Me go first:
- Most printer: we all know …
- Keurig: a coffee pod machine that use one-time pod. They once refuse to use third party pod with a chip.
- Juicero: a luxury juicer that squeeze juice from repack pod (which you can squeeze by hand). The machine will only work with pre-pack pod. You cannot make the machine work with your own food or vegetable.
You know any ? Any product, startup, dead or alive.
I remember reading about a specific dishwasher brand that uses proprietary cartridge for the soap. It uses smartcard to tell how many wash cycle left so you can’t refill it.
The article was about how to hack that smartcard so you can refill it.
Found it. Nice one.
Bob the mini dishwasher:
Peloton. An expensive exercise bike that doesn’t work without an expensive subscription, and which has now even resorted to trying to discourage resale of used machines by extorting an activation fee from second-hand buyers.
The thing that gets me about Peloton is running and to a certain extent biking are fairly inexpensive ways to exercise, and they somehow turned that into a high upfront cost with a subscription model.
Peloton is overpriced to the point of being predatory, but at least the concept of an exercise bike in your house makes reasonable sense. Or at least, it’s no worse than mounting your real bike to a stationary trainer.
What really boggles my mind is things like “spin classes” and exercise bikes at gyms, where you waste time/money/pollution/road capacity driving a car to a place, pay to ride a fake bike there, and then drive home again. If you’d just ridden a real bike instead, you’d get the same benefit with both less money and less time.
You mean items that should be generic commodities, but which companies customize in order to lock you into their ecosystem, or otherwise restrict what you can do? Like printer ink cartridges or Keurig pods with ID chips, as you mentioned.
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DVD region codes
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Camera lenses back in the manual SLR days. I don’t think there’s any reason old manual-focus Nikon/Olympus/Pentax/etc. lenses needed to be brand-exclusive. The companies could have all used the same bayonet mount and all lenses would be interchangeable.
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Blood Glucose Monitors and the related test strips. Usually you can get the meter for free if you buy 100 strips or something, and then you’re locked in to the closed system
My old man have a Blood Glucose Monitors, and i remember he ask me to buy test strips. It do not expensive, and any test strips brand does work with it, as long as it fit in the interface. No brand lock in so far.
If you can get me a name brand, it would be best.
I use blood glucose monitors and ive never seen this? Meter and strips are almost always separate and I think some drug stores even have generic strips that work on certain meters. (US)
I’m in Canada and it’s how I got all my meters until I got switched to a CGM. The hospital sent me home with a starter pack with a brand and some samples. I’ve never seen generic strips here, but that would be welcome. I’ve used FreeStyle and AccuChek and both required the branded strips, but never had to pay for a meter. I’ve seen commercials on TV for Contour doing the same deal.
Best Buy used to/might still idk sell a meter under the brand iHealth, the strips were about half the price. I tried it out and it worked fine but eventually I got proper insurance and used what was prescribed.
HP printers and their ink cartridges. They managed to make an even more horrifying offering with their subscription model based on pages printed per month.
For reference, that business model is called the loss leader pricing scheme. It’s the one where you sell a product for cheap with the expectation that the customer will buy something else that’s more expensive alongside it. It’s more common than you would expect.
For instance, eggs and milk are placed at the back of the store because there’s a higher chance of you picking up other things to buy on the way to the back.
IKEA does something similar with their food court.
The Steam deck is sold at a loss, because Valve makes their money back via game sales. The same is true for all gaming consoles
All F2P games operate on the same principle
My understanding is that Costco gasoline is so cheap because it’s offset by product purchases in-store. Also, Costco food court
I think what OP is asking about is less about loss-leaders and more about vendor lock-in.
