Comment by jmrm

4 hours ago

Maybe I'm reading between lines, but isn't it ridiculous to talk about license prices when the affected machines are $900 pro laptops?

I mean, I understand that in a cheap single board computer, but this is nonsense.

7 comments

jmrm

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iso1631  4 hours ago

Someone buying one doesn't care if it's $898.54 or $898.84.

However the price point is set to $899 regardless

Then if someone can save just 10 cents each on 10 million units, that's $1m in "savings". Despite making it a $5 worse experience, they will do this, because the majority of buyers won't be swayed by this type of choice.

"Value engineering", it's how good things get bad, and eventually new products enter the market which have consistent quality. It's one of the many problems of scale. No small company with a CEO who cares about his product is going to devalue it to save 0.1% of the cost. Once you get large though, nobody personally cares about the product, only the financials, because the financials if they do lag the product will do so after years.

  • miki123211  2 hours ago

    Also keep in mind that, for a $999 laptop, Dell and HP aren't getting $999 in profit.

    Most of the price of that laptop goes into components that other companies make. There's very little that's actually made by Dell (or even specifically for Dell).

    I wouldn't be surprised if they make as much on kickbacks for mcAfee subscriptions as they make on the laptops themselves.

  • Humperdunkel  2 hours ago

    Who is to say that all 'features' on a SoC won't have the licensed variants coming out of the woodwork. If Intel and AMD didn't think they were worth paying for themselves then they shouldn't have put them in silicon to pass on a few times to the consumer with a bundled copy, possibly buying it in the store anyway, maybe not even using windows or multimedia, etc.

    The best move would have been killing it in the crib, the next best is making no one certain the format will work with all their demographics.