Without price discrimination, everyday users end up paying more for a given product while for-profit entities would pay less.
When a company releases a product, they price it according to how much profit they want to make per unit sold. Market segmentation allows them to sell their product at a lower margin to lower income users and shift much of that profit burden to corporate customers who can easily afford it.
Where I take issue with this practice is when manufacturers start suing users who modify their own hardware to enable features that they didn't pay the manufacturer for. Tesla selling heated seats as a software upgrade is a good example. It's fine if they want to build the hardware into every Tesla and only enable it for users that pay for it, but suing customers who modify their vehicle to turn on the heated seats on their own is way out of line.
I don't think Nvidia is going too far here, unless they start suing customers who try to write custom drivers that bypass the limitation.
Because those price-sensitive buyers (PC gamers) are far more likely to be loyal customers down the road than crypto miners, who will immediately stop buying GPUs as soon as mining stops being profitable again.
Nvidia wants to give PC gamers a reason to stay on "Team Green" by making it easier for them to get a card at a reasonable price during this perfect storm of limited silicon availability and insane crypto mining demand.
I actually think that this particular move is more about rate limiting purchases intended for crypto mining than it is about putting miners in a different market segment.
When a company releases a product, they price it according to how much profit they want to make per unit sold. Market segmentation allows them to sell their product at a lower margin to lower income users and shift much of that profit burden to corporate customers who can easily afford it.
Where I take issue with this practice is when manufacturers start suing users who modify their own hardware to enable features that they didn't pay the manufacturer for. Tesla selling heated seats as a software upgrade is a good example. It's fine if they want to build the hardware into every Tesla and only enable it for users that pay for it, but suing customers who modify their vehicle to turn on the heated seats on their own is way out of line.
I don't think Nvidia is going too far here, unless they start suing customers who try to write custom drivers that bypass the limitation.