Imagine you bought a Ford Focus only to find out it was a leftover GT chassis and driveline with a focus body and a crippled computer. I'd call that a fucking win.
The reality is you are getting what you want but you got a lot more, only they tried to hide it. But if you find it, hack it, their loss is now an amazing gain. It's actually a great bargain.
Dishonest in my book would be if they simultaneously sold a high and low end model which contain the exact same internals save for a few software flags and model number. That would be shitty.
edit: Most CPU's are sold this way too. Remember the Intel Celeron, what was it 300 or 333? They were crippled 450/500MHz Celerons or possibly Pentuium 3 cores which didn't make their spec so they were derated and sold as lower end. So You bought two and plugged them into the famous Abit BP6 (I had one), overclocked and got a badass dual processor machine for half the price. I think with decent fans you could push 550MHz. Powerful rig circa 2001 or so.
Imagine you bought a house from someone, went bankrupt and foreclosed, then heard from someone else that the previous owner had hardwood placed over a solid gold living room floor.
You lost the alternate life where you didn't have to pull your kid out of school and move cross country. You lost the business you could have started. Buyers of gold lost the option to purchase from you and bought from further away at a higher total cost. As CEO of the world, would you want idle resources sitting around or would you want them to be in the hands of someone who would use them? It seems like it would be best to reassign people who work in destructive roles that diminish/obscure value to more productive roles that create value.
Are they? Sure, the hardware is capable of x, but if you want to save money by having software limit it to x/2, how is that a lie? And before the "but they didn't tell me!" argument, we may care on HN, but 99% of consumers don't care whether a limit is hardware-enforced or software-enforced, and probably 80% of consumers couldn't tell the difference if they had to.
How is it disrespectful? They might be cutting features but they are also cutting the price at the same time. Savvy customers can get superior hardware for a lower price if they decide to patch the firmware themselves.
