We had expected a small microcontroller device would be developed to send these bits to a scope automatically, and we never imagined the final version of this tool hack would be so elegant. The upgrade process is extremely simple: get the serial number of your DS2072, put it in the keygen, and enter the resulting key into the scope. Posted in Tagged , , Post navigation Selling crippled hardware under the guise of it being better than it actually is would be ethically wrong. What is NOT good business is taking advantage of your customer. As a customer, you have to assume that if one model costs double what the other does, that there is some higher cost to drive that price. I guess because some people are willing to pay more. But if they are truly the same unit and just locked up, with one person being charged double, that seems unethical to me. If not unethical, then risky. Nothing stays a secret for long. What you may be paying for, in terms of the high-end model, is confidence that your unit will be able to fulfill its specifications. If some lower end model happens to meet those higher-end specs then your confidence can only be put on some person off the street who tested it and not the original manufacturer. You might have read what I wrote, but you missed the point of it. If you need the better capabilities and functions, then pay for them. Good luck with that. If any of us need more bandwidth, then there are upline units for that with commensurate pricing. As a customer, you have to assume that if one model costs double what the other does, that there is some higher cost to drive that price. Or maybe it should be based on the cost of the raw carbon and silicon? Prices for anything you buy are set based on supply and demand. Lowering the prices means generally not always you will sell more units. If the profit from those extra units is sufficient, it will offset the price decrease. Thus, there is some optimum price which results in the most profit which is neither the highest nor lowest possible price. It would be better if you could make special discounts for them, so they can still buy it, but without cutting out your existing profit. The way to do this is price discriminations. So I am totally a fan of price discrimination. And the company may indeed wind with more sales from a new price discriminated bracked, e. Typically the arguments for increasing pricing structures have been that you have to pay more for people to work more. You pay more for better things because people put more work into it, or the raw components are higher quality and cost more, etc. Both units are exactly the same, even the software is the same. The only thing different is the manufacturer PUT MORE EFFORT INTO THE CHEAPER UNIT TO CRIPPLE IT…. This is a really cynical, corporatist thing. The only true difference between these 2 units is the sticker on the front. Would you be comfortable buying any of the higher end equipment from Rigol? I would be nervous that I was being ripped off. In that case, you actually end up needing to turn off your backups because the rest of the chip is only designed to operate X number of cores at maximum. Also, companies do this because it would not be practical to have two unique production lines. It does seem they could price the product at 1K and not mess with it at all. Just as there is nothing wrong with a company crippling a product and selling it at a reduced price, there is nothing wrong with unlocking the crippled features in the product. No more questionable than jailbreaking a smartphone you own. End users have been finding ways to enable these features for just as long. Now you realize the house does have two rooms, you get it unlocked by the locksmith and complain that you got ripped off because the seller should have given you the fully unlocked house for the price of a single room house. The fact that pricing can include things such as development cost or any number of factors, not just the price of components making up the product seems to be lost on many here. Not saying that you should not hack the scope, I would probably too, but being pissed off at the company is just narrowmindedly naive. I buy it, I make no deals on how to use or not to use the damn thing. Or added cool blue leds to it, or whatever. If it was a digital scope, such an agreement was inherent in the purchase. Your acceptance of the scope is your agreement. If the company constructs their EULA in a way that runs afoul of the law, then the courts have final say. But it is to say that such cracking certainly falls short of being ethical. That was the topic in question, that is the clear conclusion. All the comments I read here miss the point entirely.. Rigol could easily fix this.. Especially after they had it happen on previous scope models like the ds1052 series. They purposely leave in the backdoor to sell more units. I am sure having a method of hacking the scope they end up selling 2x the units. As far is the question of it being ethical.. The concern brought up here every time one of these articles is posted and never to my knowledge given a conclusive answer is: will it perform to the right level? Is the filtering set up the same? Anti-aliasing is probably going to look quite different between the scopes. Maybe some of the other parts are lower grade as well because they can get away with it. I would guess a scope falls into this category. Since an option to upgrade the scope via a key was made available to the user I guess one can also buy that key from Rigol to upgrade the scope. Your acceptance of the device creates an implied contract for the licensing of the software. This is not new. Soft firm ware controls are just straight up foolish on the part of manufacturers. Or a different unit. The trouble with doing business as you propose is retooling costs. The other common way is to have looser tolerances for the lower model. You can think of it in game terms, too. Many games come with everything needed for a full version, but the free or cheaper version is limited to give you a taste. Usually these can be unlocked with a CD key. This is no different. Firstly, paying for software features is a pretty common thing. Secondly, it sounds crazy, but people have related stories here and to me in person unrelated to each other, but very similar stories where they were basically required to take the more expensive option out of the available choices for business reasons rather than practical ones. I frequently find myself in that category. Also: It is not a single line of code that is different. And those extra features were a cost development to the manufacturer. I can not see how that is ripping anyone off who did not pay for those extra features? No one is being ripped off here. They took the sleazy way out, and now they are not getting paid for it. It is very apparent who has engineering experience on a high volume production device and who is a hobbyist. One of the major reasons the scope is so cheap to begin with is due to their high volume design decisions. They saved a lot of money in doing so and that possibly allowed the scope to be affordable to you. That suggests that the true value which reflects the costs to the manufacturer, of course of the units is represented closer to the higher rather than the lower price? The first important lesson you learn is that there is no inherent value in anything. The value of an item is exactly the amount people are willing to pay for it. End result — they have a range of units that they can sell to different market segments. But if all the costs are the same for both units…is that a smart thing to do? The risk is that your unit will end up on hackaday. Especially because in this situation, the hardware is there. The cost is already paid by the manufacturer. The first is essentially what it boils down to, yes. This business model is evolutionary and efficient. The reflexive solution to this is to raise the price to compensate for lost sales, and this ends up penalizing later adopters for the sins of the initial exploiters. Moral: Everyone loses when someone cheats. Rob: Fair enough, but the business model does not sound evolutionary or efficient at all, those words smack of economic warm-fuzzy buzzwordery. But businesses keep using them! And people keep breaking them! And then we get the boring moaning and chatter about IP and ethics and so on. You physically remove functionality. I fully agree with Skimo and his comment already contains the answer to yours: There are different sorts of costs related to a product. One is a recurring cost that has to be spend on every product manufactured parts, manufacturing, testing, shipping, margins for resellers and so on. If the sales-price is above the sum of all that you are not making a loss by selling a product. However — there are also initial costs that happen when you develop the product research, development of hard- and software, other stuff like compliance testing, certificates depending on the type of product, marketing and you want to cover those over a certain time when your product is sold. However — depending on your market and that research you did to find out about it you will sell a lot more of the cheaper version because it fulfills most peoples needs. If you would not offer that cheaper version many of your customers would buy a different product because the high-end one is too expensive for them. Which means all the initial costs for the development would have to be covered by the expensive version — making it even more expensive. To sum it up: No — the manufacturer is not doing the market a favour. He is spreading his costs among different groups of customers allowing himself to access to those potential customers. The alternative would be to develop a product somewhere in the middle — which may still be too expensive for some customers and not good enough for others. For me the problem is that they are not only crippling software features that I find legitimate but also hardware specifications. It is obvious that you could ask more money for extra piece of software but they also are crippling hardware specifications to make additional software look more worthwhile. I think that this is not very welcomed policy. I agree, ultimately this is more to do with people choosing to hack their device, voiding the warranty to unlock features they in fact did pay for with their original purchase price. It is a bit like buying a phone, finding out that it has a hidden FM radio SDR chip and making a wideband spectrum analyser with it. Disclaimer: Some Android phones have such a chip, used as part of the phone chipset to work in 4G mode so enabling this feature may break 4G. One point my boss points out everytime I tell him about these hacks is the bandwidth of the probes. Sure this doesnt apply to the firmware features like serial decode, or memory depth. Yes, I see that both the expensive and the cheap scope cost probably less than if they had developed two different scopes with different hardware. But the question is what you lose due to such a hack as a manufacturer. Would you have sold the expensive scope otherwise? Business customers will likely not hack their hardware this way. Saving a pittance on a scope for the risk of running it outside its spec and ruining an expensive project? The possibility to apply piracy to the device could be a net win for the manufacturer. Whether it is or not in fact is moot to discuss. I see, though, that this would be very hard in practice and probably just end cannibalizing the commercial sales. I btw do write software for a living. Distributing software costs practically nothing, yet it is priced like goods where you have fixed costs per unit. It should be priced according to its use for the customer. There is also a hidden profit for rigol here. I guess it comes down to if you need or your clients expect instruments with guaranteed performance at 200 MHz to be used. In the event this would void the warranty is something to consider, if the unit ever needs to be serviced by Rigol. Of course if one already owns a DS2072 no longer covered by the warranty, the warranty is no longer a concern. So if they can expand the market for their low end market by leaving it hackable, knowing that the hobbyist choice is between hackable Rigol and unhackable competitors, why not? But this certainly gets Rigol free publicity and mindshare. Look at the number of people arguing about this. What percentage of users will actually apply the hacks? They surely must know about the hack of the earlier models, yet the new model is still easy to crack. I expect more people will buy from Rigol because they can hack it. Rigol gets more sales and more money as a result. How is that bad for them? They would still sell the higher end model to those who want a guarantee it can do what it says on the label. There is no guarantee the hacked low-end model is accurate when unlocked. Our office had a 17 year old purchase the product. Since he cannot legally enter into a contract of any kind without parental permission the contract is void. The second one I purchased and set up while completely drunk. In my impaired state no contract I was implicated in is valid. Only a couple posts have brought it up, but it bears repeating. This is the tip of the iceberg. The company selling the scope can lock down features and sell it for less all they want. The Bill of Exchanges Act of Canada or equivalent in your country should be consulted. If the contract was not signed BEFORE the acceptance of paymeht, tough bananas. Any software company trying to impose an EULA is nothing more than bullying, and doing false representation. If they claim that their EULA holds, then, they also must expect that some people will not want to agree with the EULA, and then, they expect them to spend time and gas to get the stuff back and get a refund. Well, this is use of my time, and for that kind of activity, if they imply that there can be tacit agreement, it means that they agree to my terms implicitely.
