You know what scares the hell out of corporations? People like me. We replace the wonky rubber harmonic balancers with aluminum ones, we replace phone batteries using a heat gun to remove the screen, we replace capacitors in 90's era Walmart CD players because it still works. We are the anti consumers. We fix what you throw away. We will build our future golden city with the refuse from your broken appliances. We are the future and it terrifies the consumer corporations.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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I used to think that, as a tinkerer. Sorry for being jaded.
Then I got real into maker studios and all formed the same opinion: WE, the tinkerers, are a blip to companies that mass produce garbage. Apple used a fraction of a fraction of their budget to stop iRepair. And they're one of the biggest players.
Samsung/Amazon is huge and they don't care. Hell, they'll even sell the parts, as long as you buy it from them.
As long as we consume, they don't care if we set it on fire or make it work forever. They'll keep poisoning the world for profits.
Big capacitor loves you though
Planned obsolescence isn't even in my top 10. The worst things about Big Tech are existential, like its use for mass espionage and murder by evil regimes.
Exactly. Planned obsolesce is an annoyance to my pocketbook. Violations of my privacy can completely screw me over for life.
We should absolutely solve both, but if I had to pick one, I'd go for privacy every time.
It's connected. When there's no planned obsolescence, one can stop buying electronics until companies or some specific company regains reason. When there is planned obsolescence, you can't easily start ignoring the vendor, usually. Your device quickly becomes both dangerous and kinda useless without support.
This requires sort of an Ulysses' pact from companies. Sun would do such things. Sun would also develop fundamentally important technologies for literally every level of the industry. Unfortunately Sun went down.
And the way many companies went down in late 90s and 00s, I can't blame others for trying to find some way to exist without such unfortunate events. One can't rely on Ulysses' pacts anyway. Those work to a limited extent when supported by other mechanisms.
It's really a case of philosophy being required to find the solution. Not conflicting interests, to which (even in theory, with dialectics on one side's extreme and fascism on another's) both left and right movements reduce reality.
Said philosophy is that property rights are intended to share either finite resources or unique resources, and information is not a finite resource, however it is a unique resource.
The "conflicting interests" point of view means that everything unique should be a property and this is how things are done well, that means that everything has an owner who feeds from it, and a crowd of angry apes who think that fighting IP and copyright is evil theft making hardworking people hungry.
The "philosophy" point of view means that only finite resources should have owners, because ownership is a way for those who need a resource to have it, nothing more. Ownership and markets are a distribution mechanism, where those applying more energy to get a resource get more of it. It's superficial for things which are not finite, and superficial means "bad".
However work to develop new things and creation are finite resources. But those can actually be commodified. Trade secrets are the way it was called for all of history.
Patents allow rapid modernization and scale, which is an advantage over trade secrets, but patents can be issued for practical time periods, instead of practically indefinite, as it is now.
But I think for a decade or so the Western world can exist without patents at all, before reintroducing them in that improved form. It's not hard to notice that in the current global economy IP and patents are one of the most powerful assets of the West, so it may seem a leap of faith. But it has to be done. Patents in such a situation are derived from human work, so the "designing" countries won't lose strength compared to the "manufacturing" countries. The power is not in the patents. It's roughly similar to the way decolonization in the XX century counterintuitively revitalized old empires when and where done softly and hurt them when and where done harshly.
This has almost nothing to do with privacy and misses the point behind planned obsolescence. The goal behind both are the same: maximize recurring revenue. The goal behind patents is different: obstruct competition. Fixing one has almost no impact on the others.
patents can be issued for practical time periods, instead of practically indefinite, as it is now.
Patents aren't "practically indefinite," they're 20 years (15 for design patents). I don't think that's egregious, but I do think it's a little too long, especially since there's no requirement to actually produce the thing.
My preference is 5 years, with renewal if they can prove they're building the thing and need more time, or have built the thing but need an extension to recoup R&D (i.e. renew from date of release). If they're not building the thing or intentionally delaying, renewal should be denied.
That doesn't help planned obsolescence or privacy at all, because neither is particularly related to patents.
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The biggest existential threat is still ecological destruction. Old growth forest are raised to the ground, the ocean is warming and acidifying as it absorbs CO2, and it's all to make computers and toasters that don't even last a decade.
planned obsolescence wastes precious resources and massively contributes to climate change and our enslavement through consumption. its absolutely in my top 10
Planned obsolescence is a symptom of something which is, or aught to be, in your top 10 issues with big tech.
Planned obsolescence helps those things too, creating many more targets to support for open projects aiming for compatibility with proprietary hardware, or proprietary formats, or even proprietary software (for Wine), or de-facto proprietary Web.
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When smartphones first appeared, batteries were always removable.
Glances at Gen 1 iPhone
The iPhone 3g would be the first modern "smartphone" from Apple; before that it didn't allow adding more applications, same as the "dumb phones" before it. It just had a capacitive touchscreen and a better web browser
Even then, the batteries weren't glued in and it was significantly easier to replace
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Marketers manage to convince tech-savvy people that their device is almost unusable by manipulating percentages. For example, "50% brighter screen, 30% more energy efficient". It even worked for me when I didn't want to buy a previous phone model just because the latest generation had a 50% brighter screen. But then I realized that I was perfectly happy with the screen of my 4 year-old phone.
Seriously. People need to realize they should have a need before a product, not the other way around.
its because people dont understand why they dont need some specs. e.g the pupose of a very high brightness is if you often use your phone in a very bright area. the ads just dont tell users that and only just the value. if the brightness of your current phone is fine, then brightness should no longer be a valueable spec past what your current screen has.
same situation with performamce as users dont really know what kind of performance they need.
We’ve had more than enough performance for 99% of our applications for over a decade.
But when hardware gets faster, developers get lazier and software gets slower.
My old iPhone 4 ran great on iOS 5, but after updating to iOS 7, it couldn’t even show the keyboard without stuttering.
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Lol brighter screen would be against my preference, who uses at 5-15% brightness in any screen.
I agree. I want the best possible experience with the least possible light when doom scrolling at 2 AM.
I'd still be on the Pixel 5a 5G if it wasn't for the screen dying (a common issue with that model). I loved that phone. In battery saver mode it would last 3-4 days with light use.
The fun part is that „brighter screen“ is just a tool of planned obsolescence to decrease battery health long term to counter the larger batteries
That has been a thing for longer than most of us have been alive.
The "upside" of planned obsolescence is that devices are markedly cheaper if you're willing to not live on the bleeding edge (which is itself just marketing fomo bs..)
Case in point.. recently had to replace my phone. Since I now feel like a liability carrying around newish £500 one I took a look at some 2-3 years old. I eventually picked one I sort-of wished I'd gone for last time around except now I was spending 20% of what it would have cost me back then. So it's a little closer to the point of being obsolete than what it's replacing. But seriously. The amount of money people spend desperate to stay at the pinnacle of camera technology (that they can't really tell the difference on) or for Apple "AI" (I mean.. god.. really.. you're a smart independent person. How has Apples marketing team gotten this far into your brain?) is crazy. But the massively cheaper deals for what are, objectively, still amazing devices is something that only happens because of technology churn and "planned obsolescence".
There isn't much progress in phones.
There was a period between 07 and 2016 (maybe) where each new generations of phone was a big leap in quality and capabilities, so I admit being in tech, so well paid and actually professionally concerned by the evolution I was on a 1 to 2 year cycle for a while. That reminded me of the evolution of computers in the 80s/90s...
Now, I recently I broke my galaxy S8 from 2017 and went to check new phones and of course looked at the current flagships and ... meh... Yeah they are better I mean it's 6 generations later but they are not that much better. My old phone could already do 90% of what they do and 100% of what I need and it's just not worth it, especially since I'm pretty sure my income hasn't followed the same curve as flagship phones prices.
So yes, nowadays even a 7 year old phone is more than enough for the vast majority of the population except for people who need a status symbol or some weird use at the margin I can't think of. (An no, your photo sucks donkey balls and no one cares about them and you don't need 12 sensors and an AI coprocessor for your tiktok stories that only 3 peoples watch)
I've got an S9+ and find most newer phones worse in some way or other. Either no expandable memory or no headphone jack. And I've already come to terms with losing my am/fm radio receiver and IR blaster. I intend to use this device until it becomes more expensive to repair than to just buy a new one.
Hopefully some manufacturer can notice there's still a niche demand for these things by the time that happens.
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And the s8 had a 3.5mm headset jack.
I stayed on my phones longer when I had a replaceable battery and expandable storage. 5yrs was typical only replacing when they stopped turning on or I couldn't get new batteries for them.
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Planned Obsolescence is a problem across all consumer electronics that depend on the software being updated. It’s not limited to Big Tech.
The only way I see to solve it is to force vendors to release hardware specs and unlock bootloaders so you can install your own software on it.
An even better solution would be to force vendors to release their software when the hardware is end of life via their planned obsolescence.
It’s great to see small advances in right to repair for hardware, such as replacing the battery or access to new parts, but those don’t help when you are stuck on an outdated OS version.
The only way I see to solve it is to force vendors to release hardware specs and unlock bootloaders so you can install your own software on it.
Would that actually solve it? Just because a phone has an unlocked bootloader doesn't mean random ass people are going to want to support it. And even if some random dude on XDA makes updates for it that doesn't mean most people are even going to want to use it. Like yeah it's cool than a Galaxy S4 can run the latest version of Android, but that shit is buggy as hell and IDK anyone who would unironically want to use that.
Realistically no. The support needed to manage the devices we all use is just insane, and I think a lot of people take for granted how the x86 platform has evolved over the last few decades. The ARM landscape does not have the standards set that x86 does and that will always hold it back. Qualcomm learned long ago that it's within their best interest to be constantly changing the SoCs and never really documenting/supporting them very well because it forces all of the downstream vendors to do constant refreshes. Toss in the development hellscape my fellow programmers created ourselves and we get the vicious cycle we're in today where Google saying they'll support a device for longer than a few years was the headline sales pitch
-typed on a Pixel 8 which was purchased due to that sales pitch
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My one and only request : operating system security fixes, updates for years
Yes! I think part of the right to repair is the ability to install your own software on devices you own, when the vendor stops fixing it.
exactly! Like other people get a couple years out of software updates, but fuck me I only got a year, still riding on 2020 software as if I don't care but it's just the fact my phone got one update.
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Give them money reward the behaviour
Because of that I always bought Xiaomi.
I'm on the 9 pro, works perfectly well for everything.
Just hoping they won't enshittify themselves, or be caught in some USA / China gang war.
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One day we’ll wake up from this absolute nonsense. A star, long worshipped, will burn in the red. Disused and empty shell: icon of an old world.
Conscience awakened, we’ll take it from there.
The pessimist in me asks "will we ever have the chance?".
By the time we "wake up" would we even have the opportunity to do anything about it? Or just accept it like other rising costs like, rent and food, because let's be honest, technology is a necessity.
My interpretation of the closing lyrics of this song are “by the time we’ve fully understood the destruction we’re causing, the Sun will be about as close to death as it can be. Once the Earth is a husk, then we’ll start to make a change.”
One thing to keep in mind on this topic is that there is both planned and unplanned obsolescence and they often get conflated.
Planned is when the companies actively plan for it by making things difficult to repair or intentionally implementing minimal specs with an intent for failure. The former is often done by making batteries and other commonly switchable hardware permanently attached, although sometimes reliability improvements make the concepts understandable. The latter is often caused by improvements in cost reductions or simply better tech availability at a reasonable price.
As an example I'll use phones. Improvements to cameras is mostly due to improved tech. But memory can be either. When a phone gen has three levels of storage, the top level increasing is because of reduced tech prices. But inclusing a base model where the majority of memory is used by the OS and installed apps before storage of photos and other stuff is planned obsolecence because they want you to run out of space quickly so you will either upgrade or buy the next gen to get two sales in a short period of time. The fact that they don't list how much space is left after the OS is evudence of intent, because they are not making it easy for an informed decision.
The other changes for sealed cases and lack of removeable batteries or easy upgrades to memory is both planned and slightly justifiable for reliability. Sealing the case and permanently attaching hardware does improve phone survivability if it gets wet or dropped. But, the way they attach and seal it are done in a way that intentionally makes it harder to repair while being cheaper to manufacture. This is the most frequent planned obsolescence in my experience, going cheap on a reasonable sounding improvement, but in a way that makes it harder to fix when needed.
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