So Apple did their whole thing yesterday at the new spaceship campus, first event ever in the Steve Jobs Theater, and yeah, the X, I get why everyone is losing it over the notch and the $999 price tag. I'm not buying one at launch, my 6s still works fine and I refuse to be the guy explaining to his wife why the phone cost more than our flight to my cousin's wedding. But that's not actually what I want to write about tonight, because a much smaller story from earlier this week has been rattling around in my head more than any keynote slide did.
On Saturday, with Irma bearing down on Florida and half the state trying to get out on I-75, Tesla pushed a remote software update to a bunch of Model S and Model X cars down there. Not a safety patch, not a bug fix. They flipped a switch and gave people more range. Cars that were software-limited to the 60kWh battery's official number suddenly had access to the full 75kWh pack that was sitting there in the car the whole time, bumping rated range from around 200 miles up to about 249. No dealer visit, no new hardware, nothing physically changed in the car at all. Just bits.
I want to be clear that I think this is a genuinely good thing to do in an emergency, and I'm not trying to be the guy who complains about a company helping people evacuate a hurricane. But sit with the mechanics of it for a second. Some of those owners paid for a 60kWh car specifically because it was cheaper than the 75. The battery Tesla builds is apparently one battery, and the "60" trim is just the 75 pack with software telling it to stop early. Which means, if you bought the cheaper one, you were never actually buying less battery. You were buying a promise that the extra capacity would stay locked unless something like a category 4 storm made Tesla decide otherwise.
That's the part that's been bugging me all week, way more than whatever a phone camera notch means for the future of design. We've talked ourselves into thinking hardware is the expensive part and software is the free part, but here's a company demonstrating in the middle of a live weather emergency that the actual product is a lock, and the company holds the key the whole time you own the thing. Printer ink cartridges with chips in them that reject third party ink, John Deere tractors you can't legally fix yourself because of the firmware, and now cars with a battery that quietly costs less to make than the sticker implies. It's not new, exactly. It just usually isn't this visible, because usually nobody needs the extra range badly enough to notice the door was locked in the first place.
I asked around a little (well, I posted in a forum thread, which counts as asking around when it's midnight) and apparently this isn't even the first time Tesla's done a range unlock like this, they did something similar in 2016 during Hurricane Matthew too. So this is a known lever they have, sitting there, ready to pull whenever the weather gets bad enough. Which is honestly kind of reassuring and kind of unsettling in the same breath. Reassuring because it works and it helps people get further away from a storm. Unsettling because it means the car you drive every day has a ceiling on it that has nothing to do with what the machine can physically do, and that ceiling can move in either direction whenever the manufacturer decides it should.
Equifax is still the bigger mess of the month, obviously, 143 million social security numbers doesn't just go away because Tim Cook stood on a stage. I still haven't gotten around to freezing my credit and I probably should stop typing this and go do it. But between that and the Tesla thing, this has been a week where the software running underneath the stuff we own turned out to matter a lot more than the stuff itself. The phone event was the loud story. The battery unlock was the one I keep thinking about at 1am.
Anyway. Go freeze your credit if you haven't. I'll write something lighter next time, I promise.