You know what scares us about big tech? Planned obsolescence.
When devices are designed to become obsolete sooner than later, you know there is a problem. A problem that's getting scarier every day.
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.
Planned obsolescence is a symptom of something which is, or aught to be, in your top 10 issues with big tech.
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
Unless your planning on running your own infra for everything... I would argue planned obsolescence is a much greater and immediate threat.
Research is never long term. Imagine if the last 20yrs had been invested in increased ram and battery storage. Instead we have had a 20 halt on innovation in the residential side. Why big Phone wanted to stick with 4gb phone. And then 8gb so much so the reason they stopped was because it was becoming more expensive to make 8gb chips.
Unless you only pay cash, dont use Amazon to ship, google to research, Microsoft to compute... You are being tracked, the only difference now is the focus of the companies were for greed.
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.
That's because you're a proud consumer who doesn't realize how maximizing profit is the motivation for everything you've mentioned.
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.
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.
And honestly, brightness is a bad thing for me because I know I'm going to accidentally hit that slider in a dark room and blind myself (esp. since I use NewPipe's brightness swipe thing).
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
Seriously. People need to realize they should have a need before a product, not the other way around.
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.
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.
I JUST replaced my six-year-old phone, and the battery still lasted the better part of a day! I was astounded. It’s crazy not having to charge it every day, now.
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…)
Except the pace with which said edge moves too depends on how frequently most people replace their devices.
Meaning that without planned obsolescence combined expenses for tech of an average person per period of time would be the same.
people spend desperate to stay at the pinnacle of camera technology (that they can’t really tell the difference on)
Yes. People pay actual money for things they can't explain in words other than "new cool" or "3.141 times faster" or "14.88% better". I'm of an opinion that this concerns all computer things. Not even only personal computing. It's a tulip bubble that hasn't yet burst. A very big one.
If the essence of things we do with PCs hasn't changed since year 2003, but we do it the harder and more wasteful way due to vanity, there has to be an implosion.
That's not true. Businesses charge the most people are willing to pay.
I'm sorry you've been convinced that lowering your standards resulted in cheaper prices. It did not. It only resulted in worse products for us and higher profits for businesses.
I'm sorry you've been convinced that lowering your standards resulted in cheaper prices.
It literally resulted in a cheaper price
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
This would apply to all consumer electronics besides smartphones, such as smart TVs, gaming consoles, etc.
Android has problems with how each device uses a forked kernel with vendor binary blobs only working for that specific forked kernel. PostmarketOS is trying to avoid these issues by upstreaming the drivers so they can be maintained normally when the kernel changes.
Yes having a trusted entity maintain the software is a big problem.
But giving the option to install your own software would be a big step in keeping the devices in use.
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.
Nah. Legislation to make it planned obsolescence illegal would be much more effective.
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.
Big capacitor loves you though
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.
My one and only request : operating system security fixes, updates for years
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.
Exactly. The reason I replaced my last phone was SW support. I would still be using it today if I felt it was secure enough.
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
The App Store was there since the first gen. Steve jobs announce already included it and there were dummy apps like pretending to drink a beer from the iPhone. With the iPhone 3G they changed the SDK in a way that either you released apps for the first two gen or for the newer generations that made the fist two generations almost useless (planned obsolescence you said?)
That has been a thing for longer than most of us have been alive.
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.
Give them money reward the behaviour
I refuse. Just got a Pixel 4 off eBay. If the battery's bad, I'll replace it.
My last phone I had for about 6 years before the battery became so bad it couldn't keep charge for more than a few hours and opening the camera had a 50% chance of just powering it off.
I'd have replaced the battery, but all apps and the web had become so bloated by then, that it was struggling to really run anything reliably, even without the battery issues.
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.
Eventually, the world is going to become absolutely insufferable to exist in, and I only hope guns are still legal throughout the worst of it so people have a viable exit without spending 40 years in a detached level of insanity.
My Oppo Reno z only got one year of updates, so pretty much one or two updates in total, I still love the heck out of using that thing, it's built well, it's fast and comfortable, it's just that they didn't intend for me to use it after 2020.
Even though it has a cracked screen, I intend to replace it in possibly 2027, because I really don't mind the cosmetic damage or outdatedness, it works for me, just like how my 9 year old ThinkPad 11e was before I replaced it.
Thankfully, phone updates are just a software problem. It's sad we've reached this point, but there's nothing really stopping us from updating phones like we update our computers.
People need to collectively have higher standards if they want businesses to meet those standards.