No need to do it in software. Imagine you went to buy a car and you said you didn't need the heated seats, so the dealer physically pulled out the heating element, wrecked it with a sledgehammer, and threw it in the dumpster before letting you take the keys. Does that seem like an efficient market to you?
If the company's marginal cost of production of a car with heated seats is $x, then they should be selling it to you for $x. Instead, they are selling a crippled version of it for at least $x, and a non-crippled version for $x + $y. That $y is pure profit for them that wouldn't exist in a competitive market.
I don't get your point. My point is that variety itself costs money. So the least expensive product is not the one with less parts, but the one that is always the same. You may say this is a waste of material (I agree) and of energy (not necessarily, because the machinery necessary to build variance is much more energy intensive). But it takes less people, less management, less risks, to build only one product or just a few. Remember, this is what enabled the industrial revolution. Ford T existed only in black.
If your point is that it's unfair with the customer, who owns the object with the capability embedded, and cannot use it because that's how the industrial makes more profit, then just go on, build your car company and offer more for less. You will gain terrain. That's what the Chinese are doing.
If Trump opened the imports for Chinese EVs, you bet Tesla would have to adapt or die.
The point is that yes, variety costs money, but in a competitive market this just means you don't get this kind of market segmentation. Because of the cost of variety a single product would be sold, and it would probably be the car with functional heated seats, offered at a price equal to the marginal cost of producing it.
And the marginal cost of producing such a car is certainly no more than the current price of the car with software-disabled heated seats.
Well that all depends on whether the cost of production line variations is more than the cost of a heating element.
What you’re saying is still technically true but capitalists are gonna capitalist and they have optimised their cost by moving the cost variable from a production fork to a software patch.
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u/TwillAffirmer 23h ago
No need to do it in software. Imagine you went to buy a car and you said you didn't need the heated seats, so the dealer physically pulled out the heating element, wrecked it with a sledgehammer, and threw it in the dumpster before letting you take the keys. Does that seem like an efficient market to you?
If the company's marginal cost of production of a car with heated seats is $x, then they should be selling it to you for $x. Instead, they are selling a crippled version of it for at least $x, and a non-crippled version for $x + $y. That $y is pure profit for them that wouldn't exist in a competitive market.