When an upgrade really means nothing Blog Discussion 22 August 2005 at 1:03PM in Motoring 4 replies 3.1K views

Former_MSE_Andrea

Click reply to discuss Martin's blog here.

Fran

Having a boring day? :eek: I can't really think of anything to say about your car keys. Did you lose your keys, chuck them into a pile at some outrageous party last night?

Clowance

Such as our DVD recorder (a Lite on), various features (such as 3 hour record time as opposed to 2 hour or 4 hour) are supposedly only on other models, yet a software upgrade from the internet will enable this feature.
My OH who used to be a tv/video repairman says that an old Hitachi video disc player years ago differed from the more expensive model only in that the front panel had different buttons, the innards were exactly the same. Its industry practice apparently!

jazzyjustlaw

A Smart car - well get a BMW then lol or isnt it MSE?

Terry_D

[Such as our DVD recorder (a Lite on), various features (such as 3 hour record time as opposed to 2 hour or 4 hour) are supposedly only on other models, yet a software upgrade from the internet will enable this feature.
My OH who used to be a tv/video repairman says that an old Hitachi video disc player years ago differed from the more expensive model only in that the front panel had different buttons, the innards were exactly the same. Its industry practice apparently!]

You are right - it's much cheaper for manuafacturers to make one build and disable certain functions on the cheaper models - examples are most cars have full wiring looms including wires for all accessories. many years ago when computers were rare and the PC hadn't being invented yet I worked as an engineer. When a customer wanted an upgrade from 16K memory to 32k (Yes I did say K!), we had to take along a memory card identical to the one already in the machine, pretend to swap it over and then make a small change in the operating system to recognise the "new" memory - criminal!