In 2010, Intel launched something truly extraordinary.
The first user upgradeable processor, the Pentium G6951.
And thank goodness they did
because now just a short 13 years later,
I'm finding it a little sluggish for my daily computing
and I can't wait to unlock hyper-threading
and that sweet, sweet megabyte of extra cache.
Only, I'm confused here, I've got Windows 7,
I've got my upgrade card,
I just can't seem to find the Intel upgrade program.
Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop.
Hi, Intel, what do you mean you don't offer upgrade service
for my CPU anymore?
This is a more common situation than you might think
where you buy into a service or a hardware product
that has add-ons available only to discover
that one day when you go to use them,
they vanished without so much as a, oh, sorry about that.
Why does this happen?
Who is responsible?
And is there any justification for this business practice?
The only way to know is apparently to scan this barcode
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There's no question that the G6951 was bad,
but that doesn't mean that all hardware
as a service products are equally bad.
Extended warranties, for example, can be costly,
but if they're fairly priced and you read the fine print,
they can be an effective way to ensure
that your expensive TV or laptop will be serving you
for years to come, even if something goes wrong.
Then there's service contracts,
which are kind of like extended warranties on steroids.
That NetApp storage appliance that we picked up recently
comes with ongoing maintenance costs,
which sucks for your wallet,
but ensures that your business
won't experience unnecessary downtime.
Another example of hardware with ongoing costs
that makes sense is anything
that requires periodic calibration,
like a home theater projector or a scientific instrument.
Our colorimeters for testing displays, for example,
need to be checked and certified against a known good,
or you wouldn't be able to trust our results.
In all of these cases though, the after purchase costs
at least add potential value to our hardware.
Let's shift gears back to the Pentium G Nice 51
for a bit though.
Here's how Intel's pitch went back in 2010.
You could pick up the chip either by itself
or in a system from let's say Best Buy,
and out of the box, you'd have two cores
and two threads running at 2.8 gigahertz,
all for the attractive price of just 90 bucks,
which yeah, that's not actually that cheap,
but hey, that's what happens when one half of your duopoly
is busy seeing how many Winchester rounds
it can fire into its own foot.
Don't worry about that though, said Intel,
for when you get tired of your entry-level performance,
you can simply purchase a card
with an unlock code on it for 50 more dollars.
Ours here is obviously fake,
but the idea was that you would scratch
the scratch card film, install Intel's activation software,
plunk in your code and bam,
you just doubled your thread count from two to four
and added extra cash, all without ever breaking out
the thermal compound or a screwdriver.
That's a pretty good thing these things didn't take off
or how would I sell these things?
Lttstore.com.
But why didn't it take off?
I mean, on the surface, it's actually kind of a cool idea.
It did come with some big problems we'll touch on later,
but first the supposed benefits.
A major one is the theoretical lack of e-waste.
Think about all the GT 1030s out there.
They start their life on the shelf,
they end up in your computer until inevitably
they're too slow and ultimately end up at the recycler.
If instead we just had fewer products
within the stack physically,
which could then have performance features turned on
or off based on the price you paid,
we'd have a lot more one card fits all solutions.
This would also alleviate the need
to purchase a brand new product
when you want a performance uplift.
You could just save up a few bucks and abracadabra,
your 4050 is now up 4060 TI.
How cool would that be?
I mean, knowing Nvidia,
that would still be an expensive upgrade,
but socially anxious people around the world
would rejoice over not having to lift their old card
on Facebook marketplace, haggle with some jackass,
sell it, then go pick up a new card from the local retailer.
It's kind of like a layaway,
except you get to use the cheaper but worse product
while you wait to afford something better.
Don't get me wrong though guys,
I can hear you shouting at me through the screen.
If the product can physically do X,
then that capability should be unlocked out of the box.
And to be clear, I agree with you,
but there are a plethora of situations
where we accept these kinds of practices already.
Look at Nvidia's workstation GPUs for example,
they are often literally the exact same hardware
as their consumer ones,
but they might include features or especially certifications
that cost Nvidia extra time and money.
Certifications that will only be used
by a small subset of their customers.
So those customers who care get to pay extra.
And there was a significant amount of backlash against me
when I called out Tesla for paywalling
the heated rear seats in the model three.
I mean, my argument was,
hey, the hardware is present
in every single unit that Tesla builds.
So if they can afford to deliver it
to the people who don't pay for it,
then surely they can afford to just include it.
But the reasons that they do that
are because it streamlines production at the factory.
And then they just kind of massage the pricing
so that the people who do want that feature
subsidize those installs
for the rest of the people who don't.
And even though, again, for me, I was like, really?
Many Tesla owners were stoked
on being able to just change their mind later
and activate the feature.
So it is an idea that can work
without ticking off your customers,
but that is not the sentiment
that surrounded our little Pentium here.
For one thing, the value of this product
was pretty questionable.
I mean, why buy this thing at all
when you could have gotten a Core i3 530,
a chip that includes hyper-threading by default,
for just $25 more?
And making matters worse,
the upgrade was actually tied to the motherboard.
So if you wanted to sell the upgraded version
of your CPU down the line, good luck.
That also means that if your motherboard happened to die
or you wanted to replace it with something with more IO,
you would have to request a new activation code
and rerun the upgrade,
because, yeah, that's the first thing I wanna do
after changing out my motherboard.
Thanks, Intel.
Of course, that's a relatively minor issue
compared to what we encountered,
which was the inability to perform the upgrade at all.
I mean, sure, this is a 13-year-old CPU
that is not getting security updates anymore,
and realistically, nobody wants to spend 50 bucks
to make it ever so slightly less slow.
But Intel actually discontinued this program
well within the reasonable lifespan of this product,
just three short years later.
What recourse do we have when companies,
especially publicly traded ones,
are fickle, profit-hungry entities
that can alter the deal on us at a moment's notice?
Let's look at another example that's from Intel, but today.
Earlier this year, they announced
that VRock virtual RAID-on-CPU,
which is an enterprise RAID solution
that's featured on Xeon scalable processors,
would be discontinued.
But then, four days later,
OEMs were advertising VRock support
on freshly announced products.
So which one is it, Intel?
They did quickly backpedal and say,
ah, the feature is under evaluation,
and since there's a significant demand,
we'll continue to support it.
But it's like someone's head was on the chopping block,
and the executioner raised his ax,
and it was only because someone noticed and went,
oh, wait, hold on, don't chop off that head,
that it got a short stay of execution.
I mean, until when, Intel?
Personally, I'm also just tired
of this post-sales nickel and diming.
Did you see that GM is dropping support
for Android Auto and Apple CarPlay?
That's right.
Soon, they're gonna be using their own flavor
of Android Automotive,
which is completely integrated within the vehicle,
nothing to do with your phone,
and it'll be complete with subscription services
and potential micro, or who knows, macro transactions,
all so they can keep their hand in your pocket
after the initial sale, and potentially gets even worse.
The support timelines on Android Automotive
are certainly generous
compared to what we get in our phones,
supposedly in the 10 to 15-year range,
but this is a car!
I expect it to last longer than 15 years
before it just, oh, yeah, sorry,
I guess you're just not getting software updates anymore.
Ongoing revenue models, like subscriptions,
aren't always just bad.
I mean, people used to pirate the heck
out of Adobe's Creative Suite
because they wanted Photoshop and Lightroom,
but they didn't wanna spend thousands of dollars
on a one-time license.
Well, now you can get them for 10 bucks a month,
which is a lot more reasonably priced
for small-time creators.
The flip side of that, though, is companies like ours,
who need a lot of licenses for years on end,
well, it obviously sucks for us
because we don't necessarily need the new features
that they're developing,
and we would have actually preferred
to just buy the software once and use it
until Adobe releases a feature
that really compels us to upgrade.
We made a whole video about that a little while back,
and the truth is I don't really know
where I'm going with this.
I'm not sure if anything that I'm saying
is gonna change anything.
I just want us all to be on the same page,
that if we don't do something, if we don't make noise,
if we don't stop supporting the companies
who engage in these business practices,
we will end up in a dystopian future
where suddenly your GPU underclocks itself
because you forgot to pay your monthly bill to Team Green,
or on a whim, your gaming console could decide,
oh, that online store that we had, well, that's closed
because it's much more profitable to sell our back catalog
on a new console at a higher price
than to just leave the old one open.
Oh, wait, that's already totally a thing.
Oh, hopefully I haven't given NVIDIA any ideas for the future.
As for today, anywho, unfortunately,
our Pentium G6951 will remain a G6951
and never reach its final form, the G6952.
Sorry, little guy, you're stuck like this
with no hyper-threading,
like this non-hyper segue to our sponsor.
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If you enjoyed this video,
maybe check out the one where I talked about Microsoft's
monopolistic practices and the Edge browser.