That being said, while I disagree with their business practices, I think their information security is one of the best. For contrast, imagine Equifax running your home security... :)
4 years is nothing in the consumer market with the exception of maybe smartphones.
Nobody has the money to buy all electronics new every 4 years and looking at the current Android version distribution, a lot of consumers don't even buy new smartphones every 4 years.
Smartphones that expire rapidly is a Google innovation.
Home appliance lifetime is typically measured in decades.
Home Furnace is probably the longest lasting Home Appliance and it has an expected life of 15-20 years. Common Kitchen Appliances (and most other appliances) are about 10 years...
Measuring support spans this way is... odd. It's like saying "ubuntu only comes with 1 year of support" because you installed 16.04 today. If we're going by this metric a lot of electronics have 0 years of support. Regardless, apple is still has the longest support, at least when it comes to phones/tablets.
Ubuntu 16.04 may only have one year of support left, but my current desktop hardware supports both 16.04 and 20.04. It's much more reasonable to sunset old software to reduce maintenance burden while providing an upgrade path than to lock people out of any upgrade path for their hardware.
There is also the distinction that Apple sells closed hardware and prevents you from installing a custom OS with longer software support. And that Apple products cost $$ while Ubuntu is free, which leads to different reasonable expectations. But I don't think either of those are needed to make my point.
Isn't hardware support just called "warranty"? That remains the same regardless of when you bought it.
>And that Apple products cost $$ while Ubuntu is free, which leads to different reasonable expectations.
My point wasn't whether canonical/apple's support lifecycle policies were reasonable, just that that defining support periods as the last day it was sold, rather the first day it was sold was unusual/misleading. If you want something to be supported a long time after you get it, you don't grab the oldest version, simple as that. Consumer products don't have a support subscription like enterprise products do, so limiting support to old products is really the only economically viable choice that companies have.
For that reason I think it's more than fine to continue selling it discounted until 2018, it's not like they were marketing it as flagship.
Additionally the 6s from Sept 2015 is receiving iOS 14.
Not that Apple's being altruistic here, obviously they want to segment the market and get money from wherever they can. But, can't expect them to sell low price point devices that are as future-proofed (future-resisted?) as top end hardware.
samsung: 1 year https://www.bestbuy.com/site/samsung-22-6-cu-ft-french-door-...
whirlpool: 1 year https://www.bestbuy.com/site/whirlpool-25-2-cu-ft-french-doo...
lg: 1 Year General, 5 Years Sealed System, 5 Years Compressor, 6-10 Years Linear Compressor. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-23-5-cu-ft-french-door-count...
bosch: 1 year https://www.bestbuy.com/site/bosch-800-series-20-5-cu-ft-4-d...
kitchenaid: 1 year labor, 10 year parts https://www.bestbuy.com/site/kitchenaid-25-8-cu-ft-5-door-fr...
>I thought the compressor was the thing that was not warranted because they break so frequently.
given the sample above, it seems like at least with LG, that they have a lot of confidence in their compressors and "sealed system" (probably the refrigerant system).
Do you buy all new devices when you buy a new WiFi router? I don’t.
Previously I did buy a few new devices to get 5GHz support from an ac router, after I moved to a location that had very poor 2.4Ghz connectivity. It can happen but it’s rare, I’d say?
And even a 10+ year old b/g router can handle 4k streaming.
For consumers that just watch Netflix (even at 4k), latency is irrelevant and you just need the bandwidth to be high enough; for these usecases, sure, a 10-year old router is fine. This is the consumer that keeps their Android phone for 2-3 years until it breaks, and only then upgrades.
I don't think the GP was claiming that everyone needs to upgrade frequently, just that for some consumers it makes sense.
Both segments can coexist, and so it's valid for different products/companies to tailor their offerings to one or both. It's pretty clear that you shouldn't buy Google products if you want to set-and-forget for 10 years. But if you're going to upgrade to the newest revision of smart-home gadget in less than 5 years anyway, then Google's product-ADD isn't a particularly relevant negative to you.
Definitely a factor to make sure that consumers are aware of when purchasing though!
I've been on a reliable average 7ms and peak 9ms latency for twelve years. It's not necessary to replace your router hardware to get low latencies.
I agree you shouldn’t rip out 5e cables to install 6e if what you have works for you and there aren’t any substantial improvements.
To that end, I’ve personally skipped Wi-Fi 6 and will wait for 6E before considering an upgrade. Even then, I’d like to have at minimum 3 devices that support Wi-Fi 6 before I upgrade. I’ve two such devices right now, so it’s not out of the question for me.
I’m in favour of keeping devices automatically updated even years later, but I suspect the only economical way of doing so is emulating devices in VMs, a giant test suite and automatic security update testing (no humans required beyond reviewing code diffs). But setting up that kind of automated testing infrastructure is a high bar for most companies, so it’s cheaper to put the cost on the consumer to consume again within 3-5 years for the next product update lifecycle...
I get this question every time when someone sees my latency, yes it is on WiFi. I don't use cabled and haven't for at least 6-7 years. My latency was always low except when I broke something in my local networking stack.
There are at this point 40+ other visible access points in my vicinity, and my router is two rooms away. My walls are made of concrete or brick.
Everyone should stop thinking WiFi is slow, because it just isn't.
Sure, if you're wired, there's no benefit to upgrading your router.
And then there was that day Google accidently deleted everyone's router configuration.
It worked great as a dumb access point. Everything else was shambles.
Just to let you know, data is not resold by Google. It's used for interest-based advertising.
1. google sends you a bid request, which contains the user's demographic/interest information
2. you respond to it with a bid, which has a unique tracking id
3. if your bid wins, your ad gets served. from there, you can serve a javascript payload that fingerprints the user. at this point you can create a huge database mapping of device fingerprint and ip (probably unique, but also pseudonymous) to interest/demographic data.
4. (optional) you can correlate the data you've gotten with third party databases to augment the data you already have. I'm not sure how viable this is. You can get more demographic information, but deanonymizing the pseudonymous identifiers from step 3 might be difficult to impossible.
All of this only really works if you can fingerprint the user, which might be against the ToS of most ad exchanges. They're probably also on the lookout for this type of thing, because you can imagine this is pretty important business data. However, if you're big enough, you might be able to convince the ad networks to let you fingerprint for "fraud prevention" purposes.
A few months or a year later, I get emails from groups like "stop republicans" or from local campaigns in states I don't care about to elizabethwarren@[mydomain.com]. And I only have used that email once to donate to Elizabeth. And it's not just one politician, it's all of them. Even ones we feel are so idealistic, like my Andrew Yang donation that I did based on his Reddit plea now receives emails targeted to my demographic about how it's my fault the democrats will fail to stop Trump, or lose California, or whatever.
Financial companies also sell my data. I get phishing emails to turbotax2014@[mydomain.com] which is what I used to file that year's taxes. [Edit: in retrospect, this one is probably just a hack or incompetence rather than intentional selling]
And which emails have never been sold or given out? The ones I use for Google or Facebook. Never in the past 15 years.
The same applies to volunteering. I made the mistake of giving my real phone number to a congressional campaign that I signed up to volunteer with. Since then I've gotten dozens of spam texts from many different organizations.
For example are you worried that a real human at your home security company will be invading your privacy? When they do are you worried that real human will take personal action against you? Or are you worried about automated systems building knowledge about your life based on home security data? Or are you worried about your home security data used in aggregate? Maybe you are worried about attackers getting access?
Internal infosec and privacy controls/policies are required to protect you from some of these. Some of these threats may be more likely from Google, but I'd say some of them are more likely from other home security providers (keep in mind that a lot of home security products are actually intended to have another human monitoring your home).
> Or are you worried about automated systems building knowledge about your life based on home security data? Or are you worried about your home security data used in aggregate?
Does google ever actually resell data? Or just monetize it? There’s a big difference selling the personal information on someone versus letting people buy targeted ads.