Comment by alttab | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alttab | Hacker News Reader

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Assuming the marketplace is functioning, the demand for these sort of "features" (aka: non-features) would assume there would be a rational supplier to give it.

The next step in that debate is "yeah but the big monopolies are making it impossible for a little guy to get in." Which is true.

We can agree the regulatory capture is bad.

In the meanwhile, Google is not openly saying they will run ML on your images on your phone. With Android, you don't have to sync to the cloud, and you could even replace or add your own camera option. You can side-load without jailbreaking, etc.

Now, not that most consumer friendly option, but the advice for this crowd is still good - if you still have an iPhone and this is the last straw for you, there are plenty of good options that still exist, today. And then - let's fight regulatory capture and big government so a more dynamic marketplace can take root.

> Assuming the marketplace is functioning, the demand for these sort of "features" (aka: non-features) would assume there would be a rational supplier to give it.

The assumption that a "functioning" market will do a good job of catering to even fairly popular wishes does not seem to hold true in the real world, including for cases in which I'm pretty damn sure it's not some kind of government interference causing it not to. It's utterly common for plain ol' commodities subject to no special government scrutiny or control and with many suppliers to provide no option for features or product-types that would surely have many buyers, simply because no-one expects the returns to be as high as doing something else with the same capacity.

AFAIK this happens for a bunch of reasons, including that information is very, very far from being perfectly shared in all parts of the market, that there are significant costs associated with quality information-gathering, and efficient use of capital tending to cause production to cluster around tiny little bits of the possible product space (similar to how pharmacies like to build right next to each other, rather than spreading out to reduce travel-time-to-a-pharmacy in an area)

Sure, but I already have an android. The concern I have is that the regulatory landscape will change if Apple opens Pandora's box. Google could just as easily do the same thing, hampered only by their complete inability to keep androids updated. I have a pine phone but what happens if the Congress critters decide everyone should have this feature and networks should ban devices that don't.

The point is that we're REALLY playing with fire here.

> Assuming the marketplace is functioning

It's not. That's the problem.

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