Whoa. People who were paying thousands of dollars for the higher capacity battery were just paying for a software update on the cheap battery.
Refunds will be in the works. Dumb PR move.
Other way around. People who were paying thousands less for the cheap battery were actually just not paying for the software to have it run like the good battery.
There are many many instances of similar things going on. 386SX chips came into being because they had a run where the math co-processor was busted, so they just disconnected it then sold them cheaper, but they sold well enough that they made more chips with the co-processor bio turned off. They kept that up for years, even went into the 486 line. The only difference between “client” and much more expensive “server” versions of Windows NT were a handful of registry keys and if you knew which ones to flip to what all kinds of features suddenly turned on.
heck the very software I work on ships fully capable and whether you get feature set X or Y depends on how much money you give us and the license key we generate. Making two (or more) different versions of the same product is expensive, SELLING two different versions is often profitable. So a lot of companies have found cheap and quick ways of doing the later without doing the former.
No.