Comment by JadeNB

> The electronic computer didn't exist 100+ years ago. You can't ignore the exponentially growth of technology that has happened and pretend that the market dynamics are the same that they were such a long time ago.

One can't argue that manufacturers won't try to get away with this stuff, because they will, but one can argue that it's parasitic rent-seeking, which it is. Certainly, there are new classes of device that can be made by leveraging new technology in previously impossible ways, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about classes of hardware that functioned perfectly well 100+ years ago (for a bike), or for other cases discussed in this thread less long ago but before the internet age, that are being artificially hobbled to allow additional revenue extraction.