end SX market.
lynxproOct 8, 2006
Speaking of Apple and downthrottling through firmware, I am reminded of my parents eMac. The eMac they have actually has a USB 2.0 capable chip inside of it, but Apple won't release an update through firmware or OS X to enable it. Its perpetually downthrottled to USB 1.1 speed because at the time, Apple favored its own Firewire standard. And I guess in Apple's mind, it would be best to force my parents into buying a new Mac with USB 2.0 standard than it would be to issue them a patch for their existing mode so they could use printers, scanners and iPods of the past 2 years at full speed.Personally, if I were Apple, I would go for the customer support angle. If you provide excellent customer support and not pull these shenanigans, chances are, you will retain your customer base. Pulling these stunts always runs the risk of alienating the user base and giving them an idea to shop around the next time.
starmantaOct 8, 2006
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it's not just OEMs that do this - manufacturers of parts have been known to do the same thing. Video card makers have been notorious for it in the past, as have Intel as noted above.They do it because it's often cheaper than having 2 seperate production lines. The sell the upper-end product at an inflated price so that people who want "the best" will line the manufacturers' pockets; customers looking for a better value who can't or won't pay the higher price just buy the same product at a lower profit margin, just crippled.It's the same story as student & senior discounts - those who can afford it will pay more; those who can't, won't.
chillywilly5280Oct 8, 2006
And then there was the iBook. It was capable of spanning across an external monitor, but Apple crippled the firmware (there is a 3rd party firmware hack available to correct this). Not to mention that the 14" had the same screen resolution as the 12".Of course these were not well publicized by Apple.
Closed AccountOct 8, 2006
Is that possible? I didn't think it was possible to think less of sony after their continual stuff ups and dreadful decisions over the past 2 years.Of course, this one isn't really Sony's fault. Apple probably asked them for a drive with particular specs (that weren't industry standard for the time- SHOCK HORROR), and sony provided it.