What's fascinating is that they're being upfront with their customers about this, rather than trying to sneak it in. They're also explicitly letting their customers decide how long the pumps should last, and pricing accordingly.<p>I wonder if other existing DRM-like mechanisms for hardware would be better received if their manufacturers took this strategy.
Selling exactly the same hardware with different prices and performance is actually a pretty old practice. I've read stories of people long ago buying hardware upgrades for IBM mainframes and being surprised when the IBM engineer just came over and cut a wire on the backplane. "OK, you have twice as much memory now. Have a nice day!"
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. Mechanical equipment lifespan normally follows a well curve. Premature failures from manufacturing defects and improper component installation or commissioning taper off to a period where there is relatively low failure rates with proper maintenance until a certain point where equipment fails from age (fatigue, worn parts etc). If the end user is the one to specify the component, this could be great, you're not paying for unused time at the end of the components life. Some components are going to be replaced on a time schedule regardless of if there is usable life in it or not, some things are better to do on your schedule than a broken components. There is a warranty on the component for the full life of the pump so if you're doing the spacing you can be reasonably assured it will last its required life span or replaced.
On the other hand, if I purchase a piece of equipment from a different company and expect it to last N years, but they are using this component to save money and only opt for it to last M years, and don't disclose the life span, I could end up paying for N-M years of expected service that I don't get to use.
As an aside of other software limited hardware, Caterpillar c-series Diesel engines are software limited to a certain extent. If you need more horsepower call the service tech and they can increase the HP. Disclaimer: I heard this from another marine engineer so don't know if they need to upgrade other components as well or if it's completely a software de-rating.
This would logically mean they can make their pumps really cheaply and long-lasting, or they wouldn't have the markup to be able to do this. I'm not sure how I feel about their position, but I know I'm less comfortable about how this feels like "licensing" a product than I am about the markup they're admitting to making in the first place.
So they are basically renting their pumps? When the pumps fail, they must get them back and resell them to another customer. Else the economics would not make sense. Unless they send less to build a shorter life pump, but my impression was no, they program it to fail after a certain number of operating hours.
Bought a dot-matrix printer years ag, the cheap one, without double-wide character support nor lower-case (just the capital letters). It arrived. Inside was a jumper block. Reversed it - now it had all the features!
Interesting how a lot of comments here attribute some inherent evilness to the manufacturer, when more likely it's customer-driven feature that they've been asking for or their sales staff saw the need for. If customers don't want or need it, it won't be profitable. So you have nothing to worry about.
Lovely. So now software defects can <i>directly</i> affect product lifetime. Just the thing I need for something that has to live in the field for 15 years.<p>Well at least I know one more company whose products I should avoid.
This kind of offends us as technologists, but it may be the wave of the future. I think business would generally prefer to buy a "defined benefit" rather than gamble on the longevity of a device.