Device manufacturers see that as a bug, not a feature. They are starting to pair genuine parts to a specific device, which will completely lock us out of 3rd party repair options if we accept and normalize this behavior.
Ah yes, that 79-pound iPhone repair kit to fix a 1.1-ounce battery. The review of it was pretty interesting [0]. It's possible, but it's not exactly what I'd call user serviceable. There are a hojillion kits on Amazon which all include all the necessary tools to take the phone apart - triwing screwdriver, pentalobe screwdriver, impossibly small 00 phillipshead screwdriver, etc - so anyone that can follow youtube directions and has a steady hand can do it. It's just way harder than it needs to be so under the proposed law, they'd have to make it easier.
That's funny, I got the opposite read from that article and that it's Apple that's operating in bad faith here.
Really though I think what's important is that we should expect help from Apple. It might take EU regulations to force that, but what that really says to me is that as consumer in the US, my bar for what to expect from corporations is set way too low.
I don't understand what point you're trying to make. What you're saying only strengthens my original point about Apple monopolizing repair.
My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned -- I want them to (be able to) work on my device in the event that I don't have the tools, skills or patience to do the repair myself.
> My interests as a consumer and those of "people who make money out of repair" are almost completely aligned
I don’t see how. The less reliable the device is, the more business they get. The more reliable the device is, the less you spend on repairs. Sure seems like opposing interests.
Repairability is orthogonal to reliability and I've only brought up complaints about the former. This dichotomy you're trying to establish doesn't have any grounding in reality.
All that repair shops can do is provide commentary and inform consumers about whether the OEM is serious about repair or whether they're just greenwashing their image and by all accounts, Apple's self-service repair program is about as anemic as their Apple authorized service provider program.
This is clearly not true when we’re discussing user replaceable batteries or the like. It’s a trade off, like most things in engineering.
There are many extra ways things can go wrong by making components such as batteries easy to replace. Poor contacts, oxidation, mechanical breakage, battery compartment doors popping off, ingress of dust and fluids, looser tolerances for the batteries etc.
Nobody discussing this in good faith can deny that these issues exist.
This may work for common phones (aka: Apple and Samsung phones). I had to retire a perfectly workable, but five years old, HTC phone after three such shops refused to fix it, citing unfamiliarity and cost.
I now have an ASUS phone, and fully expect the same to happen in several years.
It seems like weird logic to legislate that Apple and Samsung must make their phones less reliable for everyone simply because a 5 year old phone made by a cut price manufacturer is no longer supported.
Why did you buy the ASUS phone if you don’t expect to get support for it?
I bought it used, and with the expectation that I'm going to be on the hook for my own long-term maintenance and support, as is true with more or less everything I buy. (Full-time Linux user here.)
The sad reality is that the experience of running an off-brand phone with an easily-replaceable battery would, long-term, be much worse than running a locked-in flagship that LineageOS builds for.
They can't really say Apple and Samsung have to do this, everybody else doesn't. And they are by far the market leaders, so they sell the most phones ending up in landfills.
Pay extra for labor on top of parts, and theres a good chance theyll screw something up like the waterproofing seal or leave a loose connection that you won't notice until weeks later. Then you have to take it back and convince them its their fault and wait even longer while they hopefully don't screw the phone up even worse.
Yeah that definitely sounds more convenient than a removable battery.
This is just wrong. Replaceable batteries add cost and fragility to the device, make battery life worse, and most phones die because they stop getting software updates anyway.
Replaceable batteries will increase e-waste because there will be a lot more broken phones.
Saying "we shouldn't legislate repairablity because <other bad practice that needs to be legislated away>" is not terribly convincing. There should 100% be legislation aimed at keeping old phones able to run newer software.
Thankfully EU is also working on legislation that mandates more years of software support. Hopefully days of only 2-3 years of support will be soon gone for good, it's just plain wrong.
Phones don't "die" because they no longer get software updates. They just become obsolete - as planned by the manufacturer. Sounds like the next step is to fix the software update issue!
They practically die. A lot of software, such as work profile, banking apps, etc will stop working (depending on the work settings, bank rules, etc) if you don't update your phone. Also, your apps will no longer update as the app vendor doesn't release their apps for older API versions and will effectively make your app useless if their server side protocol changes.
Indeed, but the issue is that the phone manufacturer no longer supports the phone and release OS updates. And on Android, you could install unofficial mods to upgrade to a more recent version of the OS, but then some apps (banking apps for example) refuse to work because of... reasons, again making the phone unusable. And in a majority of cases, this has nothing to do with the hardware no longer being capable.
Depends on what phone you get. Mid to high end phones usually have communities to maintain 3 party system patches for them after they are not maintained officially. You can still use it safely for a a few years if you even bother about it.
For example, my old sony xz3 is a 2018/08 phone with software update discontinued since 2020(?). But there are actually 3party roms that can update it android 12.
That covers most of the software, but basically every modern phone has some proprietary drivers that are necessary for it to function and that have security vulnerabilities of their own.
And nobody's going to exploit those device-specific vulnerabilities (that probably require local code execution anyway) unless you're a high-value target.
I'm more looking for a gesture towards respecting our values, and a more open negotiation process for developing safe use for this kind of powerful control system. The fact that the administrators of the process on the twitter side were quite polarized politically makes people doubt its fairness, as does the fact that it was mostly done in secret.
i.e. it was more of a China-style "the state doesn't like you and bad things will happen to you and your family" style of punishment where you don't know what has actually happened (limitation of tweet reach, weird glitches in your tweet's spread with no acknowledgement) than a clear "you are charged with X and have received this penalty Y for time Z."
Why not just stop using Twitter? Who cares whether the FBI has its thumb on the scales or if it’s Elon Musk and his friends?
“The world’s digital town square” is a marketing slogan, and nothing more. If you instead accept that is simply just another way to sell eyeballs to advertisers, it’s easier to understand.
If we do need a digital town square, someone needs to build one. If it needs to have free speech protections, then the government needs to run it because they are the only ones who are restrained by the 2nd amendment.
How about we settle for at least some decent evidence of wrongdoing before eradication by the three letter agency army?
The examples given in these leaks showcase accounts getting banned simply for the opinion they hold, LACKING any other indicators like account origin, IP logins, email domain registration, etc.
I'm not going to touch bot farm, but the problem with labeling someone a troll and thus is that is subjective and not clearly defined. There's a level of intent behind being a troll vs being thought of as a troll.
Here, in the USA, we do have the right to freedoms of speech, press and association. These freedoms cannot be encroached on by the government without due process, and yes, that means it would need to go in front of a jury. It's on the government to prove that a law was broken before they can intervene with otherwise lawful speech. It's not up to a government bureaucrat to decide.
Just because you disagree with someone does not a troll make.
My problem with modern discourse is we've lost the ability to disagree with people without resorting to labeling and name calling. And that we think we need the government to protect us from things we may find distasteful or offensive. Because matters of taste are individual and subjective.
Right, but there is an exception for carriers such as Twitter from being treated as publishers, responsible for the material they distribute and monetize from their website.
They aren’t treated like press, but they need to be.
Man that is so horrible. Not all places are like that. Unfortunately it tends to be smaller places that are more trustworthy. I suggest that at very least you may need a good immigration attorney.
I'd phrase it this way: at a smaller company, you are much more likely to be treated as a human, by a human, versus being treated as a unit by a system at a bigger company.
Family companies are the worst in my first- and second-hand experience. Blood runs thicker than water, and outsiders are often reminded of that fact come promotion/major decision time
> The official narative is: China bad, America good.
This isn’t accurate. The official narrative is that America’s way of life is under threat from China. This is just true. China would say the same thing, and that would be true too.
There is an assumption that most US citizens prefer America to China, also true. Can we assume that most Chinese nationals prefer China to America? Presumably.
It’s only a multibillion dollar fraud, so it’s fine for him to fly first class. Imagine if instead he’d been caught selling loose cigarettes on a street corner.
If the cigarette seller posts $250m bail, they too can sit in a lounge. The likelihood of an extradition for street crime at this level is low. If they have outstanding warrants for illegal tobacco sales and tax avoidance ten years back, higher.
The comment you replied to was likely referring to Eric Garner, who was killed by the NYPD in 2014 via a prohibited chokehold maneuver for allegedly selling loose cigarettes on the street [1].
I believe the point being made was the wildly disparate proportion of justice (even assuming pre trial treatment and “innocent until proven guilty”) with regards to the crime and harm caused. Petty crime? Violent treatment. Billions of dollars of white collar fraud? Business class and lounge access.
That situation was awful. Drawing a connection directly between the two scenarios makes very little sense. The people involved in each event are so far removed as to be entirely causally unrelated.
It’s highly unlikely that there’s some individual out there that’s in charge of both situations, saying “yes we should murder petty criminals, and also let fraudsters fly first class”.
So, yes this dissymmetry is unfair, but it’s also unfair that the sun will eventually expand to swallow the earth, and that’s about as connected to SBF as Garner is.
