The structure of this story buries the lead, but the story is plain: Rather than spend four extra cents per unit on computers that cost more than $1,000, Dell and HP think it’s more cost effective to disable a feature that people rely on in modern laptops.
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To be clear: This does not affect consumer laptops, but business laptops are often purchased downstream by consumers, with HP and Dell two of the most popular options. This effectively forces you to buy what are often lower quality laptops with worse upgradeability if you want to have decent video.
But it sucks even for those business consumers, because business consumers use Zoom, and watch and edit videos too. Basically, you should probably avoid buying anything from Dell or HP until they fix this.
How is this disabled if it's built into the CPU? Is it a BIOS flag?
Do you get it back if you buy the right software?
@svavar Presumably they hit a switch at the hardware level—took out a tiny transistor, perhaps. If you read the spec sheets for these devices (linked in the piece) they say straight up that it’s disabled.
OK, so there's no way to get it back by paying the fee yourself?
In the article, HP is quoted as saying "Customers requiring the ability to encode or decode HEVC content on one of the impacted models can utilize licensed third-party software solutions that include HEVC support."
That's misleading because even if you buy the software you don't get the full feature set with browser support?
@svavar The key line is “software”—even if you buy something, you’re buying a solution that is CPU bound. So even if it decodes, it tanks your performance.
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There is a deeper issue which is worth pointing out—we should all be relying less on licensed codecs—but we do not live in that world and this is screwing people over now.
@ernie where do you actually use and rely on HEVC?
I just found that since #Android 14 handheld devices must support #AV1 encoding and decoding to be called Android device. At least if I understand https://source.android.com/docs/compatibility/14/android-14-cdd (search for "video encoding") correctly.
@datacop
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