There are many more locked phones in drawers or acting as mere paperweights than people actually care to disclose.
Several years back we ran a poll to understand lifetime recycling habits. People aren't proud of dropping a phone and shattering the screen, but they are less proud of having thrown a phone into a drawer because they couldn't be bothered to run the obstacle course set up by their telco to keep them in check.
Phone right-to-repair should be EXPLICITLY INCLUSIVE of unlocking, otherwise it is only solving a part of the problem.
However, in reality, not only does the carrier not mind if the phone keeps being used (as long as it’s on the carrier’s network) but the lock doesn’t expire once the customer pays off their plan.
Furthermore the process for unlocking a phone is intentionally made convoluted. Until recently, you couldn’t even figure out which carrier an Apple device was locked to without playing brute-force with all the carrier’s SIMs in the entire world and even Apple support couldn’t be of any help. And when you finally figure out which carrier it is, getting in touch with them is a pain and some have stupid policies like keeping the device on their network for 30 days before being able to request an unlock (a scummy attempt at getting some people to give up and just keep using their network past the deadline, or revenge against someone who doesn’t intend to do so by essentially making their device unusable for 30 days).
Fast forward 6 years, and it is much harder to unlock a phone than it was then. The whole thing backfired for consumers. It was actually easier to unlock a phone in a "non-legal" way before the law than it was right after.
This whole new code of conduct for carriers actually made them convert their SIMlock departments to be more like a customer retention lifecycle.
This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.
[1]: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/08/15/heres-h...
I had no idea this was still a thing, it’s horrible. What mechanism is creating the current situation? Phones are all unlocked here in New Zealand.
Lack of general consumer protection regulation (or their enforcement), and specifically with regards to telecommunications the regulator who's supposed to oversee the field (the FCC in the US, or OFCOM in the UK for example) is often in bed with the companies it's supposed to regulate.
Really? I'm surprised because I'm in AU and there are certainly phones locked to a specific carrier. What about $10 burner phones?
It's not usually like that - and I've had a few locked phones.
Usually the deal is that a network, say Vodafone, subsidises the handset by £50 of some such in return for you being forced to use Vodafone services for a couple of years, unless you arrange to unlock it.
It's sort of ok as a deal but a pain in many ways if you want to travel and use a local SIM or sell the phone for example.
I recently paid off my AT&T iPhone X and the process to unlock it couldn't have been easier.
https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1262649
Notably, you have to have been paid up (somewhat understandable), active for 60 days if postpaid (not really reasonable at all), or if prepaid, active for 6 months (absolutely not reasonable). This basically precludes someone selling a phone secondhand entirely if they haven't unlocked it first by holding the value of the phone hostage (phones are worth less when locked). Completely anti-consumer. And AT&T isn't even the worst about this. I once tried to unlock a phone through Rogers and they wanted $120 to do it! This was back around 2011 so their policy might have changed but given Canada's terrible telco situation I doubt it has changed much.
UK: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54692179
EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unfair_Commercial_Practices_Di...
But there are Android phones that come with bootloader/OS lock, which often means old device is stuck with some ancient OS version (and some bundled bloatware), instead of being able to be reflashed to a recent LineageOS.
I recently got two iphones from their owners, pulled out of the drawer to monetize them on classifieds. Both locked and unresettable without the previous owners help (one could be unlocked because I got her account password over the phone, huge nogo but she trusts me to not screw with her account). The other not, account was lost.
Apple also now tags and ties both battery and camera to the logicboard. Shame.
Perhaps it's because I was less financially literate in the past, but I remember that as being the only way in the 2000s. There might have been laws passed to limit that practice and its abuses.
The smart solution, provided you have enough money, is to buy the phone elsewhere, and take a plan without a phone. It's always less expensive in the long term.
in Germany, the Telco's gave up locking the phones in 2017. Because it was to expensive. I can not remember if it was a hard lock - as in any other sim card is blocked or just their additions to the OS. bought a phone in 2017/early 2018 - Xperia 10, where on the boot screen a Deutsche Telekom logo appears but otherwise the OS unaffected by vendor edits/additions. But updates are really slow since they go through Telekom instead of directly from sony which is already slow.
I know many who can't do math and paid twice the value of the phone for a locked device and some plan they never really used fully.
That has not been the case for a long time. The last phone I had on contract was an iPhone 4.
/me mumbles something about "Kids these days..."
But the reason I have a handful of paperweight mobiles is not that they are locked but that they are no longer useful. They have low resolution cameras, little memory, small screens, obsolete operating systems, etc. I sometimes try to sell them but no one wants them even free.
It's worth mentioning that the common problem with these anecdotes is that it doesn't account for survivorship bias. That 30 year old refrigerator at your parent's house might lead you to conclude all refrigerators back in the day lasted 30 years, but in reality you're only seeing the refrigerators that lasted 30 years, not the ones that broke down and were replaced.
That's a key aspect of the market here: People tend to compare on purchase price. If manufacturers have to compete on price, of course something has to give in order to make cheaper appliances...
The market tends to give consumers what they want.
It's not all bad, though, because this also puts pressure on manufacturers to optimise, including by using less material. Appliances tend not to be that bad either unless perhaps if you buy really cheap cr*p.
The market tends to give consumers what they buy. This is distinct from what they ask for, which too is distinct from what they want, which too is distinct from what they like (and, while we're at it, from what they approve of).
A major point of markets is to try and figure this out iteratively. You can usefully think of it as an optimization algorithm that in practics prone to local minima but has some mechanisms to try and get out of them, which sometimes work.
So best we can do is observing "revealed preferences", which is what Economists call "what people actually choose".
As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die.
It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of us.
Sure we want better quality, repairability, longevity, but we also want cheaper, among other things. I think product ranges simply reflect where our priorities really lie.
To use two relevant examples:
Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack.
Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it.
Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends.
--
[0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
I for one "know" this by weighing HN anecdotes I've seen over the years - couple dozen saying that they sell solid stuff, and one or two saying that they used to sell solid stuff, but are now following the trend of replacing metal components with cheap plastics. How do I evaluate that? Brand trust isn't that strong a signal.
So as a consumer, I am unable to decide objectively, just using rumours if there isn't a hard guarantee or a trustworthy evaluation of the quality of all products I could pick. In that situation, I will price in the uncertainty, I will evaluate the rumours and the tendency to produce crappier stuff over time. And when in doubt, buy 4 cheap short-lived washing machines instead of 1 for 4 times the price.
A long warranty, while not a guarantee, is pretty correlated to the product lifespan.
A long warranty is only good if the manufacturer is trustworthy. But untrustworthy manufacturers are one of the causes of the whole problem.
A fix might be warranty terms defined by law, where the manufacturer can pick the duration and nothing else. Disputes should be settled in court or by a neutral board of experts.
Of course this is not a perfect measure, but I do think that a correlation would exist here.
My strong impression is it's hard to do. People may say the want kale, but end up buying donuts.
They weren't lying about wanting to be the kind of person who buys kale. But at the moment of truth, they got donuts "just this once".
Their tight grip on retailers also makes it hard to buy their products outside EU because nobody is willing to go through the pain. Add higher than average price and most smaller retailers just sell samsungs, lg and random chinese brands.
The biggest problem remains, manufacturers are not required to sell repairable devices and parts everywhere, requirement is only applicable to EU, so they will continue to manufacture trash and will never have their parts available outside EU. And no, those EUR parts will definitely won't fit 99% of their products outside EU.
1. You don’t see the junk which never lasted 20 years - plenty of stuff died back then, too. Cutting corners to save a buck is a very, very old practice - I’d be surprised if you couldn’t find some Babylonian tablet complaining about it.
2. Manufacturers generally switched from letting prices go up to introducing new products. If you buy stuff which costs as much (adjusted for inflation) as what your parents laid, it often lasts just as long. The problem is that a lot of us only buy the cheapest thing and are then surprised when a $400 purchase now doesn’t hold up as well as a purchase which cost $1,000 in today’s dollars – and the one costing $1,000 today probably does much better.
Styles also change - for example, a lot of athletic gear became very focused on ultralight performance: great for racers but almost always less durable. Does that mean you can’t buy the older style or just that you need to shop differently?
It’s definitely the case that there are areas where it’s harder to find durable options (IoT causing a generation of devices to lose features or fail long before the hardware does) but it’s less pronounced than old people complaining believe. It’s really harder to correct for subtle biases for things like inflation which happen over long periods of time.
- Bosch Fridge Freeze - a couple of the shelves have broken and I have no idea where to get replacements.
- Bosch Fan Oven - sometimes cuts off if it is left on above 250c for more than 30 mins.
- Bosch Dishwasher - had to take it apart once to clean as some paper got stuck in the impeller.
- Bosch Condenser Dryer - no issues so far, other than not RTFM about the drain hose which needs to be elevated above the unit for some reason.
- Samsung Washing Machine - One day I came in and there was water all over the floor from the washing machine. Took it apart and I could see signs of leaking, but couldn't see anything wrong, after that it worked fine. Recently it starting making a lot of noise on the spin cycle, turned out the feet needed leveling, now it's good as new.
- Electrolux Induction Cooktop - There are some cosmetic issues (stains that won't come off) on the glass.
I did not repair any of my fridges (they never failed in all of my adult life), but I did repair my washing machine (AEG 15y.o.) and my beans-to-coffee DeLonghi (10+ y.o). Both were very repairable and it was a matter of identifying the failure and finding the right part on eBay.
You can still do that on most modern fridges, but it's not worth the effort with appliance prices now. They also don't fail often these days.
The same thing happened to furniture.
Still it’s a worthwhile pursuit. At some point pocket PCs/phones will be good enough, just as for many a 2014 laptop is still good enough.
Google is making billions per year, they can certainly afford to support all versions of Android. They just choose to pocket the money and screw their customers instead.
Anyone know why opera can run on android 4 and the latest Chrome can't/wont?
Have you checked whether you could install LineageOS or some other custom ROM on the tablet? That way, you might be able to extend its lifetime by another couple years.
That's simply because "make it easy to replace" has not been a design constraint in a very long time -- in fact, making things hard to replace or fix has been a design constraint that product management has enforced more or less explicitly in lots of places. "Miniaturisation" has been a reality of electronics design since at least the 1950s -- not being able to fix things is a more recent phenomenon.
Even if that weren't the case, IC manufacturing reliability has come a long enough way that, in fact, "everything on-chip" doesn't account for all that many broken units. Virtually all of the phones I've repaired in the last 10 years or so had broken volume buttons, cracked displays and so on. The phone I currently use had a blown battery management controller, which was trivial to replace.
"Everything is small now" is just one of the excuses that companies bring to the table. It is a legitimate reason in that, yes, the fact that everything is small amplifies the effect of the fact that, at best, making things easy to repair hasn't been a design goal. That doesn't mean the design can't be improved.
Edit: also, a lot of the high repair cost comes from constraints that derive directly from the fact that repairing things is all sorts of faux pas. E.g. replacement screens often have to be shipped, in small batches, halfway across the world, which isn't exactly easy or cheap if you're a small repair shop. If repairing things were easier and carried less of a stigma, replacement parts would be cheaper, repairing things would take less time and so on.
Nobody is asking to split the current, high pin-density SoC into eighty chips with DIP sockets, they're mostly asking for things like:
* Publishing service manuals and schematics
* Making replacement parts available (replacing the SoC isn't that big a deal, the problem is that you often can't get that SoC anywhere)
* Not selling things with an EULA that explicitly prohibits "unauthorized" repairs
"Making things discreet" is pretty much a red herring. Sure, making everything discreet would result in bulkier, pricier, and probably worse phones, but you can massively improve the general public's access to repairs without doing that.
This is only partially true. The true cost is hidden and at least by average people like me immeasurable. We are putting a lot of cost out of sight if you consider the environmental impact of e-waste.
If all modern phones were as repairable as those we could eliminate so much garbage!
It seems that most people want more than just usable. They may not want to pay more for a device up front, knowing they will be missing out on the latest technology down the road.
People can still buy new stuff earlier if they want. But their old stuff can be reused by those that do not need, want or can afford the new devices. There are many categories of devices where that's a good option for many, not only phones. Besides, it's always good to have the option to repair that thing you have when it breaks even if initially you did not think you would need that. You might have grown to like it.
I've been using a 6S since 2015 (this thread caught my interest because it's now somewhat of a Ship of Theseus as I've replaced so many parts over the years), but the 11 Pro I bought last year was the first time a multi-year-gap upgrade felt rather incremental, especially for $1100. I returned it and expect to continue to use and repair the 6S until they drop iOS support for it.
Smartphones have largely caught up to traditional computers in terms of the time it takes for upgrade-worthy advancements in hardware. I expect we'll see smartphone upgrade cycles continue to lengthen until they mirror desktop/laptop upgrade cycles.
* OnePlus 3, released in June 2016, 6 GB RAM.
vs
* iPhone 7, released in September 2016, 2 GB RAM.
* iPhone 12 Pro Max, released in October 2020, 6 GB RAM.
From my perspective smartphones have not changed much.
By contrast the processor in my work phone (an Iphone) is faster than my laptop.
This is the worst kind of planned obsolesces
I agree that the manufacturer or carrier doesn't owe you updates indefinitely, but they definitely should give you all the resources you need to develop these updates yourself if you wanted to.
The landscape can change. Maybe there's going to be a huge open-source project that will make these updates. Maybe someone will figure out a way to automatically handle a large number of hardware configurations at scale (a powerful enough hardware abstraction layer should be able to deal with it). Maybe someone will make a business out of it, providing security updates at a reasonable cost. Either way, there shouldn't be any artificial hurdles against the customer developing and running their own firmware on hardware they paid money for.
I would really like to hack on a tablet I have that's 5 years old, but I can't because the firmware and drivers are both closed source.
I think when I buy a device, I should get the source code to it once the manufacturer decides it's not worth it for them to continue patching the software for the device I've bought.
I3 runs reasonably well, but Gnome would probably be too heavy to make for an enjoyable experience.
Would you be willing to pay whatever your share is of how much generating the update would cost, in order to get it? With a clear indicator when you buy the phone that you automatically get a subscription to 3 years worth of security updates; past that, you pay whatever amount is needed to keep it up to date.
Conceptually, I dislike that mobile development hasn't followed a similar path. Samsung should not dictate how many updates my phone gets and for how many years. Practically, I realize that this is a consequence of how we've built SOCs and mobile hardware and there's no incentive for companies to change. That doesn't make it less problematic.
Also, we’ll have to figure out how to manage with a sort of stagnation.
Essentially this entails curbing change. Curbing change means slowing progress (initially in this niche), but if we extend this into other areas it can mean significant stagnation because since things are good enough we don’t need to improve and progress (ie. we’re at equilibrium )
We'll have to grow comfortable with that outlook.
But sure. Repairability is one thing, it just means that devices can continue the things they were made for. For new workloads they would need upgradeability, which is a completely different beast.
I don't think having repairability will slow things at all. It will simply prune some behaviors corporations engage in that destroy the planet, like glueing in batteries. Stopping such practices will not even make new devices more expensive - we have old designs that did it right. Falling back to them and innovating there could even save money.
The problem is that this has happened despite my usage not changing.
Though yes, thank goodness the end of Moore's law is here to help.
I normally find these types of appliances make parts readily available. I just replaced the locking mechanism on my washing machine for example, it was cheap and easy to order the parts I needed.
- no service/troubleshooting manual/videos available online
- no way to identify what replacement part to buy unless you're in the know already
- getting access to locking mechanism looked like it would lead to washing machine completely falling apart structurally (there was a somewhat hidden "safety" screw that looked like a last defense against people removing the front panel just by removing the apparent screws and hurting themselves)
So I bailed on this without a proper guide on safe disassembly procedure.
Thankfully wiggling the connector to the locking switch made the lock and thus the washing machine work again, after a first failure since 15 years ago or whatever. It looked just fine inside (surprisingly). Vibrations probably don't allow much dirt to accumulate. No obvious rusting/leakage. I was surprised.
I'd like to think there was a reason the manufacturer wanted the entire housing replaced?
I, mistakenly, bought the refrigerator with LED lighting because I hated how old-style bulbs would turn on slowly in the cold. LED lighting should be instant I thought. Oh no, totally on purpose it was made slow.
Regarding slow starts - not that it's terribly useful to mention now, I grant, but most incandescent appliance bulbs can be replaced with compatible and much less temperature-sensitive LED ones these days.
The fridge manufacturer probably assumed it’ll always run cold (it’s a fridge right?) and overdrove them too hard to get just as much light out of 20 LEDs instead of 24.
Could bridge the faulty LED with solder to buy some time, and find a donor LED from a “burnt out” LED light bulb or whatevs and solder it in.
I guess you’ve tried a lower wattage bulb ...
That trend has become ubiquitous: cars, laptops, phones...
Nothing is designed to be fixed at home anymore. If there were regulations that required it, we'd still have the same advanced tech, but it'd be repair friendly.
HP Pavilion gaming, ASUS ROG Strix and newer Macbooks have keyboards secured by melting topcase plastic pins or bolts so you can't easily replace keyboard, you need to replace the whole topcase.
And the keyboard is something which degrades by use and can easily be damaged by liquid...
Just as we have with pharma patents, after a protection period it should be free game, and they should open-source if they don't intend to continue pushing updates, say evety 6 months or so.
In all of the following I got a new thing looking for some new feature or because I could I guess, and had the older device outlasted the newer one: Bose headphones, any mobile phone really, Thinkpad laptops, Audi cars, Brother printers, any and all household appliances.
I really don't see the problem. Like you're saying people are buying new stuff because they want the new stuff, not because old is broken. There are tons of extremely cheap second hand things that could do the job and yet people keep buying new things.
How will this right to repair change anything? How much money was spent making it reality that could've been spent productively?
Note: whenever throwing those things out, save the knobs. They’re like $10+ each.
They have to change the whole motherboard, lose all my data. Price of a new machine...
grumble, grumble
I have seen a "for parts" Macbook on eBay with bad motherboard where the seller drilled through SSD and T2 chips to "wipe data". While drilling they damaged the topcase as well.
I think this is part of the point you are trying to make, but everything requires maintenance. Not sure what model fridge you have, but a bulb replacement should be not too hard to pull off on your own.
I simply am surrounded by tens and hundreds of sort-of-broken devices that don't force me to replace yet, but are not fixable either. The laptop overheats, phone compass never works properly, one port in the TV is dead, there is no light in the fridge (but it still works). The list goes on. I just want a world where stuff lasting a lifetime exists.