While I agree that this sound nice this will virtually guarantee DRM-encumbered features of devices reaching their legally-required unlock date will be set to fail immediately. That'll force those devices to become e-waste anyway. No more streaming videos, no more using your bank's app, etc.

I miss the days when computing was focused on trying to protect the user from developers. These days it's more and more protecting the developer from the users.

I can still use my bank's "app" (read: web site) and stream videos on my desktop, which has an entirely unlocked bootloader.

That's coming. Just wait.

See Windows on ARM based PCs.

Sounds like you've stumbled on another thing we need to regulate.

We should do this sort of iterative thought experiment w.r.t. regulations all the time.

It's sort of like compiling a big package of code. Just keep trying to compile and fixing the errors that come up until it compiles.

Yes, regulating everything someone doesn’t like has a long storied history of success.

Do you feel that the level of regulation that we have in the tech sector is sufficient?

Why/why not?

The same should go for cars. I've got some bugs I want to fix on my in car entertainment system...

Where's this license to sell new devices that you speak of? And if it's hypothetical, what's the definition of a device that such a license would restrict?

Here https://www.fcc.gov/engineering-technology/laboratory-divisi...

But unlocking the bootloader, even only once official major updates has stopped, is a risky business move due to activation lock and Find My iPhone.

If they did this, there's a good chance phone theft creeps back to high levels, since thieves could just

1. wait until Apple releases new firmware that unlocks the bootloader

2. use that new firmwaare to wipe the memory that handles activation lock

3. re-install a fresh iOS

4. resell the phone

iPhone 8's still go for over $100 on eBay, so it's not unprofitable to 'inventory' stolen phones by throwing them in a desk drawer to sell within a few years.

Thieves are not known for their patience. Stealing things that won't be valuable for several years is not a very good business.

That's a lot of risk for $100 in 5 to ten years.

It might be for a small-time thief, but the more likely scenario is that they ship it to China (like they already do when they snatch an activation-locked phone and sell it for parts) and get $100 now, and the long-running shops in China do the long-term inventory for these phones instead of disassembling them for parts.

Android already has a solution to this. Unlocking the bootloader requires disabling activation lock.

Even back on the nexus line, if the phone was stuck in activation lock, you’d have to unlock with the google account and then with the phone unlocked you’d use adb to unlock the bootloader.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, a big point of contention is activation lock specifically. Unless you're buying $50-100 iPhone 7's and 8's off marketplace, chances are tons of devices you see in landfills are activation locked phones that either had their battery cut out, got cracked to the point where the user couldn't use the device, or were so badly damaged they just threw it away with no thought to reuse. In this case the iPhone(/iPad/Mac) is still locked, but enabling scrapyards to repurpose them by disabling activation lock would either allow criminals to do this as well, or if you had some vetting process to be able to remove the lock, it might just then the scrapyards de-facto dumps for stolen iPhones (since the scrapyards will like pay more for each phone once they can repurpose and sell them).

> potentially infinite

The moment we run out of rare minerals to build touch screens, there wont be an infinite e-waste problem anymore, unless we find some other fancy uses. It’s a finite resource logic that is needed; that mindset should be adopted globally and there should be a general agreement on how to best manage these finite resources…

As far as e-waste goes from discarded smartphones goes, it is not clear to me that it is a problem we have to solve now, as opposed to just storing the discarded phones somewhere until it becomes economical to break them down for recycling.

Given the number of smartphones currently sold world wide per year, and allowing for reasonable growth, if everyone discarded their phone every year and those discards were all just dumped into a 1 km x 1 km pit, if you made that pit 30 m deep it would be able to hold well over a century's worth of phones.