“Starting at” is the Biggest Lie in Tech

[dogwitch]

7 hours ago, papajo said:

I doubt that there are even edge cases where they overperform 

 

If I had to bet I would say that there are some edge cases where they underperform but they keep this "different" copy paste with some minor details changed protocol for greed. 

honestly yes.

[papajo]

5 hours ago, SkyHound0202 said:

I won't necessarily call it a bad thing if a "starting at" price is low enough that makes a previously unobtainable tech (in terms of price and/or performance) available and accessible to more people, while also informing the customers what caveat ("catch") it may have.

 

For some (if not most) people, their biggest concern is not performance, but price. To them, solving the problem of owning a device take precedence over the actual performance of the device.

Yea and the point is that you pay more lol 

[Spindel]

Starting at price is a consequence of consumer behaviour. And unless regulated it will continue like it is.

 

People looking for a new, anything, will start doint research along the lines ”best computer for $1000”. To show up in such a search vendors (of all kind of things) then offer a stripped down model at a price they are break even or a very small profit margin (some times even at a loss).

 

Once the consumer finds a product a this price and start looking around and finds ”ahh this add-on would be nice to have” and since they allready psycologically have ”locked in” on it being a $1000 computer it ”feels” ok to splurge the extra cash for some up grades. This is what companies make money on.

 

The thing is that this thing isn’t exclusive to computers, people on internet forums just tend to lock in on it because members of forums like this just happened to know above averege about just computers.

 

This is really prevailent in a lot of industries, people have already mentioned the car industry but guess how it is if you ask a contractor build a house for you. And I could pull other examples too.

 

The problem is that this is hard to regulate, who will decide what is a ”fair” price? If you make the base model of a computer at zero profit or even at a loss shouldnt it be fair that you make up some profits at add-ons?

 

 

[OnePlane]

While it's been mentioned a bit but not really hammered on at all, there's an important real-world factor why it works the way it does: hardware root of trust. Specifically, a root of trust that cannot be hijacked like OPTAL TCG can and TPM (including 2.0 if it's on the LPC bus) can for BitLocker and LUKS2.

 

This is an extremely difficult problem to solve, which is also why it takes the likes of Google (Titan chips), Apple (SEP in A, M, T type chips) and Microsoft (Pluton) and many billions of dollars to get something that works at scale at all. To make matters worse (for the self-service part), they all rely on PKI, which essentially means that there is no way to make it both secure and customer serviceable (it's a limiting factor on how the math behind PKI works), especially when you want it to resist interdiction (for example in the shape of evil maid attacks).

 

Intel and AMD have tried and successfully failed at this multiple times, primarily because they never could get practical and scalable cryptography to work without also having a standard Secure Enclave for every design out there (and it would have to be incorporated everywhere if it were to work at scale). This in turn means that the likes of HP, Lenovo and Dell make their own versions of this, but using Embedded Controllers, the kind of which you might usually find in laptops that control keyboards, trackpads, LEDs etc. which are not suitable for this purpose at all.

 

Take HP SureStart for example, it often runs on nuvoton controllers, usually together with the Super IO chip that does things like serial, PS/2, fan control etc. It's got the security of a wet tissue to the point where if you want to break in to the hardware you just wipe the memory of the chip, or short the memory pins on the chip, and it will think any firmware loaded when you turn the computer on is fine.

 

Now, all of this might seem like high security stuff that only super duper secret organisations have to worry about, but this sort of thing has to be done on pretty much all devices considering the way they are intertwined with our lives, and theft, software exploits and abusive relations have a real effect on lives all over the world. It's almost like herd immunity, if you can make attacking millions if not billions of devices less attractive, that's a positive thing.

 

Returning to the issue at hand: Apple's storage stuff. What they are doing has little benefit in terms of performance or cost on their end (they'd simply raise the price even more), if anything, annoyed customers due to data loss is a net loss I imagine, and besides some evil scheme where a hand-wringing middle-manager wants to get a raise for making more money from upgrades I only see the security factor remaining as the thing of value.