Often when buying a piece of equipment, whether it is a food processor, a new laptop or a car, sellers offer us to purchase something extra. Some kind of "tricky" knife for a meat grinder, a trunk for a car or an autonomous charger for a smartphone. What does all of this mean?
Option as a marketing move
Competition forces manufacturers of goods and service providers to strive to reduce the cost of their products. In order to attract the attention of a potential buyer to themselves, in price lists they often indicate the price of the simplest configurations of appliances, equipment and household appliances or the cheapest services. And when an interested client appears, they tell him that he can also buy this, this, and this, and additionally for him, they can do this and that ...
Sometimes the client himself asks about the presence of any function in the household appliance or mechanism that he liked.
And then comes the moment when a person hears this magic word: “option”. It turns out that everything that the managers of the company offer him, and everything that he asks about himself, is optional - this means, in addition.
What are we talking about?
The bottom line is that in the cheapest (so-called basic) configuration, some functions or devices that are not fundamentally affecting the operability of the mechanism are disabled and sometimes not installed at all. For example, a web-camera is not integrated in a laptop to reduce the cost, in a passenger car there is no stereo system or no radio at all.
The seller will immediately explain that the function of interest to the buyer is attached optionally. This means that there is a special socket for connecting a web-camera or radio, car service specialists will build a stereo system that the client will choose on the window, but for a fee.
How it works?
Sometimes at home, studying the instructions, the buyer sees the opposite of any function or component parts marked "optional". A logical question arises as to what an optional connection means?
It's pretty simple. For example, a car has a hitch - it is, and that’s it. And what exactly will cling to it is optional. This means that you can attach a freight trailer to bring potatoes from the cottage, or you can use a cable to pull someone else's car out of the mud or go on a trip with a caravan.
The same is true with any other household appliance, computer or laptop. Using a USB port, you can optionally connect a phone, a camera and a video camera to your laptop to download photos or videos taken on vacation and away onto your hard drive. You can attach a portable storage medium or webcam.
In the basic configuration of the electronic microcircuit of the device, in the motherboard of a computer or laptop, it is possible to include all the functions and peripherals that are possible at the time of production of the device. They are simply not activated, not connected initially, so that you can do this later, for additional money taken from the user.
For example, there is a need to connect a smartphone via Bluetooth to a laptop. The smartphone has this function and it is activated by simply clicking on the icon in the menu. And in the laptop it is optional - this means to use it, you need to connect a standalone Bluetooth port to the laptop. The operating system recognizes it, activates the appropriate driver and that’s it. You can use it.
Is it convenient or not?
Conveniently.Currently, there are so many various additional features that the inclusion of all of them at once in one or another device can raise its price to unattainable heights, on the one hand. On the other hand, it will overload it with functions that are not always necessary or even not necessary for the owner.
Why overpay for the presence of a roof rack if no one is going to carry anything on it? Why does a person, in principle, not keen on photography and video filming, have a camera in his phone? After all, its cost is invested in the price of the phone. Better these options remain optional, and those who need to buy them separately.
