Let me get this straight - people buy a product advertised as having a feature, containing a part also advertised as having that feature, and then they disable it after purchase?
How is that legal?
Americans have no consumer protections.
So the hardware is capable, but refuses to work until someone pays for the licensing cost. Yay capitalism bringing innovation!
It’s clearly a move to make torrent for movies unviable and get funding from Netflix.
I don’t for a second believe this is about the rising cost. It raised by $0.04. Someone below said that works out to a savings of $600,000.
Alright, but for an individual, it’s $0.04.
Just increase the final price by $0.25. You made back your $600,000. Plus whatever $0.21 would equate to as GAINS.
Fuck guys. You suck at business. This is what happens when companies replace their CEO with AI.
The real key is buried in the middle, where they say hardware decode capabilities are going to be restricted to models with discrete GPUs… Meaning they can make a $500 upsell mandatory for the most basic of capabilities.
Both HP and Dell are partnered with Microsoft, and have been for decades. Isn’t a discrete GPU one of the things required for Microsoft Recall ready machines?
There’s NO way they broke HEVC just for 4¢. Something else is paying them a lot more, and Recall would be one of those things.
Nah, that’s an NPU.
I shoulda looked it up, lol. Thanks for the correction.
The HP 16" EliteBook 665 G11 Notebook costs $1500. That means this $600k “cost cutting” measure starts to decrease revenue if only 400 people buy a laptop from a different brand.
Or even a single person. Someone tasked to purchase 400 laptops for a company, reads this news and decides to get ThinkPads instead…
Sell the CEO private jet if they really need the money
Imagine buying a “Pro” laptop that can’t even play HEVC videos without software transcoding. This is insane penny pinching and infuriating
Anyone has a list of the Dell laptops? I have a Latitude 7350 Detachable with an intel core ultra 164U. I think I might be affected…but then again, I have it running KDE neon, so not sure if this is disabled at hardware level or if it will work on a different OS.
He’s usually right.
*On software. For the love of god don’t follow his ideas on consent, child sex, or bestiality.
Or plants. Or whether you should shout at people. Or sort of the concept of women.
Our hero.
They are disabling it because the license cost went up 4 cents? Just pass that cost onto the customer. Even if they mark that up several times, I would rather pay that than have my battery drained because I have to software decode a video.
There is still a lot of H.265 content out there. I have many terabytes of it that I don’t want to transcode.
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synology also did this recently. shit should be illegal.
From the article:
Last year, NAS company Synology announced that it was ending support for HEVC, as well as H.264/AVC and VCI, transcoding on its DiskStation Manager and BeeStation OS platforms, saying that “support for video codecs is widespread on end devices, such as smartphones, tablets, computers, and smart TVs.”
Well, not anymore lol.
What should be illegal is patents like this!
that was the final straw for me to switch NAS vendors when I next upgrade.
Here’s two brands I’ve not touched in decades. Keeping it that way.
What have you touched recently? Asking, because my Lenovo V14 thing is fine inside, but everything mechanical is crumbling in my hands.
Lenovo V series is cheap, prefer Thinkpads, especially T series. Used Thinkpads tend to still last a long time.
HP Pavilion and Dell Inspiron or whatever are also cheap and worse quality than the cheap Lenovos IMO. HP Elitebooks were fine last I touched them, years aho. Dell Latitude too, though bad models exist
It might be possible for you to replace the ‘upper case / palmrest’ (top section of your laptop with the keyboard and trackpad.)
Check the manual to see, buy a generic computer repair kit with basic tools to open a laptop case, buy a set of screws in bulk from aliexpress. The screw sizes may not have to match exactly, but it depends on the screw and location.
You could try following the manual during the repair, but I found it to be cumbersome and unnecessary. I was able to replace the upper case of my laptop in less than 15 minutes by just looking at it and removing what was in the way.
My problem is mostly with the moving parts and places with screws, all the plastic there is cracked and crumbling.
So it’d be more like replacing the whole “shell”, which would make sense if I knew where one can buy that, LOL.
You may be able to find the replacement parts on amazon or the manufacturer’s website.
Look up replacement parts for your specific model and go from there.
increasing from $0.20 each to $0.24 each in the United States. To put that into perspective, in Q3 2025, HP sold 15,002,000 laptops and desktops
“This is pretty ridiculous, given these systems are $800+ a machine
I wonder how long the list of these fees for one machine is
That’s about a $600,000 savings for that quarter, for a company that reported $13.9 billion in revenue for Q3 2025.
It would be cruel of us to ask them to only have $13,899,400,000 in revenue that quarter instead of $13,900,000,000
Revenue wouldn’t change from this, only expenses and profit.
Someone was a doing a lot of hard work subtracting big scary numbers in their budget sheet.
Is it disabled in hardware, firmware or software? Does Linux enable it?
Reading through a bit it sounds like it works on Linux, not on Windows. Folks are hypothesizing it’s disabled at the ACPI level because different drivers don’t help.
They’re a business and they need to make money!
