In other words this was complete bullshit.
It’s true that older devices are less capable than newer ones, and you might not want to browse on an old device.
But they aren’t bricks.
Understatement of the year concerning unsupported, insecure and (unreasonably) locked Apple devices.
2. What 11 year old GNU/Linux phone is supported today let alone ‘forever’?
Linux laptops have a proven track record of being supported for >10 years. Since the GNU/Linux phones also run mainline Linux, they are effectively the same kind of devices. There is no reason to expect that GNU/Linux phones will stop being supported.
> 2. What 11 year old GNU/Linux phone is supported today let alone ‘forever’?
Nokia N900? See also: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
1. No they aren’t. The hardware is different. Laptops are not the same as phones. It’s a false comparison.
They may run the mainline kernel, but they certainly don’t run mainline distributions usefully.
PinePhone isn’t even considered supported for consumer use today.
It’s sold for developers and most users say it doesn’t even work as a daily driver
2. Is the Nokia 900 supported? It’s not obvious. What makes you think it is? Even you used a ‘?’.
3. Why is this relevant?
Anyone who wants one can buy a PinePhone or Librem.
Why would someone who wants a GNU/Linux phone buy an iPhone?
An iPhone 4 with the “last supported OS” is significantly slower than when it had the OS it launched with.
This is true across the board, which leads to this very convenient “they can buy used iPhones, but we don’t want them to use them, so we’ll gently guide them to new devices by making it inconvenient and annoying”
And before someone argues: Yes, much of the slowdown is because of new features, BUT Apple could simply allow users to disable most of them (such as ML-processing photos in the background, or deep-indexing file contents for spotlight. Those are not required for the phone to function as a phone).
If someone wanted to use the iPhone 3GS with the original iOS, not sync to the cloud, replace the battery every couple years, and install a firewall to prevent intrusion via known attack vectors, they could realistically have a perfectly snappy and solid experience in any future decade. Doubly so if they kept a 2.4Ghz AP when the industry is on some unknown future frequency.
However: Apple has taken many steps to prevent exactly that sort of thing, and they will continue to make as many as they can get away with.
This ignores the fact that later iPhones with the newest OS are significantly faster than what they launched with, which contradicts the conclusion that this is intentional.
Large companies simply settle out of court in order to silence the facts.
- If they are wrong and are successful in getting out of it, they might walk away with a judge "confirming" that they did no wrong.
- If they are wrong and the evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive, they might write a cheque and walk away.
In either case the public does not have any convincing argument based on evidence. Therefore we have to go by subtext.
Apple was accused of slowing down the devices intentionally. They admitted the bare minimum (low power mode), then wrote a cheque that made the rest of the accusations go away.
To me, that's as convincing as a verdict by a judge.
We can deduce that there as no evidence of intent, since if the plaintiffs had such evidence they wouldn’t have settled for so little. Remember that this was a class action with a huge class, so the settlement amount is diminimis for the plaintiffs but a decent payout for the attorneys. I.e. they had no case, and Apple paid to end the inconvenience.
This is obviously nothing like a verdict by a judge and provides us no information about the facts whatsoever, because no facts were presented.
The presence of a court case does not provide evidence for the michaelmrose’s subtext.
If it did, you would be able to reference some.
Also, this further confirms that the original claim by michaelmrose that they lost a court case and that the court found intent, was complete bullshit.
I remember when in 2014 I decided to give away my unused iPad 1st gen, just as a e-reader. So I've erased it but no apps were supporting this device already. Even the official Apple Books app.
Yes, techicaly it wasn't bricked, it worked, you still can turn it on and off. But without software it's useless.
4 years was an eternity in device capability at the time the first gen of the iPad was released.
I’m writing this on a 6 year old iPad Pro that I use every day. Everything runs on it, and it shows no sign of being too slow or even needing a battery replacement.
It seems like the problem has been solved.
Or you mean that there was a problem with Apple servers and now it's fixed?
The design choices have to be made to artificially shorten the life, not for any other purpose. For example, I can make a device cheaper and use cheaper materials that wear out faster - that's not planned obsolescence. However if I include a little plastic tab that I know will break before everything else for no good reason other than making it break faster - that is.
I suspect you'll have a hard time arguing compellingly that the purpose of apples closed update system was to shorten the useful life, rather than as a side effect of other product and design goals.
Phones are sort of a bad example, because for a long time the replacement cycle was driven by actual technical obsolescence, arguably only relatively recently has this ceased to be the case.
So what is the reason to prevent updates of software after the support is over? This is a classical software anti-feature.
The reason 1st gen iPads don’t have this is fairly obvious though - the unlocking feature is itself a likely vector for attacks e.g. by law enforcement unlocking tools, etc.
I’m not sure what it would take to enable it to be done securely without destroying the overall security model but it’s clearly not trivial, and would take some investment that certainly wasn’t possible at the time the 1st gen device was released.
Wondering, can that be called a planned obsolescence or not?
This is definitely an issue, but it's not the same issue as planned obsolescence.
Because the design choices are pretty easily argued to have been made for reasons other than reducing user access, but have the side effect of reducing user access. Both size/weight constraints and case integrity drive you to the same sort of thing.
To be clear, I think it's fine to call out a company for planned obsolescence, and I think it's fine to call them out for emphasizing size, etc. over user serviceability. I just don't think it's useful to pretend they are the same thing.
Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence.
It could, but nobody has presented any evidence that Apple is doing this, and their business strategy is openly stated to involve increasing the lifetime of their devices, so that they can deliver services to more users, so this is just innuendo.
Simply compare the cost of official Apple service and corrsponding third-party service.
Here are some reasonable explanations for how third parties cut costs without resort to a conspiracy:
1. Less warranty on repairs.
2. Lower cost substitute parts.
3. Lower quality control,
4. Less training for staff.
5. Lower profit margins, leading to unsustainable businesses.
I don't think it can, for reasons elsewhere in thread.
Arguably it’s the opposite of planned obsolescence - even used phones are not obsolete and are still in circulation.
It’s also worth pointing out that this is Apple’s stated policy - they want phones to last longer so that more people have them and they can continue to sell services to them.
This has nothing to do with the definition of planned obsolescence. It does not matter what people do with the old phones.
I don’t need to reread it. My response applies to design obsolescence.
Relatively few people upgrade every year these days. The fact that the old devices are still desirable negates the idea that people don’t want them because they look outdated. I.e. changes in design are not causing people to stop using the devices.
For design obsolescence to apply to Apple, workable devices would need to be retired from service early because they were no longer seen as desirable.
That isn’t happening.
[Citation needed]
Compare phones sold to phones in service.
Tens of millions vs more then a billion.
Every update I get on my mac, or Iphone slows it down. Bloat and "protecting the users battery" are the root causes, and ultimately Apple is one of the best examples of a company "artificially shortening" things via design choices.
This is completely false.
Secondly, as you must be aware, the reason Apple decreased the performance was to extend the useful lifetime of the battery.
The fine was because they didn’t explain this properly in advance, not because they did it.
They still in fact do alter the device performance to accommodate aging batteries and make them last longer.
This is a really silly issue to raise if the argument is about Apple shortening lifetimes of devices or batteries, since it makes the device usable for longer.
To imagine it requires understanding how technology works.
Batteries are chemical processes - they degrade slowly over time. An older battery produces less power, and so can’t support the same peak performance.
You can therefore extend the useful life of the battery by throttling the CPU performance to within the power envelope provided by the battery.
It’s fairly simple to understand.
Nothing was proven by the lawsuit, since it never went to trial, you know this so it’s unclear why you’d repeat this falsehood.
As for not your suggestion that Apple not slow the devices down to extend the battery life and have users just replace the battery, that seems misguided.
Why would you want users to be forced to buy unnecessary battery replacements and further damage the environment by wasting working batteries?
It’s much better for the devices to be able to continue to use the batteries for longer, don’t you think?
Yes, it is. Even though Apple devices last longer, after the support is ended, I cannot do anything with them. I cannot update, install anything. They effectively become bricks. If this is not planned obsolescence, then what is?