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.

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.

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.

• DVD region codes

• 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.

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