Isn’t the underlying issue planned obsolescence as a business model? It’s anti-consumer and anti-environment, and maybe we shouldn’t incentivize it as a planet.
Apple’s penetration into the US market is not because the iPhone matches Android in terms of sales, it’s because iPhones last longer and get handed down or resold. Apple literally continues to sell years old devices.
That isn’t planned obsolescence.
A really simple step in the right direction would be mandated labeling showing how many years of software updates the device will get and statistical expected lifetime.
Yes, it is. Even though Apple devices last longer, after the support is ended, I cannot do anything with them. I cannot update, install anything. They effectively become bricks. If this is not planned obsolescence, then what is?
The design choices have to be made to artificially shorten the life, not for any other purpose. For example, I can make a device cheaper and use cheaper materials that wear out faster - that's not planned obsolescence. However if I include a little plastic tab that I know will break before everything else for no good reason other than making it break faster - that is.
I suspect you'll have a hard time arguing compellingly that the purpose of apples closed update system was to shorten the useful life, rather than as a side effect of other product and design goals.
Phones are sort of a bad example, because for a long time the replacement cycle was driven by actual technical obsolescence, arguably only relatively recently has this ceased to be the case.
So what is the reason to prevent updates of software after the support is over? This is a classical software anti-feature.
The reason 1st gen iPads don’t have this is fairly obvious though - the unlocking feature is itself a likely vector for attacks e.g. by law enforcement unlocking tools, etc.
I’m not sure what it would take to enable it to be done securely without destroying the overall security model but it’s clearly not trivial, and would take some investment that certainly wasn’t possible at the time the 1st gen device was released.
Wondering, can that be called a planned obsolescence or not?
This is definitely an issue, but it's not the same issue as planned obsolescence.
Because the design choices are pretty easily argued to have been made for reasons other than reducing user access, but have the side effect of reducing user access. Both size/weight constraints and case integrity drive you to the same sort of thing.
To be clear, I think it's fine to call out a company for planned obsolescence, and I think it's fine to call them out for emphasizing size, etc. over user serviceability. I just don't think it's useful to pretend they are the same thing.
Artificially inflating cost of parts can trivially be used to enforce planned obsolescence.
It could, but nobody has presented any evidence that Apple is doing this, and their business strategy is openly stated to involve increasing the lifetime of their devices, so that they can deliver services to more users, so this is just innuendo.
Simply compare the cost of official Apple service and corrsponding third-party service.
Here are some reasonable explanations for how third parties cut costs without resort to a conspiracy:
1. Less warranty on repairs.
2. Lower cost substitute parts.
3. Lower quality control,
4. Less training for staff.
5. Lower profit margins, leading to unsustainable businesses.
I don't think it can, for reasons elsewhere in thread.
Every update I get on my mac, or Iphone slows it down. Bloat and "protecting the users battery" are the root causes, and ultimately Apple is one of the best examples of a company "artificially shortening" things via design choices.
This is completely false.
Secondly, as you must be aware, the reason Apple decreased the performance was to extend the useful lifetime of the battery.
The fine was because they didn’t explain this properly in advance, not because they did it.
They still in fact do alter the device performance to accommodate aging batteries and make them last longer.
This is a really silly issue to raise if the argument is about Apple shortening lifetimes of devices or batteries, since it makes the device usable for longer.
To imagine it requires understanding how technology works.
Batteries are chemical processes - they degrade slowly over time. An older battery produces less power, and so can’t support the same peak performance.
You can therefore extend the useful life of the battery by throttling the CPU performance to within the power envelope provided by the battery.
It’s fairly simple to understand.
Nothing was proven by the lawsuit, since it never went to trial, you know this so it’s unclear why you’d repeat this falsehood.
As for not your suggestion that Apple not slow the devices down to extend the battery life and have users just replace the battery, that seems misguided.
Why would you want users to be forced to buy unnecessary battery replacements and further damage the environment by wasting working batteries?
It’s much better for the devices to be able to continue to use the batteries for longer, don’t you think?
Arguably it’s the opposite of planned obsolescence - even used phones are not obsolete and are still in circulation.
It’s also worth pointing out that this is Apple’s stated policy - they want phones to last longer so that more people have them and they can continue to sell services to them.
This has nothing to do with the definition of planned obsolescence. It does not matter what people do with the old phones.
I don’t need to reread it. My response applies to design obsolescence.
Relatively few people upgrade every year these days. The fact that the old devices are still desirable negates the idea that people don’t want them because they look outdated. I.e. changes in design are not causing people to stop using the devices.
For design obsolescence to apply to Apple, workable devices would need to be retired from service early because they were no longer seen as desirable.
That isn’t happening.
[Citation needed]
Compare phones sold to phones in service.
Tens of millions vs more then a billion.
In other words this was complete bullshit.
It’s true that older devices are less capable than newer ones, and you might not want to browse on an old device.
But they aren’t bricks.
Understatement of the year concerning unsupported, insecure and (unreasonably) locked Apple devices.
2. What 11 year old GNU/Linux phone is supported today let alone ‘forever’?
Linux laptops have a proven track record of being supported for >10 years. Since the GNU/Linux phones also run mainline Linux, they are effectively the same kind of devices. There is no reason to expect that GNU/Linux phones will stop being supported.
> 2. What 11 year old GNU/Linux phone is supported today let alone ‘forever’?
Nokia N900? See also: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
1. No they aren’t. The hardware is different. Laptops are not the same as phones. It’s a false comparison.
They may run the mainline kernel, but they certainly don’t run mainline distributions usefully.
PinePhone isn’t even considered supported for consumer use today.
It’s sold for developers and most users say it doesn’t even work as a daily driver
2. Is the Nokia 900 supported? It’s not obvious. What makes you think it is? Even you used a ‘?’.
3. Why is this relevant?
Anyone who wants one can buy a PinePhone or Librem.
Why would someone who wants a GNU/Linux phone buy an iPhone?
An iPhone 4 with the “last supported OS” is significantly slower than when it had the OS it launched with.
This is true across the board, which leads to this very convenient “they can buy used iPhones, but we don’t want them to use them, so we’ll gently guide them to new devices by making it inconvenient and annoying”
And before someone argues: Yes, much of the slowdown is because of new features, BUT Apple could simply allow users to disable most of them (such as ML-processing photos in the background, or deep-indexing file contents for spotlight. Those are not required for the phone to function as a phone).
If someone wanted to use the iPhone 3GS with the original iOS, not sync to the cloud, replace the battery every couple years, and install a firewall to prevent intrusion via known attack vectors, they could realistically have a perfectly snappy and solid experience in any future decade. Doubly so if they kept a 2.4Ghz AP when the industry is on some unknown future frequency.
However: Apple has taken many steps to prevent exactly that sort of thing, and they will continue to make as many as they can get away with.
This ignores the fact that later iPhones with the newest OS are significantly faster than what they launched with, which contradicts the conclusion that this is intentional.
Large companies simply settle out of court in order to silence the facts.
- If they are wrong and are successful in getting out of it, they might walk away with a judge "confirming" that they did no wrong.
- If they are wrong and the evidence is overwhelmingly conclusive, they might write a cheque and walk away.
In either case the public does not have any convincing argument based on evidence. Therefore we have to go by subtext.
Apple was accused of slowing down the devices intentionally. They admitted the bare minimum (low power mode), then wrote a cheque that made the rest of the accusations go away.
To me, that's as convincing as a verdict by a judge.
We can deduce that there as no evidence of intent, since if the plaintiffs had such evidence they wouldn’t have settled for so little. Remember that this was a class action with a huge class, so the settlement amount is diminimis for the plaintiffs but a decent payout for the attorneys. I.e. they had no case, and Apple paid to end the inconvenience.
This is obviously nothing like a verdict by a judge and provides us no information about the facts whatsoever, because no facts were presented.
The presence of a court case does not provide evidence for the michaelmrose’s subtext.
If it did, you would be able to reference some.
Also, this further confirms that the original claim by michaelmrose that they lost a court case and that the court found intent, was complete bullshit.
I remember when in 2014 I decided to give away my unused iPad 1st gen, just as a e-reader. So I've erased it but no apps were supporting this device already. Even the official Apple Books app.
Yes, techicaly it wasn't bricked, it worked, you still can turn it on and off. But without software it's useless.
4 years was an eternity in device capability at the time the first gen of the iPad was released.
I’m writing this on a 6 year old iPad Pro that I use every day. Everything runs on it, and it shows no sign of being too slow or even needing a battery replacement.
It seems like the problem has been solved.
Or you mean that there was a problem with Apple servers and now it's fixed?
I have owned many and not one has become useless in this way, not has any I have every heard of.
Any closed platform that becomes unsupported and stays locked down is made artificially obsolete.
I can buy an original IBM PC, write my own software and run it with no limitations, despite it being an unsupported platform for several decades. See the famous 8088 MPH demo for an example of how much can still be done on an ancient platform, way beyond what was considered possible in its heyday. I can even write my own OS and run that. Remember that Linux was originally written by Linus Torvalds because there was no freely available Unix-like on x86, so he decided to write his own.
I can't do that with an original iPhone. You can jailbreak it, but that's not a risk-free process and it still doesn't let you install your own OS or give you direct access to the hardware.
Once a device no longer receives updates or official support, it should be opened for hobbyists to experiment with.
However this:
> Once a device no longer receives updates or official support, it should be opened for hobbyists to experiment with.
I agree with and I’d support legislation to that effect.
The hardware is fine, well-built and solid, probably still has 50% battery life left at this point. It's not the fastest device, but plenty fast for text and 2D graphics, plus some mild 3D.
But Apple has cut off support, very few apps can run on the old version of iOS it is locked to, and there is no real way of installing a different OS or adding a third-party app store or sideloading apps. Even with a paid developer account, you're severely limited.
That is actively killing off a device that could still be viable and usable to a lot of people, thus planned/deliberate obsolescence.
If this problem hadn’t been solved, there would be more of an issue, but my 6 year old iPad Pro runs everything and is still fully supported.
Having said that I actually do agree that unsupported hardware in general should be opened to new OS installs at the end of official support.
It is still a perfectly viable piece of hardware for many uses, no matter how much technology has improved.
That is deliberate, but has nothing to do with planned obsolescence.
Opening up the original iPad to other operating systems and/or DIY software does not mean handing over the signing keys for currently supported platforms. In case of a running iPad, an Apple-authorized update could be pushed to the OS to unlock it and allow it to run binaries directly.
Apple could also document any hardware features that would allow someone to put an iPad into "free-for-all" mode. Presumably this would require opening up the device to attach a serial cable to a JTAG connection or something similar.
There are many options for Apple to open up unsupported devices for hobbyists to tinker on, and it would completely in line in the original hacker-friendly Apple spirit.
Instead Apple refuses to do so, and insist that opening up an 11 year old, long unsupported device, by claiming that it would somehow compromise their current security model.
> In case of a running iPad, an Apple-authorized update could be pushed to the OS to unlock it and allow it to run binaries directly.
Which of course an attacker would be able to do too.
> Apple could also document any hardware features that would allow someone to put an iPad into "free-for-all" mode. Presumably this would require opening up the device to attach a serial cable to a JTAG connection or something similar.
Which of course a police department, the FBI, or the agents of an oppressive regime or anyone who bought a JTAG device off ebay would be able to do too.
These are exactly the reasons they don’t do these things - if they did, they would be opening attack vectors.
Security is hard. I’m not saying it’s impossible to achieve this, but it’s not simple.
Opening up access to install your own software would have great potential to increase the security of the device, not least because you can actually run current and patched versions of any software.
What you're arguing for is security by obscurity.
Nobody is talking about security through obscurity. This is about not introducing easily explored weaknesses into all devices, supported or not.
Open the hardware, use secure software and keep your storage encrypted, preferably on removable storage.
This is complete bullshit.
iOS devices use an SOC so there is no way to ‘tap the memory bus’ without destroying the processor.
iOS decides do in fact resist access even when they are in the hands of an adversary.
Also it seems like you don’t know that the storage on iOS devices is already encrypted.
This is a straw man - nobody said ‘impervious’.
You said this:
> If you have physical access to a device, you can already tap the memory bus or countless other places
It is complete bullshit.
If it wasn’t, you’d be able to post a link to someone doing it.
If you think that is the only way into an Apple device, and that police or even nation states are now helpless against the mighty "hack resistant" iPhone, then you may be interested in this bridge I happen to have for sale.
I presume you know that isn’t an example of someone “tapping the memory bus”, which seems to be still just bullshit.
Yes, security flaws exist.
Generally we close them, not argue for abandoning security altogether as you are doing.
Police generally are helpless against the iPhone.
Nation states may well not be, but it is still going to cost them a lot.
Your argument - that because nation states can compromise the iPhone, we should make it so everyone can, seems very odd.
This isn't that simple because it depends on _which_ software. This gets glossed over a lot in these discussions.
An iPhone gets ~5 years of iOS updates. Importantly, these updates are the only place where the only permitted web viewer on the platform gets updated. An android phone gets 2-3 years, if it's very lucky, of android updates. However, the _browser_ you use on that device is updated entirely independently of the OS, and while it isn't obvious how far back Chrome supports, android Firefox runs on android 5.0 devices (i.e. at least 7 years, probably more?)
These are two different security scenarios - an iOS device is fully patched against OS-level exploits for longer. True. But an android device will have a safer browser for a lot longer. In my threat model the latter is a lot more important - I don't think I'm unusual in that my web browser is by far my largest attack surface.
(disclaimer: i work at google, but i work on iOS stuff and like iOS a lot. more than android for sure. but i'm very salty that i can't have a browser updated independently from the OS)
I realize there are other runtimes, but for a general indication for cross comparison this would do.
On the left hand, you make design choices with the goal of limiting the life expectancy of the product, and on the right hand, you just don't prioritise life expectancy over other considerations when making said choices.
Of course the line is thin and the complexity of design trade-offs in all directions makes it pretty hard to pinpoint where evil actually happened... which is why the "right to repair" is so complicated in terms of hardware.
Software though is another matter: no-one can claim it's "too difficult" or "too costly" to provide users with the information that will allow them to use their device with the software they want.