Everyone wants the best stuff for free. That's not controversial. But it is controversial to complain that the best stuff is more expensive than the cheap stuff. Of course it is. That's the type of stuff they sacrificed to make it cheap.
If they want low end free btw, they do have that too. Pinebooks are super cheap.
Of course, not to say the above are all panacea, but something much more directly measurable and visible, like your health, local economy/ecology welfare, people can barely afford. The invisible, like the privacy affecting where your precious wallet gets spent, the habits which can be used to target and manipulate you, that's the invisible hidden behind marketing promising "great performance at a low price".
You get what you pay for, and the moral of this story is that what most people can afford, shit, is what they get (shit).
At least, until people decide to take control and dethrone the tyrants from their thrones. That's why govt and big biz can't stand a message to be private, they are well aware they stand to lose, well, everything, from anyone ever bothering to unseat them. Not to lump all biz or govt together, there are some worse than others.
The same situation can be spotted on services. E.g. people already forgot that running email service costs money and they take the free GMail account as given. But around the corner they blame Google for poor support then free GMail account is randomly closed.
It is not only email. But if you want (support|control|freedom|insert-yourself) - pay for it.
Nah. Technically, and in terms of manufacturing cost, it would be even easier to make a simpler computer, without all those bells and whistles that can be turned against the user, without the Intel Management Engine, TPM, and what have you.
> That's the type of stuff they sacrificed to make it cheap.
No, it's economies of scale which make one expensive, and the other one cheap. And human greed, and the human need to control other humans.
Non-technical users can and will be tricked into doing all sorts of ridiculous things to their computer, and then they will blame the computer manufacturer for letting them do that. Computer manufacturers responded by not letting them do that.
Mainstream computers are designed for mainstream users... the common clay of the land... you know... morons. They have to be protected from doing stupid things to their computers (because otherwise that's how you get botnets).
As the OP says, there are computers that don't have these features, and that you can do whatever you like with. But they tend to cost more, in part because they're not mainstream so they don't get economies of scale.
That's true. However, vendors don't look at manufacturing costs in isolation - they care about profit. All these user-hostile additions generate more in profit than they cost in manufacturing.
This way, the best stuff costs more, even if it has less - because "value-add" garbage has negative total cost.
You're right that it is all about economies of scale. Economies of scale say that it doesn't make sense to tape out a whole separate die just for non-business consumers. They just don't sell that many units that it's worth it. It's cheaper to make one die for everyone and then sell one die with AMT turned off, even if it involves wasting a small amount of silicon for each chip produced.
Incidentally, this is why (apart from a few noxious exceptions like ECC) consumers are generally the beneficiaries of market segmentation. Businesses will pay a lot more, locking these features behind higher-priced models lets the consumer models be cheaper. Without market segmentation, the outcome isn't that you get a Xeon at the price of a Pentium, it's that you get a Xeon at the cost of a Xeon.
Maybe I'm missing something here but how is it possible that on-die features like IME affect the manufacturing cost and complexity of a laptop for e.g. Dell?
