Intel’s Suicidal New Business Model: Charge Twice For The Same Product

Geeks and nerds everywhere, prep your fingers for some angry typing in the blogosphere, this one is going to get messy.

Intel has decided it doesn’t make enough money selling you a single product once, so now it’s experimenting with selling you that product twice.

This genius marketing strategy is in place at Best Buy, where customers purchasing certain Compaq systems are offered a $50 upgrade card to unlock threads and cache capability that are otherwise unavailable to the system.

You read that right, Intel builds CPUs and sells them to you, only to then slyly sidle up to you to ask if you wanted unlock a little more of that CPU’s juicy goodness.

Intel has been looking for ways to build DRM into their hardware since 2004 when their Trusted Platform Module had geeks all riled up.

Has anyone purchased one of these deliberately crippled systems?