this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Tesla (formerly Tesla Motors) is a tech company based in Palo Alto, California with a mission to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Developing products across the complete energy life cycle, from solar production and battery storage, to all-electric vehicles heavily focused on autonomy.
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This isn't a new concept, or exclusive to Tesla. I know first hand that camera companies do this too. Commonize the imaging chip and software lock the available imaging quality behind price tiers. You get somewhat lower manufacturing costs by having just one component sku and larger volumes of that sku. You need to sell at a certain price point to make it viable, but still have to offer lower price point options to keep and keep market share.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not new or unique . Far more common than people realize.
Yeah but with chips it’s often a yield optimizer. Back on the ps3 days, the cell chip had 8 “cores” but getting a full wafer of chips with all 8 working was really tough, let’s make up numbers, let’s say 60%. If you instead say, we’ll, 7 functional then maybe 85% of the chips have that and the cost per chip goes way down.
There are dual and quad core cpu setups that shit as 2 with some cores turned off- there are tricks to get them back, and they may even work- or your system might become incredibly unstable and crash all the time.
Sensors in cameras would be the same- you could reuse “bad” full frame sensors because they have dead spots somewhere by cropping down to a smaller area and get more yield out of the batch.
This is different than with a car- they done make a battery pack that’s half fucking functional and then go “oh well”. They’re literally just soft locking it to some diminished capacity so you can pay for an “upgrade” that “feels like magic” pumping more battery into your car at the speed of Wi-Fi or some bullshit.