Not surprising, a <$450usd budget laptop usually has the lowest tdp CPUs, huge storage, and tons of slow ram, combining those specs with hevc support makes an excellent media server. Disabling hevc also disables compute instructions ensuring poor local inference/mining performance.

All this over a $0.04 bump in licensing fees. They literally intend to break the user experience and frustrate global IT professionals (YEAH HI) to save $1m a year between the two of them.

Unbelievable, but also not surprising. All the more reason to hang onto older hardware or change vendors entirely. I’ve been bandying the phrase “Adversarial Partner” about a lot lately as it pertains to Microsoft, Apple, and Google, but I guess I have to add HP and Dell to that list too.

This is why open, unencumbered standards are needed (e.g. AV1).

This strikes me as HP and Dell just trying to be extra sneaky about it as they don't publish their reasons behind this (saving a bit of cash and pushing back against licensing the codec) and just leave it to the customer to discover that their new machine is hobbled after they've bought it.

If they had any respect for their customers, they would mention it in their advertising and allow customers the choice of whether they want the hardware encoding enabled or not - presumably that would entail having two different models of the same hardware which I bet would be more expensive than just paying the HEVC licensing in the first place.