Please make your substantive points without fulminating.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that a $50 smartphone introduced in 2021 is in no way anything special or novel. Cheaper usable smartphones have been around for years. The billions are not getting anything they haven't had for years.

This is classic PR, inventing a fake reason why a profitmaking move is somehow altruistic.

It works on many such as you because many such as you are steeped in the middle class world of $300 flagship phones every couple years and were unaware that decent sub $50 phones have been around for years.

Even a pretty nice phone like a Google pixel or Google pixel 2 can be had for about $100 used. They work great still and only have issues because of intentional choices by Google to prevent security updates. It's only a policy thing, no technical cause -- custom ROMs allow latest Android to be used just fine.

I can't express my contempt for big companies creating an artificial problem, then trying to get credit for partially fixing it.

PS: I relied on the $40 moto G for a few years without issues except "kind of slow". I upgraded to a used Google pixel off eBay for $100 a few years ago. I'm a software engineer and use plenty of popular apps. The forced upgrade treadmill is totally artificial. Just look at the specs on the Google pixel 2 vs pixel 5 sometime. No practical difference, just a bunch of marginal gimmicky stuff like 4 cameras, fingerprint readers that are on the screen instead of the back, etc.

> I can't express my contempt for big companies creating an artificial problem, then trying to get credit for partially fixing it.

Pretty much nailed it. How many big companies are out there, which are not taking advantage of their partial monopoly or huge influence?

Money always wins. Capitalism encourages for endless growth and profits.

Wholeheartedly agree — I’ve owned a pixel one for the entire lifecycle of the phone. The problem with the pixel one right now is that they no longer get security updates — any tips with regard to that?

These guys[1] still publish updates of the AOSP code including security updates. So you would just miss firmware updates.

1: https://download.pixelexperience.org/sailfish

Thanks, that’s amazing. I have some fondness to the phone as I swapped out the screen two times, finger reader and battery. Manual updates will just be another thing I do to keep the adventure going :)

Very true!

I still use my 10-year old Samsung Galaxy 2 phone (mainly as mp3 player and spare phone when I want to take a more expendable one).

Flash it with cyanogen and you have a basic smartphone that still feels snappy.

https://cyanogenmodroms.com/i9100/

My main phone is a 5 year old Galaxy S7 and I would very likely buy another as my main phone if this one was lost.

MotoG at $40 off contract was probably a clearance sale, and not available in millions of units. I can't think of an HD screen phone at this price point - can you post some links?

The 300m people Jio is hoping to migrate from 2G to 4G with this phone will now be able to use essential apps such as those needed for Covid vaccination registration, job searches and digital payments. Hence this is hugely empowering.

I find your comment a little disheartening, sorry. You could buy on a black friday sale, or eBay - but so what? The target segment for this phone makes less than $300 a month.

Dude. I literally bought the aforementioned moto G twice, new, a least a year apart (cracked the screen and it was cheaper to replace than fix). I bought it at the Verizon or TMobile store (I forget which) both or at least one of the times. Just do some quick googling and you'll find brand new phones for under $50 today. It wasn't a one off deal. The world is awash in cheap smartphones and has been for years and you have no idea because of your social class haha.

I find your lack of effort "a little disheartening" as you say. It's like you don't want to believe it's cheap and easy to get a decent new phone for very little.

I went to the trouble of doing what you were too lazy to do. I don't have time to do more pointless googling but Verizon prepaid sells a no contract $55 smartphone today. You can likely get better deals if you shop around at all, or are in a cheaper market than the USA. I'm not going to engage with you further, do your own work. https://www.verizon.com/smartphones/orbic-maui-prepaid/?cmp=...

I did search unlocked phones before commenting; couldn't find a comparable phone. The link you posted comes with a 60-day lock period.

The cheapest phone in India with an HD display comes in at around 25% higher than what Jio phone will sell for (if the $50 turns out to be true).

Disclosure: I did work with Jio (as a consultant) on software for their older JioPhone, running a version of Firefox OS. It sold about 70 million units.

Add: Perhaps my Google fu is lacking, but I am not able to validate "decent sub $50 phones have been around for years". With these specs, that is. I can't find anything on Amazon, Walmart and TMobile under 50.

Maybe there's been a little inflation then, we've had a lot of that lately. I bought my moto Gs years ago. I think you're losing the forest for the trees here.

Shoshana Zuboff explains this perfectly. These companies disempower and commercialize people at the exact moment of empowerment, e.g. I provide you with a cheap smartphone / free and great service (like Google Maps) at the exact same time I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data. This is exactly what makes it so fraught. People aren't objecting to cheap phones, they're objecting to the continued commercialization and manipulation of human experience.

> I load it up with trackers so I can sell your behavioral data

Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.

Both companies sell ads. Data they collect is used to target those ads. That is their market edge. It doesn’t even make sense for them to want to sell data to 3rd parties because it would diminish their ad-targeting advantage.

I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other reasons to be concerned, but the myth of Google or Facebook “selling your data” is just wrong.

Fair point, but it's a useful shorthand for "assembles a vast profile via collection of your data in an effort to manipulate your behavior." Part of Zuboff's book is about this very thing. This is an entirely new economic model in history and therefore we lack useful language to describe it, and since we struggle to describe it we struggle to criticize and oppose it.

> Google doesn’t sell people’s data. Neither does Facebook.

These companies are in such a position, that they have so much data when selling it brings competitive disadvantage.

There is a competition going on from the control of the world, in terms of sophisticated A.I. development. This is where they are using their data. Ads are just little sidekick in the process anymore.

Also, they probably do everything with the data and a bit more than average data buyer would do.

Poor people don’t deserve to have their rights stripped just for being poor. Yes, this will help them, but it’s also important to be transparent about the motivations of Google; they’re not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, at all.

Are usable smartphones at the ~$50 level all that hard to find in India? If they're already available, then this move by Google won't make information more accessible, but it will give them more data & ad revenue. From a business standpoint that's fine, but it's not virtuous and doesn't improve the status quo.

Bilions of people already have access to much cheaper phones. Google just wants their data.

Meh. I agree that it's probably doing enough good for the world that Google's ulterior motives are worth ignoring, for the time being. But this level of cynicism and skepticism is absolutely warranted.

I wasn't and am not going to complain about "Boo, Google bad, ads bad", but I wonder if the promise of all the world's information in your hands have helped. Nowadays it seems misniformation has also been helped by the connected world, e.g. with Facebook groups basically helping^Wfacilitating the prosecution of Rohingya, not to mention the spread of Covid misinformation...

Well to actually talk about Google and ads, amazing how bored kids in Eastern Europe made fake news websites to earn Google ads revenue, not caring how it affects the people and the world.

I wonder if they do all of the same complaining on threads discussing Apple's and Samsung's new flagship phones at 10-40x price point...

what if people are actually better off not having 24/7 internet access in their pocket and all the new expectations that go along with it? i’d definitely like to return to that world given the chance

> But billions of people will get access to all the worlds information.

This is exactly how we ended up with QAnon, anti-vaxxers and people taking horse dewormer.

I'd argee with you ~15 years ago, but with the internet now being more or less dominated by companies who profit off "engagement" and are hawking any content (no matter how false or harmful) as long as they can get eyeballs to look at their ads I'm not sure it's that good of a thing.

> But billions of people will get access to all the worlds information.

The web is mostly only useful to a tiny percentage of the working class who have been somewhat able to get a successful formal education, and who go on to take up a spot as a privileged knowledge worker/labor aristocrat. For capitalist owners there is no toll-booth they cannot get past (through acquisitions/informational duopolies).

Today's education system is itself a traumatizing Hunger Games-esque competition (it was to me), and ends up debilitating and wounding most of the working class, convincing them that they are dumb and incapable [1], and most of all competitors to conquer. The public facing web you talk about ("all the worlds information") is actively hostile to beginners/learners, and is mainly designed to control the feedback from what today's dominant institutions/organizations are spouting out at us (it is far from the two way 'global village' McLuhan talked about).

I keep seeing access to Google, Wikipedia and YouTube touted as some sort of standard or benchmark for online knowledge equality, yet this narrative just serves as a self-justifying tool to remedy the survivorship guilt most labor aristocrats feel. As I wrote recently:

> It isn't access to Google search and Wikipedia that made the best scientists and engineers, it was access to commoditized knowledge which is enclosed, re-enclosed and then rented out in small amounts to the highest bidders (i.e. the so called 'prestigious' universities in the global north). In other words, it's held hostage behind corporate firewalls.

What we need is a distributed knowledge commons, as well as fully open-access scientific production systems. This means abolishing the IP regime and abolishing Silicon Valley. [2]

I see two of the highest leverage points for this being 1.) the Valueflo.ws vocabulary and system, which can help us rapidly replace today's corporatized siloed Enterprise Resource Planning software/systems, in favor of a fractal inter-organizational networks (similar to project Cybersyn in Chile under Allende [3]), and 2.) the holochain/ceptr (metacurrency project) framework, which has the potential to completely rewire/rearchitect the web using it's BitTorrent + Git + cryptography qualities [4] (keyword: agent-centric).

[1] Why I started my own Sudbury Valley school, https://www.reimaginedonline.org/2013/06/why-i-started-my-ow...

[2] Abolish Silicon Valley by Wendy Liu, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[3] Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile (Full Documentary), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJLA2_Ho7X0

[4] Reinventing Applications by Nicolas Luck https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...

You talk about abolishing IP regime then talk about strong IP defending holochain. The irony! (Bitcoin is all that is needed btw).

Your comment is insane dude. The knowledge commons is the public internet. Silicon Valley is just a place in California, why does it need to be abolished lol.

Access to pics, movies, propaganda and distraction.

Have you recently seen cities in "third world" countries like Uganda or Kenya? They look pretty modern. I don't buy that access to information relies on a cheap spying and data collecting device there.