Spain is forcing phone makers to give you an extra year of warranty | Hacker News Reader

Spain is forcing phone makers to give you an extra year of warranty

xda-developers.com

31 pointslokedhs26 comments

As someone who had a Nexus 5X die about a month after the warranty expired I really hope we will see more of these actions. There is a notion of how long something should work for (a toaster should last for at least 5 years for example), and with phones we've reached a point where I don't see a point in switching every two years.

Android has been nearly stagnant for the last 4 years (and maybe more). The newer features are not game changing and a Snapdragon 801 is still pretty good for anything I do on my phone.

Presumably you'll be fine with paying for the reliability?

Just because the government demands a company supplies something, it does magically make the cost of supplying it disappear.

What kind of new features one would expect from a smartphone OS?

There are brands other than computer hardware who play the product longevity, hard to understand why it's rarely the case for electronics. Innovation is not a valid excuse.

In my view, the problem stems from software vendors doing agreements with hardware vendors to use obsolescence to put pressure on consumers. The difficulty is about proving that those products are designed like this.

Thanks Mr President for letting us enjoy higher phone prices. We absolutely love paying more for our phones. Why not 4 years? 5 years? What about ten years?

So you'd prefer a phone without a warranty if it would be cheaper?

I think the reaction is distrust that the manufacturers will play nice. If it costs them $20/phone average to warranty them for another 12 months, they may charge $50 more per sale.

A similar thing happened in Canada. A few years ago, a law was passed that barred 3-year phone contracts (with a new max of 2 years). In retaliation, nearly all phone subsidies from carriers have stopped. Ie, there’s no such thing as “$0 phone on 3 year term” in Canada anymore.

> nearly all phone subsidies from carriers have stopped.

I find this great. The ability to differentiate on "free" phones was a barrier to competition on the service costs that allowed telecoms to avoid competitive pricing for decades.

My concern with the Spanish law is that it seems to ensure a functional, repairable phone physically but there is not a realistic way to ensure essential security updates across all the software involved.

Not sure what region of Canada you are from, but as far as I can tell they just shifted from a contract model to a balance model where you amortize the cost of your phone using your monthly payments.

In the end what changes if how transparent they are with pricing, before it was 60$/month with a brand new phone and 55$ if you brought your own device, now it's. 55$/month and you can bundle a phone for 5$ more.

This is in Quebec.

> In retaliation, nearly all phone subsidies from carriers have stopped. Ie, there’s no such thing as “$0 phone on 3 year term” in Canada anymore.

It's not a 'subsidy'. It's just a payment plan. Why get your loan from your phone company? I don't get why people wanted this in the first place.

>there’s no such thing as “$0 phone on 3 year term” in Canada anymore.

Why is that a bad thing?

When carriers subsidize phones the price is inevitably higher overall. It's little different to those $1100 now or "$100 per month for 12 months" ads.

Of course it is, they are financing your phone which costs money. You are paying extra for the risk, inflation and interest.

Except it doesn't cost that much. It's mostly profit margin. You're paying extra for the illusion of free.

My Pixel 2 was actually cheaper through EE in the UK than it was to buy it SIM free.

It's never happened before or since.

When I worked in the travel industry some luxury hotels would agree to do deals where heavily discounted hotels would be bundled with flights.

They wanted to sell at < £X without the appearance of having sold a premium product so cheaply. Bundling with the flight hid the cost.

It's possible this happens occasionally for phones but I doubt it's common.

Why is that a bad thing?

Or less...

Did you forget the time when Apple deliberately made old iPhones grind to a halt so people would run out and buy new ones?

This has never happened.

You may be thinking of batterygate in which handsets with degraded batteries throttled themselves to prevent brownouts. Replacing the battery returned the handset to full speed. The feature still exists today, except now (in reaction to the controversy) you can turn it off if you prefer random reboots when your battery is old.

It was only ever about batteries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

If it was only ever about batteries they would have A) been open about it B) consequently not fined for deceptive commercial practices.

I find it astounding how many people believed that the cover story was the unvarnished truth given the lack of transparency exhibited by Apple over the matter, the obvious incentive and the natural proclivity so many similar industries have towards planned obsolescence (lightbulb conspiracy?).

It's a hell of a reality distortion field.

>Replacing the battery returned the handset to full speed.

Ah yes, the battery they sealed into the phone.

Talking about distortion fields, let’s try and penetrate one.

You are asserting that Apple slowed down phones in order to sell new ones.

- Why only target specific handsets (with degraded batteries)? Why not entire model lines?

- Why allow users to get their speed back by replacing the battery? Why not keep it slow to encourage the new sale?

- If they got “caught”, why is the exact same feature available on a brand new iPhone 12? The only thing they changed was to allow you to turn throttling off if you prefer reboots. Surely they would remove the feature if it’s only purpose was to slow phones down?

- Android phones suffer the same problems when their batteries degrade. Apple updated phones, some of which were out of warranty at the time. Is preventing reboots of older hardware planned obsolescence? Or the opposite?

The only thing they did wrong was to not alert the users to the fact that the throttling was happening and how to remedy it. Now they do.

I’m all about punishing companies when they do something wrong, but the environmentalist in me hates the fact that so many manufacturers drop support for phones after only a few years and the phones end up in landfill. Apple extended the life of older phones by doing this. People would be more likely to buy a new phone if it randomly rebooted vs ran slower.

Anecdotally, my wife’s phone was throttling at the time and she didn’t even notice because she just used it for calls and texts. If she had encountered reboots she probably would have bought a new phone. Even once she knew it was throttled, she didn’t get the battery replaced because it still did the job until she upgraded last year.

The answer to a lot of these questions is "because they wanted deniability" or to maintain the pretence that they did nothing wrong. It's true that they could have been a lot less covert about it in which case they'd be in even deeper shit legally and reputationally.

One thing that I never really understood is why they degraded performance when the battery was at 30-100% if the random reboots didn't kick in until the battery was at 30%. Perhaps you know.

Or why I can easily replace the battery on my phone but the iPhone battery is sealed in and has to be replaced by apple. Hmmm...

The degraded performance is latching. After a brownout occurs, it will stay on until you get the battery changed or turn it back on. I.e. it’s not based on any fixed percentages. The fact that people can put third-party batteries in and also that different batches of batteries will age differently means that this is probably the best solution.

More info here: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208387

“This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power. Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again. Disable…”

As for not (easily) allowing third party replacements, as someone who designs products: why should I (or Apple) have to support third party items? Why should I use engineering resources debugging why a third party touchscreen doesn’t work with my new firmware (this happened to Apple)?

Also, as someone who buys second-hand electronics I don’t want a third-party battery in the phone, or at least I want to be able to tell if there is one in order to reject the phone. I like my house in a non-burned-down state thank you very much. And you just know that the average punter with a third-party battery is still going to blame Apple when their phone bursts in to flames from an eBay battery.

Now, I believe there should be laws to dictate reasonable repair costs and, more importantly, number of years of support to ensure electronics live a long life.

Could that lie stop being perpetuated anytime soon? It was poorly communicated, but done for valid reasons.

As part of the agreement, Apple must display a notice on its French-language website for a month:

"Apple "committed the crime of deceptive commercial practice by omission" and had agreed to pay the fine."

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

As you say, "just a misunderstanding".

If it was genuinely done for the benefit of users they wouldn't have needed to hide what they were doing.

The word "hide" implies they intentionally concealed it, beyond just an "omission". To me, this is like games running at lower resolutions on older iPhones. Would that, too, require a disclosure?

I think a lot of people have never heard of the lightbulb conspiracy.

Lie? No Apple was fully aware of the power usage profiles of their devices and the power delivery profiles of their batteries and how those degrade over time.

Apple chose, for a variety of reasons (cost savings, weight, size) to use a capacitor and battery combination that as the battery degraded with use over time would not be able to meet the instantaneous power delivery requirements of the phones and result in unreliable behavior.

Instead of admitting their mistake and offering to replace peoples batteries or refund them or some other reasonable solution. They instead decided to sneak in a performance throttling software change to try and mitigate their design mistakes.

I don't consider that "valid reasons".

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