The solution is rather simple; buy devices with better documented and open internals rather than what's cheapest, shiniest, and most convenient. There are alternatives, and we all vote with our wallets.
watches the plan fail yet again
This is like saying "we dont need regulations in meat packing, every individual can become educated in butchery cleanliness and track the supply chains for the products they buy and everything will be better!"
It's easier to achieve regulation when people care and show that they care. It seems to me, voting now with your wallet is one of the most direct ways to make a case.
> I vote for what I think is best.
Maybe you're an exception, but if you're talking about "vote with your wallet", then the vast majority will actually vote what they think is best for their wallets.
I mean, if you're going to let money decide, then expect the outcome to benefit money.
People say this kind of thing all the time, even on HN. It's a libertarian saw that the FDA is unneccesary and obstructionist. Personally I think it's deranged, but apparently it's an ideological battle that's still being fought.
If you mean "a bunch of relatively new Android phones not getting security updates because their manufacturer doesn't support them", then yes. Apple is actively providing not just security patches but entire feature software updates for the iPhone 6S, which is 4.5 years old at this point.
Did this already happen? I only remember the announcement and then researchers on Twitter complaining that the first one is yet to be seen.
iOS ecosystem. Since Apple is a hardware manufacturer foremost, you notice from the start you aren’t the product. Lots of apps, many of high quality.
Librem/Pinephone : Linux phones. While the hardware is still closed source in certain parts, it’s a step up from what we have now. Librem allows you to install any linux variant you choose.
Zerophone : Build your own phone basically, very cheap to build ($50) , and currently in development.
There is more to a phone than just the cpu.
I'm gonna keep these things running as long as I can, because the prospect of replacing them with something a decade newer but inferior in every meaningful way is simply sad.
LineageOS is the only reason I don't loathe the whole Android ecosystem, to be honest.
Rooting permits applications to have more control over the device at runtime. Some devices require the bootloader to be unlocked to enable rooting, and others do not.
Nokia is the best though: https://www.counterpointresearch.com/nokia-leads-global-rank...
they support even their very old phones to upgrade up to the latest version of Android.
It is missing the Jan & Feb 2020 updates that the Pixel 2 received, but it's plausible the Pixel 1 could still get a patch for this critical issue.
Less dangerous, for sure...
And get locked in another walled garden? Erm... no thank you.
You can appreciate the longevity and continued support of an iPhone without having an Apple Watch. You can appreciate a MacBook for its OS (pre Catalina anyway) and build quality (I'm still running a 2014 model -- though I have read about recent models' issues) without having an iPhone to pair it with. To be fair, you cannot appreciate an Apple Watch without an iPhone at all since it won't do anything, and I'm no the fence about AirPods and how well they do outside the Apple world.
My point is, once you're in the ecosystem, you notice a lot of little things that may make your life easier. Are they great? Yeah absolutely. Are they what sells the product? In my opinion, not at all. Unless it happens to pinpoint your exact use case (I need to lock and unlock my MacBook 30 times a day and I'm tired of having to enter a password, I want my Apple Watch to unlock it), it's the product itself that will most likely convince you. The way they neatly play together at times is just the cherry on top, like when you notice your computer and phone now share a clipboard. That's awesome, but not a single selling point for anyone.
Now, I will be the first one to say: iTunes sucks. So, if you do buy an iPhone, it makes sense IMO to shed out the extra 99ct a month for iCloud storage.
I didn't want my comment to sound like I'm saying Apple does it best. I just wanted to drive the point home that I don't think it's mainly the ecosystem that makes Apple devices fun to use.
As a side note, I wasn't talking hardware that lasts 5 years. We all know most devices on the market now can pull that off, bar one battery-replacement. I was rather talking continued software updates, where iOS is certainly in the lead.
Edit: just re-read your comment and you were talking Apple computers specifically. Oh well :)
I feel like that only furthers my original point though. I didn't want to argue that Apple does it best, only that you can enjoy their devices without being fully bought into the ecosystem.
* The barrier of entry is very high: You need a top-tier manufacturing system and supply chain. An operating system. An entire suite and market of applications. All of the apps users expect and rely on (mail, navigation, Facebook, chat, Instagram, etc.) must be supported. The hardware is only profitable if you manufacture at very high scale.
* Information asymmetry is very high. Users have almost no insight into how secure one platform is versus another. In fact, they have access to paradoxical information. The most secure platforms are the ones with the most transparent security flaw handling, but those are also the ones that appear the least secure because the vulnerabilities are more widely reported.
* Products are nowhere near commoditized. A phone is a very large constellation of hardware, operating system, and software features. There is no apples to apples comparison between phones. Maybe you like the camera on one but not the screen on the other. One has better apps but the other a more stable OS.
This is not a market where consumer choice will effectively drive solutions to diffuse problems.
Also FWIW, the problem has zilch to do with "Android" per se - pre-Android mobile Linux was even worse. It's embedded platforms in general.
That means there is no Android or Apple device on the market today that accomplishes what you say.
The only phones that are out there that can do that are the Pinephone and Librem 5. I have beta devices of both, and while I am extremely excited to see them mature and turn into daily drivers, the fact is neither can actually be a daily driver today.
Better go with a Pinephone if everything that's been written about Librem as a company is even half-true.
If I have $200 to spend on a phone, I will not buy a low-end 2019 $200 phone.
I will buy a used (or new-old-stock) flagship that was $700 when it came out a few years ago, and is now $200 on the used market.
The older flagship will have similar specs to today's low-end junk, but also all the enthusiast support, better accessory availability, and probably better build quality overall, because it was originally intended to be the highest of the high-end.
I've saved hundreds of dollars of technology on trivial home repairs instead of buying replacements.
Having a "standard" OS interface for the phone, where there is just one OS image for a given OS version, and that image could be installed on any phone - now that would be the true alternative, which I would be delighted to vote for with my wallet.
Project Treble is working towards this, in a way. But it's a huge hack that's still dependent on lots of weird AOSP-specific stuff, and doesn't even give you a "single" OS image for every device - the "proper" image for your device varies by baseline AOSP support (7, 8, 9, 10), "A" vs. "A+B" boot and of course 32-bit vs. 64-bit architecture. Nowhere near "UEFI-based PC" territory.
Sure, but each PC is also 'unique' in that sense, in fact I'd happily bet that there are more different kinds of hardware combinations for PCs than there are android phone models. And yet, that never was a problem.
for i in range(256):
poke(i,magic1)
if peek(i) == magic2:
found!
Phone SoCs on the other hand have many peripherals memory-mapped, (meaning there are millions/billions addresses to 'probe'), plus there are things like power sequencing, GPIO enable lines that need to be asserted, and clock-sources configured before peripheral would even respond at all. Oh, and that GPIO, or power controller, or clock source themselves might be accessible via an i2c chip speaking its own protocol, so you need to initialize those first, etc, etc.
All of this complexity could be described via linux "devicetree" subsystem, and devicetrees are in a usable state for some hardware (although DT itself is often a labyrinth to navigate). Thing is - factory software for most phones have been extremely slow to adopt DT, and even some that do use DT, don't do it in a particularly portable way.
The current options include all Nokia smartphones, Motorola One line, and Xiaomi Mi A line.
For the best hardware and 5G support, I would look at Nokia 9.2 (Snapdragon 8--) and Nokia 8.2 (Snapdragon 7--) releases this year.
The best deal is to buy 6 months after the release, when most Android devices become heavily (30-40%) discounted, but are still quite new.
I prefer Android over iOS because of the freedom to install open-source OS-level ad-blockers, such as Blokada[1], which greatly improve privacy and battery life.
That's true. Just like Samsung, Huawei, OnePlus, and any other Android manufacturer except Nokia, Xiaomi maintains its own Android ROM, called MIUI[1]. It's not as vanilla as Android One, but at least it also receives monthly security patches.
> Among which is the need to "sign up" online for bootloader unlock and wait for a timeout period. They do this because resellers used to ship bootloader-unlocked versions with "unofficial" mods of sorts, often with customers being none-the-wiser. Not an issue on the 'Mi A' line, for whatever reason.
It's not an issue with Xiaomi Mi A line, because Xiaomi's reputation is not affected as much if there is something wrong with a smartphone that is not running its custom ROM.
Nokia has only recently started allowing to unlock the bootloader of some of the models, and has a similar process[2].
And any custom Android ROM requires drivers to be able to completely support the hardware of a particular device.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/241012/safetynet-explained-why-and...
Librem/Pinephone : Linux phones. While the hardware is still closed source in certain parts, it’s a step up from what we have now. Librem allows you to install any linux variant you choose.
Zerophone : Build your own phone basically, very cheap to build ($50) , and currently in development.
Can you name one smartphone device with open internals? I'd love to buy one, but I don't think they exist. From Replicant's recommendations [1]:
If compromising on privacy/security is not an option, or anything serious is at stake (e.g. political activism or journalism in a sensitive area), it is advised to avoid using a telephony-enabled device at all.
My impression from the smartphone market is that phone platforms have become less open, not more, over the last ten years. The PinePhone isn't generally available yet, and the Librem 5 current iterations don't have working audio calls.
[1] https://www.replicant.us/freedom-privacy-security-issues.php...
Mainline Linux:
https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/
Mainline Linux + high-level hardware documentation:
"Voting with your wallet" only leads to good outcomes if the incentives are right. I mean it's money, the VAST majority of it is spent not for the greater good but for small, inefficient egotistical purposes.