iFixit tells the sad story of how Samsung “ruined” its upcycling program
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If your business model is based on artificial obsolesence and 100% of the cost of e-waste and disposal is externalized, then anything that truly encourages effective continued use of older models is directly opposed to the business model.
And while it's something to have marketable trust-building by taking some responsibility for the waste and longer life-span, that also invites people to start thinking about how bad the fundamental business model is. If you get people to actually care about this stuff, that's building demand for a different business model, something closer to Fairphone.
At this point, the only really scalable way to solve repairability and e-waste is probably to mandate it legally. Force the costs to be internalized. Require a deposit on all electronics, like some states do with bottles. Adjust the numbers at each end to actually discourage waste and to actually cover real-world recycling costs.
And figure out how to require companies to unlock unsupported devices.
It doesn't work to have one company do these things while others don't. That puts the one company at a competitive disadvantage.
You’d think more companies would skip that model: bmw and Apple benefit from the high sale value of their devices, in part due to continued support. It doesn’t hurt that California and Germany have pushed part of the lifecycle cost onto the manufacturers, with some success.
Android as a platform in general, with its wild fragmentation and ever moving software goal posts, seems almost cruelly designed almost entirely for the artificial obsolesence path and that path alone.
Apple's business model is reliant on people buying a WHOLE NEW PHONE for ~1000$ every 2-3 years. And you get to sell your old phone for what? like 200$ trade in?
Apple also constantly locks you out every 5-6 years of iOS updates and then you can't run, say, spotify on your old ipod touch because you can't update the OS.
I actually find it hard to believe your propping Apple up here with their huge fight against right to repair.
I don't have to provide a counter example because that wasn't even remotely the argument I was making (that no companies really do this because their objective is to SELL NEW DEVICES).
With air pollution, the market has never solved that problem. Regulation addressed it. If there had been a market solution invented, why is air pollution still rampant in unregulated regions?
The market won’t solve any other niches of the waste problems either (recycling, other pollution, carbon emissions, etc.) until it’s too late. The equilibrium point where the incentives to address waste are as strong as the incentives to produce waste exists at a point which would be untenable for human living. Proof? We have millions of people all over the world who basically live in garbage dumps, and there’s not some magical incentive for them to clean things up. They live off it. If there’s not an incentive that’s developed for them, then the point at which the incentive equilibrium exists is beyond even that.
There's some fundamental cognitive dissonance in being part of a business that thrives specifically (not incidentally) on externalizing the costs of the constant turnover of devices and somehow also keeping in mind concern for this. As soon as you take on the tiniest slice of care about the issue, the cognitive dissonance comes on board. If e-waste or longer life-cycle of products is a PROBLEM, then how can we justify X Y Z A B C… the entire business model being questioned is the logical conclusion.
Far easier to belittle and minimize the whole issue, pretend it's nothing, make minor half-assed programs like the one they are actually doing. The business model does not permit of actual responsibility around these things.
1) Really hard now to do the fake replacement battery scams, Apple alerts buyer if a new battery was put in outside of apples approved ecosystem.
2) Fantastic duration on updates. Despite the claims of the more repairable androids, far too many NEVER update, AND ship with crap / older versions from the start. Apple by contrast has iOS 14 running on: iPhone 12 iPhone 12 mini iPhone 12 Pro iPhone 12 Pro Max iPhone 11 iPhone 11 Pro iPhone 11 Pro Max iPhone XS iPhone XS Max iPhone XR iPhone X iPhone 8 iPhone 8 Plus iPhone 7 iPhone 7 Plus iPhone 6s iPhone 6s Plus iPhone SE (1st generation) iPhone SE (2nd generation) iPod touch (7th generation)
iOS 13 and even iOS 12 are STILL getting updates that cover iPhone 5S, iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, iPad Mini 2, iPad Mini 3 and original iPad Air.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212341 came out just this month for iOS 12.
3) Phone is pretty durable, everything is glued down and surprisingly waterproof.
4) Hard to root the device. When you buy a used phone / do a reset, you are less likely to be getting backdoored.
5) Resulting in fantastic resale and down market value which means the phones go and go and go.
Really hard now to do the fake replacement battery scams
Fantastic duration on updates
iOS 13 and even iOS 12 are STILL getting updates
Phone is pretty durable, everything is glued down and surprisingly waterproof.
Resulting in fantastic resale and down market value
This seems to be contradicted by https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212341, which states it's getting security updates even for webkit.
I can also the throw the same argument back at you by pointing out that even if I can't update the Android OS on some devices, I can still update the default browser (Chrome) or even install a different browser, like Firefox, that is totally independent of the OS (unlike in ios where every browser is forced to use Safari / Webkit as the rendering engine, and thus will be stuck with an older version whenever Apple decides to not update it). The argument can even be stretched further - I can also buy an Android phone with an unlocked bootloader (like Sony Open Devices phones) and install other Android and other mobile OSes on it too, if I so desire.
When compared with that perspective, don't some Android phones seem better than Apple's iDevices? Anyway, that isn't the point - the criticism here is that Apple users like me are demanding more from Apple are not satisfied with their current practices.
They aren't Samsung's phones. They're yours and mine and whoever traded money to own a device and now OWNS THAT DEVICE. We shouldn't be okay with this new world where we're begging companies to LET us use our OWN devices for whatever the hell we want.
Verizon is notorious to be the worst in this regard. OnePlus disabled the eSIM in their latest phone which let to outrage and returns among some of the enthusiast community.
Bad actors can already get their hands on the technology to spoof/intercept cellular traffic so that cat is kind of out of the bag, but if the modems were totally open and could effectively be turned into SDRs, I worry a bit about the ramifications.
I've talked to script kiddie teens who get their giggles out of downloading some dodgy windows or android app to mass deauth wifi clients from APs. If it truly becomes easy to gain full access of your average phone's modem, I wonder what sorts of similar apps would appear. Maybe it'd be no worse than wifi, but given the much greater scope and potential damage from a DoS'd/jammed cell tower, it's a heavy topic IMO...
In English, the grammatical "possessive" is not only used to mean legal ownership... It can refer to nearly any kind of proprietary relationships:
• "Their husbands all laughed at the joke." • "Their jobs disappeared when the factory closed." • "Their comments are disagreeable and combatative."
The previous poster's use of the possessive was entirely appropriate. I believe your correction was unnecessarily combative and shrill.
I'm a native speaker, I'm not responding to the grammar. I'm responding to the very notion that Samsung "allow" users to do what they want with their own devices. Quotes like all of these...
> by allowing users to unlock the bootloaders of devices Samsung decided to no longer support
> Samsung was going to let users replace the shipping Android OS with whatever they wanted
> Samsung [...] should set their old phones free
> Let people use their cameras, sensors, antennas, and screens for all kinds of purposes, using whatever software people can dream up
...start out with the premise that Samsung should have any say at all what people do the things that they own.
That's what the article is about. iFixit wanted to participate in a partnership with Samsung where Samsung would deign to permit users to repurpose their own devices that are no longer profitable to Samsung, and then Samsung changed their minds and you're still not actually allowed to do that and iFixit is annoyed that Samsung tricked iFixit into doing a bunch of marketing for Samsung on the back of a project that doesn't really exist.
That's the world that we're in right now, you really do have to beg Samsung to allow you to repurpose your own hardware. But it's not okay, that's not the world we should live in.
It's not magically going to convert the phone into a Raspberry Pi anymore than Debian is going to suddenly port itself to a 4-year-old platform. And even that would reduce e-waste only by a rounding error.
Now, guaranteeing Android updates 4 YEARS, or more, that would be something...
how exactly is an unlocked bootloader after 4 years of use going to help to reduce e-waste?
And absolutely none of these platforms will start working on 4-year old Samsung hardware because of an unlocked bootloader.
I'm sure Apple made this same calculation, and still decided that directly supporting devices for 5+ years was worth the investment. It might lead to users upgrading less frequently, but it builds brand loyalty. A user that doesn't feel screwed over is more likely to be a repeat customer.
Apple's calculation probably has more to do with its reputation. It understands that older phones are still in service and that doing the minimum to keep these at least functional is great for their brand. Hey, an iPhone is an iPhone...
A lot of other smartphones aren't even worth selling after 2-3 years of use.
That isn't to say that keeping old devices running is pure selfish self-interest on Apple's part, though. This isn't a zero-sum game; everyone wins when hardware gets a long support life cycle.
Eventually they killed the program altogether, likely due to poor demand. But to use the owners of the previous devices as betatesters, only to tell them they will have to uselessly buy the new device if they actually want to run the final version is just evil.
Also, most Samsung phones, at least the flagships are easy to bootloader unlock / root and have an active community.
It looks like Samsung position has always been "do whatever you want with your phone, just don't expect us to help you with that", which is actually much better than many manufacturers who actively try to stop you.
Note: I don't count carrier-subsidized phones. These are not really your phone anyway, they are leased by your carrier.
The North American versions of the Galaxy S series phones (which use Snapdragon processors) have bootloaders that cannot be unlocked. Only the non-NA ones (which use Exynos processors) have unlockable bootloaders.