Electronics are built with death dates. Let’s not keep them a secret
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And every single one of them, across a range of manufacturers, has had the cord not be detachable from the brick. So what could have been a simple $5 replacement cord is now "replace the entire converter" and is now $30 if you try to find a third-party and pray they're not a fraud, or $50 from the manufacturer. Meanwhile at perfectly good converter (sans cord) is landfill.
But lo and behold: the brick-to-wall cord is detachable. And funny that, that one never breaks…
Yup. But that shows they're willing to pretend to be recyclable...
I got a Razer once, and the power brick's integrated cable came with pre-frayed insulation, no extra charge. That laptop had tons of hardware bugs, too.
GaN 90/100W chargers from manufacturers like Anker and Monoprice can regularly be had for half of that. Right now there are a lot of 90W ones from unknown-to-me manufacturers for ~$32 on Amazon.
I'm not trying to correct you here; I'm just wondering if there's something I'm missing.
[0] https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MX0J2AM/A/96w-usb-c-power...
There are cheaper Anker chargers on Amazon that say 100w in the title but that's only because they include a 100w capable cable, the charger is a lower wattage.
Until now, the only USB-C chargers that I've seen with that are Apple, DELL, and HP (haven't come in contact with Lenovo, etc).
I was looking to buy a second USB-C charger for my HP laptop, but since it has a metal case, the ground connection is a must for me.
I actually found an HP charger on Amazon, and it even had a USB-A port, which I've found neat. But with all the horror stories about counterfeits and Amazon stock comingling, and what with my wish to not burn down my house, I didn't buy it.
I guess time will tell how reliable USB-C connectors are, but my naive impression is that the female connectors (device side) are very simple with no springs or other moving parts. I imagine my nice USB-C chargers (mostly Apple) will be useful for as long as USB-C lasts as an active standard.
I've been using it since March with no complaints. It'd be great if manufacturers could standardize on something like this so that the port could be flush.
They just can't call it Magsafe (trademarked) or use the patented Magsafe design.
Also lightning (the connector used in iphones starting in 2012) is different from magsafe (the connector used in macbooks starting in 2006).
There’s also been reports of fire due to friction and dirt
IIRC, the USB Type-C connectors should survive at least 12000 insertion cycles.
In practice, this does not seem to be true, so I assume that many USB Type-C connectors substitute the more expensive alloys and coatings that they should use for the metal contacts in order to achieve conformity with the standard with cheaper alloys, and this is not something that a normal user can check when buying a device.
The most "advanced" I've seen are wireless chargers. My dad's 2021 Toyota only has USB-A.
I know Vaio used to advertise that as a feature.
When I got a new HP laptop with USB-C charging a few years back, I hoped it would support that, too. It didn't. My current one doesn't, either.
The car has a two-phone Qi charger as well.
That's why my current laptop is a https://frame.work
- USB-C to USB-C adapters means that the part that will fail is changeable
- All four USB-C are able to charge the laptop.
And the power brick also has detachable USB-C AND power cord cable.
(And just for fun I ordered an upgrade to the motherboard, will use the old motherboard as always on PC in my home)
I can charge my Sony headphones with anything from an old USB2 only PC, old Samsung USB-A phone charger to my 65 W HP USB-C power adapter.
I don't think they have any kind of PD mode, I think they just expect regular 5V. The specs on the site say "USB charge" and the charging duration is 3 hours. They come with a USB-A to C cable.
I did not know that, thanks. I was expecting USB-C chargers to work in "dumb 5V mode" by default. I guess that could be to avoid problems if you connect two chargers together?
USB-C can on do the following on the same cable at the same time
1. Charge 2. Data 3. Video
Your power cable can
1. Charge
How is that "orders of magnitude" worse?
I've done replacements of barrel plugs and also USBC ports and the barrel plugs are significantly easier to replace.
Now my USBC charging ports haven't failed me yet, i think that's probably because i have 4 of them on my laptop, and i charge from different ones depending on multiple factors. So I'm spreading the wear around.
That said. When one goes more than likely the others will go shortly there after.
For example my framework laptop USB C ports are replaceable (for the laptop side).
Also you can buy magsafe like connectors for USB C if you have a regular laptop.
Having one USB C charger for my phone, my laptop, my earbuds, my battery and my remarkable is such a life improvement on trip vs the old barrel connectors. It just doesn't even compare. And we just talk about charging here, one of the multiple uses of USB C.
I have two laptops. One with a old school barrel plug and the other with USBC, and the USBC charges faster as it has more wattage.
So.. id like to hear how you define worse?
As the GP said: the cables are less robust and break more easily.
This is not a limitation of the barrel plug, it's a limitation of your laptop or charging brick not being able to use or provide a higher rate. I have a barrel plug laptop with a 170W adapter. USB-C chargers above 100W move into 'exotic' range and none go above 100W at 20V, the cables can't move that much current without heating up.
If we replaced the usb-c charging port with a normal charging port you would permanently lose it.
I didn't call it orders of magnitude worse. I called it orders of magnitude more delicate and prone to falling out than a bespoke laptop charger like a ThinkPad Slim Tip connector. Why bother misquoting me when my comment is right there?
...if they would sell me one.
The tipping point was an LTT vid where he changed the motherboard on his laptop to a 12th gen one AND used the old motherboard with a 3D printed case to make a tiny desktop computer.
Overall, yeah, where USB-C can be applied, I like it, and it definitely helps turn the charger into a bit more of a commodity, and for whatever reason, USB-C chargers seem to not suffer the design flaw I mentioned above as much: the cables tend to detach at the converter. The two big issues I have is that a. chargers are terrible at listing the max wattage they can supply (and laptops their draw), so it's hard to impossible to know if a given charger will be able to supply enough power. My work desk had built in power & USB-C charging, for example, and I now comically charge my USB-C work laptop off the desk's AC plug (a MBP¹, so that's thankfully USB-C). USB-C never really charger, and eventually we figured out that the desk (and this was hard to find) was a USB PD of like 15 W. And MBPs need 87 W or so.
And b., my current laptop alleges to have a max draw of 135 W, which is above the max for USB-C. (Which is why I suspect it has a custom adapter… but who knows.)
¹I am glad Apple switched to USB-C, and they allievated the design flaw I mention in their chargers when they did so, for which they should be praised. But there is so much else wrong — completely unservicable design, the butterfly keyboard problems, cable-gate, battery recalls, ergo fails, heat dissipation issues, macOS, crap warranty — with their laptops that it isn't sufficient to tip the scales to me buying.
While I am not exactly an USB-C supporter. One of the side benefits is that they are much better quality and fixes this PSU issues.
But USB-C will solve your problem. I currently throwed away my laptop brick and just using a GAN power supply with two USB-C ports. It also charges my phone, and, eventually, other stuff like VR headset, joysticks and so on. I have two things micro-USB left: Kindle reader and JBL speaker. I hope next generation of those will be manufactured with USB-C charging ports.
I haven’t owned an LED bulb long enough to see this myself, so take it with a grain of salt.
Some bulbs (estimated 20%, mostly higher output ones) have lost SMD LEDs, in some cases having reductions in brightness as a portion of the bulb is then INOP.
I’ve stopped taking them apart and looking into the failures once they got to be cheap enough to not care.
I’ve had lots of different kinds of LED lighting, including LED bulbs and this is honestly the only reason I’ve had to replace them.
The electronics powering the LED overheat and over time starts to fail.
Some brands are worse than others, particularly cheap Chinese ones. They will break faster than you can replace them. Avoid at all cost.
Other mid-range bulbs are better (like IKEA Trådfri) but still without what I’d call industrial reliability. Philips Hue are more reliable, but again at a higher price.
In short, you get what you pay for. That said you can still have bad luck. For instance in my house we have semi-expensive Junostar LEDs (from the pro-market) for ceiling lights, but we received a bad batch with lot of flickering and had to have them all replaced. It was on warranty though ;)
I've lost 75% (3 out of 4) cheap LED bulbs to electronics overheating issues, withing a year.
I've lost 16% (2 out of 12) expensive LED lamps to overheating, within 3 years. I'll use the extracted LEDs somewhere.
I've lost 0% of LED lamps in my fridge to overheating in nearly 7 years :)
Still not as good as having it pluggable.
It would also make sense to phrase other quantities on product packaging in the way they're experienced by the consumer: instead of emphasising the wattage of a bulb, if you showed the lumens/$, more efficient bulbs would naturally win out. Instead, LED bulbs have fake wattage numbers to show the equivalent wattage incandescent lighting that would be needed to match the LED.
I suspect that would be the reality with a lot of the proposed mandatory labeling for electronics, too.
At least the Phoebus Cartel had an ostensible explanation (efficiency) for what they did. Doing the same with LED lighting is pure corporate greed.
Some of the indicator LEDs on some of my electronics are many decades old, yet they are still functioning like when they were new. Clearly LEDs can last a long time, but there wouldn't be any profit in that.
Here's some interesting discussion about the "Dubai Lamp", an attempt at going the opposite direction and actually making LEDs last significantly longer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27093793
How does it help the corporation make more money?
If my gadget just failed long before I was promised, I am quite likely to shop around.
Bad brands aren't sticky in this situation, are there. (I don't know whether good brands are sticky here.) So there's no extra incentives for planned obsolescence, because the next purchase is more than likely to go to a competitor.
Or what do you mean?
This is how the Phoebus Cartel worked for incandescent bulbs. Every brand was in on it, it wasn’t about improving market share for specific brands.
If a single one of them doesn't play ball and start selling "forever lamps" that last a hundred years (slap some patents on running LEDs at their rating, why not), they'll effectively salt the earth for the entire market.
I don't understand what the problem is supposed to be. The system we currently have is that all bulbs are labeled with their brightness ("equivalent wattage"), which is the outcome the customer cares about. You can then choose the cheapest bulb at the brightness level you want. That second step already causes more efficient bulbs to crowd less efficient bulbs out of the market.
In your hypothetical system, we stop indicating how bright bulbs are. Instead, we indicate how efficient they are, and customers are supposed to work out the brightness for themselves.
Why would anyone want that?
I have burned too many times by manufacturers not taking security updates seriously (Motorola phones for instance). If a manufacturer wants not to fix an issue it should be an automatic reason to get a full refund.
It would be good if
* We could safely obtain reputable Li-ion batteries from reputable sources. I trust a handful of companies to vet their supply chain so I'm confident of authentic cells like Murata VT6, etc .. but its less than ideal. I don't think my mom would be able to just find a authentic 18650, and this has to pass the mom test
* Easy way to recycle these cells. This needs to expand past home improvement stores, which often seem clueless as to the specifics of what they can accept
> An 18650 Battery is a lithium-ion rechargeable battery. The first 4 digits of the designation “18650” indicate the physical dimensions while the 5 <sup>th</sup> digit indicates it is a cylinder cell. The standard 18650 battery is 18mm around by 65mm long.
(copied from curl because that page crashed the firefox tab, though I guess the superscript wouldn't have been preserved otherwise anyhow so might as well leave that bit of HTML in)
18650 is so popular it’s used in some teslas, while newer ones use 21700
Aside: When people try to increase it to like 4.3 V with "strengthened electrode material," the lifetime still seriously suffers. I'm typing this comment on a Razer Blade 15 with a currently swollen battery pack, which has been replaced only 10 months ago due to the same swelling issue
E.g. a 2032 lithium battery for computer motherboards has a diameter of 20 mm (20-) and a height of 3.2 mm (-32).
A thinner 2025 battery, used in various appliances, has a diameter of 20 mm and a height of 2.5 mm.
There are many other such standard dimensions encoded in the battery numbers.
We went through this exact cycle with laptops and cellular phones. The hardcore internet users were furious when companies dared to remove the option for a user-replaceable battery.
But the market reacted positively. And honestly, it turned out fine. I could get replacement aftermarket batteries for my iPhone and MacBooks for a long time, and now I can even get genuine replacement parts when I need them.
I see a lot of parallels in the flashlight world: The hardcore collectors who value their ability to swap out batteries, experiment with different cells, and carry their batteries from one light to the next are furious. Yet the average buyer probably prefers the features afforded by the custom battery solutions.
The standardized-battery flashlights are still readily available. The market will avoid the proprietary solutions if that's really what the market feels, but I suspect these companies actually have a good idea about what their customers are looking for.
Your average company knows the average buyer is an idiot and will gladly burn the earth selling them junk. We had to heavily regulate the food industry to prevent bad actors from causing negative effects, looks like the same needs to happen with e-goods.
Sounds like 'post hoc ergo propter hoc' to me.
As people get richer, they also often tend to demand stricter regulation, but that doesn't necessarily mean the regulation is the driving factor.
The Chinese market for eg baby formula might be a good example. On average, baby formula consumed in China today is less dodgy than it was in the past.
A big part of that is because everyone in China who can afford to will use imported baby formula. Places like Australia haven't really changed their regulation much, but their products made up a larger share of the Chinese market over time, just because more Chinese became rich enough.
In parallel, driven by the same public sentiment that drives the import business, Chinese authorities have enacted stricter and stricter regulation for local baby formula.
In this case, consumer preference is driving a move towards higher quality. Competition from overseas suppliers is a key factor in helping consumers vote their preferences with their wallets. Regulation plays a trailing role at best.
Of course, when you look back in a few decades and compare the quality of baby formula in 1990 vs 2050 in China you will both notice an enormous increase in quality and increasingly strict regulation.
It will be very easy to spin the story that the regulation drove the increase in quality.
P.S. For a similar example, have a look at https://www.econlib.org/find-the-date-of-osha/
Um, what? The Chinese government executed people over adulterations of products.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna28...
Sorry for the Amp link
But without the regulation, the trust wouldn't be there, and people would use imported formula, and likely occasionally get contaminated stuff from fly by night vendors.
Grocery stores would probably refuse to stock the poison in some cases, but there might be more subtle contamination that went unnoticed.
Regulations are written in blood and there still seems to be cases of doing the legal minimum even when it's not enough to be safe. As far as I know there are plenty of coin cells with no bitter coating or childproof packaging.
But even more cases of companies going above and beyond the legal minimum, and customers who care will buy from those companies.
Eg it's perfectly legal to sell furniture with drawers that can catch and hurt the fingers of toddlers. But it's also perfectly possible to buy furniture that doesn't have this problem. (You can also buy kits to retrofit some of that protection.) Similarly for sharp corners on tables.
Are you suggesting that the wide availability of tables with sharp corners is a problem? That we need regulation to ban sharp corners on furniture?
Is the availability of tables that go beyond the legal minimum safety a problem for your world view?
I would imagine that at least kids furniture does have some fairly heavy regulations, and all furniture probably has some fire resistance laws or something.
Availability of tables with sharp corners becomes an issue when it starts affecting economies of scale. If some safety thing costs a few cents but for whatever reason is not available on the cheapest version, the market might or might not solve that, and the safer versions could be expensive for years to come.
Regulations aren't there to protect middle class people doing their research. They're to protect the weakest and most vulnerable who don't have time to research or money to buy anything better.
They're also to protect people who didn't choose furniture, like guests. It's about making an overall safer world.
Some level of balance is needed, but there are some things that most people are probably better off if they just don't exist, like a lamp that catches fire or baby formula that is made without strict controls, or cars without whatever the current modern safety assistance standard is based on the best evidence available.
A quick google shows that childrens products are in fact regulated by CSPC and can't have sharp stuff, among other requirements.
See what I wrote for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32373369 and also have a look at https://www.econlib.org/find-the-date-of-osha/
Most of the people I know replace their phones often enough that it doesn't seem to be a problem, and usually the battery isn't the issue. They mostly break them / get stolen / they just want the new shiny.
Fist falsifiable statement about e-waste policies - if it is so easy to read a company's e-waste policy, could you tell me which companies had policies that said "we will ship this waste to Indonesia and Africa, where it will de dumped without reprocessing and poison children'? If companies are so open about this information, and they want consumers to have a choice, then why do they send armed goods to beat up journalists investigating E-waste supply chain? If I buy a phone from a company that says 'we fully reprocess every single atom' and then it turns out they don't, why do they not go to jail for fraud?
Second falsifiable statement - 'people find having sealed batteries "acceptable" - this claim is not difficult to check - have you ever asked people on the street what they think about this? Have you looked at polls? Majorify of people prefer removable batteries.
Concerning the second, I would also tend to agree, but I'd argue that both can be true.
Most people don't solely buy a phone or other device based on the battery.
I would personally prefer a phone with a user-replaceable battery. But I don't prefer it enough as to be the most important thing when buying a phone.
I prefer an iPhone enough (for its other characteristics) compared to a cheap Android phone that I'll accept the non-replaceable battery. Hell, even if the latest Galaxy Sx had a replaceable battery, I'd still buy an iPhone with a non-user replaceable battery. However, if I had the choice between a regular iPhone and one with a user-replaceable battery (even if it were thicker), I'd buy the latter. But I won't go without an iPhone just because of the sealed battery.
Why? Because I prefer using iOS. And during the more than five years that I've had my iPhone 7, when the battery started being "degraded", I rode my bike to the closest Apple repair shop and had it replaced for the price of a Galaxy S5 battery. Again, I would have preferred to be able to do it myself, and be able to carry a spare battery when riding my motorbike in the middle of nowhere. But not enough that I'll buy an Android phone with a user-replaceable battery.
Every smartphone I’m aware of has had a replaceable battery and I’ve personally done replacements on about 2/3 of them. (I tend to buy 2 year old phones at a significant discount to original cost, meaning I replace more batteries than someone who buys new and upgrades every one to two years.)
Now, can it be replaced? Yes. Is it intended to be within the skillset of the average consumer? Clearly not.
What manufacturers think and what they want us to think are different things.
I don't really buy into (no pun intended) any argument that relies on the efficient market hypothesis. As this article pointed out, there's a vast asymmetry of information, which prevents an efficient market, even in theory.
> but I suspect these companies actually have a good idea about what their customers are looking for.
I suspect these companies have a good idea about what will cause their customers to purchase more often, and which parts cannot be evaluated on a showroom. Replaceable batteries would add tremendous value for customers, and battery life is frequently the most desired feature in surveys.
What kind of theory are you using here?
There might be some theoretical reasons to expect that symmetric information (and a few other conditions) will lead to an efficient market.
But that doesn't mean that a pre-existing information symmetry is necessary for an efficient market.
The classic example is the 'market for lemons', a paper about the information asymmetry in the market for used cars: layman buyers typically can't judge a used car well via a short inspection.
That was supposed to prevent an efficient market where you can buy quality goods.
Of course, the business solution to this problem is fairly straightforward and profitable: reputation.
You run your company with strict standards, so over time you build up a reputation and charge a premium for that. In addition you can sell warranties, too.
A really simple example is white goods: it's really hard to judge a dishwasher when you just see them in the store. There's reviews I can look at, but I can also just go and buy a Miele dishwasher. They are pricey, but I also know that they are extremely high quality and will last.
For a while, Miele could ride that reputation and sell shoddy products until the market catches up. But it's more profitable for them in the long run to defend their reputation. (Also employees would probably rebel against a change in policy. Many people like to take pride in their work.)
This is all without regulation having a binding impact: shoddy dishwashers are just as legal as premium dishwashers.
"Reputation" is yet more information that is both well known to and distorted by businesses. It's no kind of counterbalance to information asymmetry, it's just another example of it.
In contrast, for many of my needs, I find it relatively easy to buy high quality items even where there's a vast information asymmetry, as long as I am willing to shell out for products from companies with stellar reputations.
Granted that's neither foolproof nor applicable for every product or service. It can also get really expensive really fast.
But: given your comment, it sounds like that strategy shouldn't work at all, and even companies with ostensibly great reputations should sell me only trash?
So it's not an efficient market because of the premium you have to pay for reputation.
What's the definition of 'efficient' you want to be using here?
There is a huge price spread on nearly-identical products because people don't have enough information to determine which of the various supposedly equivalent products available are more reliable, efficient, safe, etc. and this is reflected in people spending more than necessary.
If, in fact, a particular brand was consistently more reliable than others but priced at a premium then with perfect information everyone would know this and a new manufacturer could introduce a similarly-reliable product at a price point within the spread and everyone would buy that instead.
Information about a product is part of the whole package. It's ok that people pay extra for it.
You even get effects like what you describe in some of the most efficient markets. Eg aluminum that's traded on the exchanges often sells for a different price than over-the-counter deals. See https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2014-11-20/the-go...
That doesn't mean that the market for aluminum is not 'efficient'. It's just a bit weirder than a naive look at the physical properties of the ostensible good, aluminum, would let you to believe.
Basically your critique says 'there's this subset of physical properties that is the same for two products, but they sell for different prices; hence the market must be inefficient'. But products aren't always made up of their physical properties alone.
Eg suppose I have a business selling sheets of paper with the winning lottery numbers of five years in the future. This is a product with a lot of information asymmetry: you can only judge its quality five years after buying it. To make it more extreme, assume that my predictive powers aren't quite so awesome: I can't divine guaranteed winners, I merely manage to produce lottery numbers that are a thousand times more likely to win than your average number. Still a useful product, but even harder to judge by individual customers.
Now a competitor springs up who sells the same sheets of paper with numbers printed on them. It's just that my competitor's numbers are no better than chance.
The physical properties of the paper and ink are exactly the same. They even use the same font. A lab couldn't tell them apart.
Would you insist that both suppliers' products should sell for the same price?
Now assume that I don't even print my own sheets: I just buy them in bulk from the other supplier, but I only resell the sheets that have the increased chances.
Now the sheets really are identical, and the only difference is my reputation for quality.
I hold that an efficient market will have different prices for this ostensibly identical goods.
> If, in fact, a particular brand was consistently more reliable than others but priced at a premium then with perfect information everyone would know this and a new manufacturer could introduce a similarly-reliable product at a price point within the spread and everyone would buy that instead.
Yes, that strategy is available even with imperfect information. And we often see that in the market, see https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/184207/was-the-jok... for an example from popular culture.
The information I value isn't related to the product you are selling, however, unless you also run the lottery (which would lead me to be highly suspicious). I'd pay roughly the same price for the same information on any medium, and it would be directly related to your reliability and not your reputation. E.g. you may have a reputation as a soothsayer, wizard, Oracle, or be named Omega but I will not bid more than the value of the lottery times your predicted accuracy (assume you sell only one prediction per lottery at auction, and your accuracy is the ratio of correct predictions to total predictions sold, to ignore the effect of multiple buyers+winners). Your brand reputation is your accuracy, not pieces of paper.
The closest analog I can think of is paying for a subscription to Consumer Reports to determine which lightbulb lasts the longest, for example. The information is decoupled from both the products and the manufacturers; the MTTF of a particular run of lightbulbs is simply a property of the world to be discovered. Given that a Consumer Reports subscription is less costly than the price difference on a basket of goods from reputable brands vs. generic brands suggests that consumers are not reaping an accurately priced benefit from brand reputation.
My theory is that most customers/consumers don't have the time and energy to invest into microeconomics (or reading CR) and therefore can't achieve an efficient market in the same sense that you or I could, or that large organizations can. Microeconomics requires approximations of rational actors and most people are not, and therefore business strategies incorporate this information in their pricing and advertising.
Another example is Costco which has generous return policies, sells with lower margins than most retail stores, and still makes money. Clearly they must be incorporating more information than is available by brand reliability or they would lose money on returns or sales or both. Likewise, they are charging a nominal membership fee for the job of collecting and acting on information about product quality that is isolated from the actual pricing of the products they sell. In practice, they work with existing manufacturers to rebrand their products as Kirkland at a lower price than the brand name, directly exploiting the arbitrage. There's probably still a fairly moderate price spread but it becomes harder to exploit with the cost of additional research and risk of asking for prices that are too low from the Kirkland suppliers. To survive (and thrive) they only have to pick a price in the middle of the spread where their popularity still allows manufacturers to make a sufficient profit that they put up with the dilution.
Where the market fails is in the creation of new industries that are willing to invest in manufacturing and selling products in the spread between the lowest cost junk and Costco prices. There is still money to be made there but customers won't have enough information to know that it's the most efficient option for them. It's the difference between saving pennies or millipennies on production costs vs. additional months or years of reliability that people would pay an entire extra dollar for, but practically pay several more when trusting brand reliability.
You're about to talk about "market for lemons," so presumably you figured it out.
> the business solution to this problem
It's not solved, so I can't wait to hear about the solution.
> reputation
LOL. Reputation is laggy, easy to manipulate, and easy to bypass.
> warranties
Insurance contracts are even harder to analyze for quality than cars, so you have replaced a small problem with a big problem.
> Miele dishwasher.
I am glad you are happy, but I am not in a position to assess if there is wisdom in your happiness. In markets where I am in a position to analyze the wisdom in premium options... you have to pay a very high dollar premium for a very small edge in quality. Buying cheap and hoping for the best (70% 1x, 30% 2x) absolutely pummels buying premium in cost efficacy (90% 2x, 10% 4x), even though the cost premium to produce quality is small. In other words, "market for lemons" fits my observations of market price structure while "reputation and warranties are totally great" just doesn't fit the evidence.
Which just shows that going for premium can be a very lucrative strategy for the supplier! Exactly as I suggested.
The literal textbook prerequisite for efficient market is not just informatuon symmetry, its perfect information. You shoupd know that if you are making 'free market can do no wrong' arguments.
Its like if all arguments about physics where made by 1st year university students that never moves beyond 'a hypothetical 100% efficient car on a frictionless surface hits another and has a perfectly elastic collision, what is the new velocity'
Please point me to that textbook.
Who says that free markets can do no wrong ever?
(I'm mostly saying that some markets might have some problems, sure. But most of the time most real world regulation dreamt up by real world politicians and implemented by real world civil servants etc is unlikely to improve them.)
What does this mean? That people didn't swear off using smartphones entirely after every manufacturer decided that sealed-in batteries would sell more phones?
Before priests would help you veil your decisions in religious terms. Now economists help you veil them in economic terms.
When everything is going okay, tou can use that as divine approval for any random decision you made. When everything is going badly, you can blame it on any random decision you opponents made.
We look at a downturn after the pandenic as a sign of the divine entity, the market, being displeased. We attempt to applease the divine entity with human sacrifice, by throwing the poor to the wolves and cutting taxes.
Anyone that points out that we've been trying the same religious orthodoxy for 40 years with poor results gets labelled a heretic - a socialist.
Every year there's a hurricane, wherever it passes, a good amount of people will be out of power for maybe a week, If you cannot buy a battery in the corner store, you haven't bought a flashlight, you've bought a toy.
I'm not sure how your aquarium lights are configured (whether they cycled or were always on) but honestly 5-7 years is already quite impressive. There's not really any other lighting technology that can do that. 5-7 years of constant usage also far exceeds what consumer batteries can usually do, which are something on the order of hundreds of "actual cycles" before significant capacity degradation. That translates to maybe a couple years, but definitely less than five.
I go through about 1 power brick a year. I got a wire wet in the original one, and I can't seem to find ones that last long. They always run hot.
I just changed a relay yesterday. My smart switch doesn't output clean voltage or do clean off; so I have it drive a 120VAC relay. Could have been my wiring, though. It's an industrial relay, so I don't see why it'd fail after ~1500 cycles.
Why do they do this? Because many high quality manufacturers (Samsung, LG) don't approve their cells for usage in vaping devices. Some like Molicel are OK with it. I'm sure you have heard of Mooch :)
Interesting. In France, there's a vape shop that advertises batteries as Samsung, Sony, etc.
For instance: https://www.lepetitvapoteur.com/en/batteries/5185-samsung-30...
Although, I do have a pair of these in front of me right now, bought a few years ago, and I can't find any mention of Samsung, or any other manufacturer, on them.
[0] https://www.lepetitfumeur.fr/accessoires-cigarette-electroni...
---
edit: Even Conrad, supposedly an old store, is selling these things. They're advertised as batteries for "industrial solutions".
https://www.conrad.com/p/samsung-icr18650-26-non-standard-ba...
It makes me sad to see them claiming waterproofing as the reason, when the art of sealing easily disassembled components has already been perfected over many centuries... the other comment here mentions flashlights, another object of a similar shape which does often come in a waterproof version with replaceable batteries. I have no doubt they could design an electric toothbrush which is both waterproof and has replaceable batteries; they just don't want to, because they'd rather you buy a whole new one.
Adding to the irony, water ingress and resulting damage often occurs to them anyway, but not at the bottom where they seal in the batteries; instead, water gets in around the shaft seal and then corrodes the insides from the top. Once again, it would probably be an easy task to make a better seal design, but that would cost just a tiny bit more than they'd like.
If you have to be a qualified professional to ensure that a brush is disposed of the right way, well, that's a good way to ensure that they won't be disposed of the right way.
They can, because mine is, and does! It was strangely refreshing to get an electronic device that takes plain-old AAA batteries in 2022.
It's the cord. For me, a max of six months of fiddling with the damn thing and it breaks.
I've had real headphones last quite a bit longer— but I buy the ones with replaceable cords. The pair I still have is on its fourth cord and second pair of muffs.
I don't view it as any sort of economic, human, or environmental catastrophe, that they stop holding a charge after... how long again? I've had a pair of Pros since before the pandemic which seem to hold up fine.
So I'm around what, twenty cents a day? It's a rare day I don't wear them for a solid hour.
It undermines the argument to pick the easy, lazy, and really rather bad example that everyone else flocks to for some bizarre reason. It's genuinely hard to come up with a better product category for glued-in batteries than in-ear wireless headphones.
- Value per use - Weight (analog for materials used) - Likely lifetime
Bonus for wireless headphones specifically is you can buy replacement cases, or single buds if any go bad.
Would be nice.
Ironically, that could at least partially be attributed to their use of "environmentally friendly" plastic with little to no plasticisers.
> I've made AirPods last longer than any other pair of earbuds I've ever had.
We've heard the same argument about phones, and my old Galaxy S5 with a user-replaceable battery was a whopping 0.5 mm thicker than an iPhone 13 mini. That's the width of a mechanical pencil lead. They're both water-resistant, too.
According to google, 0.5 mm = 0.019685 in
Yup. I have a pair of Shure earbuds bought in 2011. When the cable started acting out, I replaced it with a lightning cable, since I had just got an iPhone. When that one started acting out, I replaced it with a Shure BT cable. Now I get great sound from my crappy work laptop.
Please post the original URL. You can add a link to an archiving site in the comments if you feel that would be helpful.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please submit the original source."
Also heart rate based training isn’t a new concept. Neither is running to music. I’m running much shorter distances now - because age. But the only thing that made running half marathons tolerable was music.
My Apple Watch 3rd Gen also has a cell phone chip that one day will be obsolete. While the cellular version of the 3rd Gen Watch has 16GB of memory, the non cell version has 8GB and is already struggling with operating system updates.
As far as AirPods, if you have seen the tear down, it’s mostly a huge battery. Throwing away the battery and keeping the rest wouldn’t cut down on ewaste meaningfully even at scale.
Even if I could replace the battery of an x86 Mac easily, why would I want a laptop that sounds like a freight train when I open a few Chrome tabs, gets hot, has horrible battery life and is still slower than an M1 MacBook Air for $999 that beats it on all measures?
But let’s get back to the Garmin GPS watch example. Have you seen how big and bulky those things are compared to an Apple Watch. Do you think I would want to use that in 2022? I had to use a separate chest band to measure my heart rate. Now it’s built into the watch.
I try to buy all of my new electronics with this lesson in mind.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Logitech+MX+Anywhere+3+Battery+...
It looks approximately as difficult as changing the battery on a smartphone.
Knowing that the battery could be changed gave me the piece of mind to switch.
The battery management on the MXA 3 is really good - lasts a very long time and is quick to charge on USB-C. The Logi Bolt has been trouble-free. Changing to other devices via bluetooth is handy if you have multiple computers. The magnetic hyperscroll takes a little getting used to but uses a lot less force to switch modes.
And there's _still_ no USB-C unify receiver? Ugh.
There needs to be a DIY mouse-hacking community on par with the customized mechanical keyboard community.
YouTube is famous for supporting really old stuff, Netflix doesn't both quite as much.
So, I have an original iPad Air from 2013. Apple is no longer providing updates, and Netflix has long stopped working. But Youtube keeps trucking on just fine. I assume thanks to heroic and soulsucking efforts by the developers.
(I remember when I did something as trivial as working on a few web frontends once, and how I loathed supporting anything but the most recent browsers. So supporting age old devices with Youtube is probably much, much more annoying for the devs.)
A Macbook will easily last you 8 years, unless it has a butterfly keyboard, how many would be willing to pay extra for one that lasts 15 years? Or a phone that lasts 10?
When it comes to products with strong brands, people will quickly learn what the life expectancy is, so you can’t really fool them. If they break easily, people will atop buying them.
With generic gadgets like an electronic thermometer or something the incentives are different, it does make sense to have them break early.
Btw, I’ve used my AirPods pro for at least 2 hours every day since they were released and the battery is still pretty decent.
I opened it up for cleaning, to check the electrolytic capacitors (some need replacement) and to swap out lithium coin cell battery that backs up the user’s saved settings.
Since the battery was working, I assumed it had been replaced.
Nope, the working lithium coin battery has a date of November 1987 which is very early so far as I understand.
So it’s still there because if it’s still working after thirty five years, it will probably be working for the two or three years I can expect from a new battery.
It was refreshing to experience an engineering design driven by long reliability in a piece of digital electronics.
This has largely been replaced by flash memory, so if you see a battery in a modern device there's a good chance it's powering a real-time clock, which use a fair bit more power in comparison.
I'm sure there's a big difference between different implementations of this -- low power design is an art that's quite easy to get wrong.
By the time you get a serviceman out to take a look, order the part, come back and fix it the cost is approaching half that of a new machine.
I've fixed my espresso machine, washing machine and fridge with parts that are usually sub $50, but they wouldn't have been viable to fix if I had to get a serviceman in for it.
I'm not sure any of the repairs could have been made much easier, for example the front panel/MCU for my washing machine can be replaced in minutes, just remove about 6 phillips head screws to get the top and panel off, swap the connectors over, done.
I think it's pretty funny when people pay more for an electronics gadget than for a used Honda Civic, and the Civic outlasts the gadget by 10 years (with maintenance). And the Civic's electronics, ironically, usually don't need maintenance.
The failures we can predict (like batteries) have gotten more attention, admittedly, but by and large it’s my experience that the actual electronic components don’t fail. The only wear part in most modern devices is the battery.
This is the tip of a very large iceberg. I'd love to see it fixed, but id rather we don't forget the other problems just because we're taking about the battery issue...
(And while we're on that one this covers electronic cars as well. But I guess some people believe that replacing a car every 10 years is somehow green efficient and makes up for a whole new car being ripped out of the ground somewhere in the 3rd world)
A higher-than-expected failure-rate of non-solid aluminium Electrolytic Capacitors
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search: >'bad capacitors'< @DDG : <https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/?q='bad capacitors'>
Changing tires is better than throwing away a car whose tires are worn out, but it's not without impact. Tires don't recycle into anything useful; there are only so many bouncy playgrounds you can build from shredded tire rubber.
Perhaps there's breakthroughs that can be made, but you can't expect people to just start trying to drive without tires.
Would be good to get a source on that claim. Or if not a source, then a reason why tires can't be recycled into anything useful.
Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. This confuses me greatly.
Anyway, I also complain about planned obsolescence in other areas: TVs, fridges, washers, etc. A friend of mine uses 50+ year old fridges and cars. They still run fine, though the cars are a death trap.
I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a gradient or pendulum, and we’ve swung too far towards the wasteful side of things in my opinion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-H7E-KQgHQ (6.5 min.)
According to the video, they're built to last for 50 - 100 years.
Haha, sure. Let me rephrase: an engineer with a job.
...and yet we did, and still use a lot of that construction today.
I bought a cheap spot welder ago on Amazon some years ago for re-celling packs. I bought the highest rated high output Molicel 18650's and it took about 5 minutes to spot weld them in with some nickel. Vac is now better than new, runs for a half hour or more on a charge. Probably will be good for years unless something else breaks in it.
Nowadays there are deliberate design decisions in every product that cause these things to break down before their time.
There has been planned obsolescence in human economic activity whenever it could be made advantageous to do so.
You also discount the increasing capability of electronics, which in many cases involve including more or more complex circuitry, which reduces the lifespan. You can certainly design for reliability, but this generally increases the cost, and consumers almost always opt for the cheaper product.
The places to look for deliberate design for failure to drive profits are markets in which there is an effective monopoly or cartel and the manufacturers no longer have competition (like the Phoebus cartel).
Not true. Entire industries can move in lock step without formation of a cartel. Phones, cars and fashion is one example. All of the aforementioned products are designed with planned obsolescence in mind.
It's sort of a behavioral phenomenon, the same way a flock of birds stays synchronized in the sky. Additionally, competing Companies in industries can still deliberately design things that fail earlier without losing profit margins simply because humans are too myopic to judge the difference between a phone that fails in 8 years vs. one that fails in 3.
Just this weekend my five year old NAS died because of a CPU flaw. AV receivers seem to last about 6 years before something fails (usually the HDMI board seems to fail). Wireless access points get worse after 4 or 5 years of use (I’ve been told the amplifiers wear out). It’s frustrating.
Why do we not have universal batteries? In fact, we could probably just use USB-C directly. We are good enough at making small things that we could just choose a standard size, lile a Gopro battery, power bank form factor, with a male C connector sticking out one side.
Would it be slightly wasteful to throw out the whole pack with all the electronics? Yeah kinda, but better than throwing out a whole device. Plus, it would guarantee any battery powered device can be run without a battery at all plugged into the wall.
Failing that, they can just design a new futureproof chemistry-independant smart battery from complete scratch.
If I've got a busted HDD or a dead tablet — anything which is holding data that I can't electronically destroy — who do I give it to?
The office supply shops have paper shredding. The municipal recycling centers will take stuff, and so will the electronics stores, but they all carry disclaimers about data privacy.
I've considered visiting my local police station where they store confiscated property and just tip it into a public trash can.
I suppose that the City's service would be safe enough. Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?
No one, you do it yourself. Here's what works for personal devices.
- Hard drives: Open them up with a screwdriver, then physically smash the platters with the pointy end of a hammer. The platters easily shatter into a thousand pieces, very little force required. Use a plastic bag to contain the pieces. For newer models, also smash the cache chips on the logic board.
- SSDs / flash storage: disassemble the case, then smash the memory chips with a hammer.
- CDs/DVDs: break them a few times, ideally use a shredder if you have one that's strong enough. Make sure the metal foil is sufficiently destroyed.
- Tapes: take out the tape itself, then carefully shredder lengthwise or just burn it.
- anything with batteries in it: remove the battery first.
- anything with device specific cloud service accounts: delete the data and close the account if you won't be using it anymore, so it can't leak data if it gets hacked in the future.
>Would ethics or liability prevent salvage operations from harvesting personal data?
Physically no. Especially don't trust anybody telling you you can trust them. You have to do it yourself or at the very least watch it with your own eyes. There are commercial services that physically shredder hard drives and documents, these should let you watch so you can verify the destruction yourself.
But the 365th day after I bought it, WiFi and Bluetooth stopped working. All of a sudden. WiFi chip was built with a death date.
On the other hand, the next phone I bought lasted with me for more than 7 years - until I accidentally dropped it and crashed with an acute metal surface. Only the screen died but I used it as an excuse to got a new phone, but now I fear phones now aren't designed nor built to last that much.
To learn more here's an interesting short video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
No kidding. It's only mentioned several times in the article.
Mandating that they admit the death date seems to be baking in some level of stockholm syndrome.
for now society has voted with their dollars to support my preferences
How is producing tons and tons of e waste each year and having you spend an extra few hundreds every single year unnecessarily is something you’d prefer to keep on doing?
And it’s not like the alternative would prevent you from doing it. You could still throw your phone away every couple of year and buy the new incarnation of you really wanted to still set your money on fire. It would take nothing away from you but make everyone else’s life a little better. I don’t get it.
i prefer aesthetic over upgradability.
i’m sure it won’t surprise you but i buy a new iPhone nearly every year.
this isn’t meant to troll but to show you that people can care this much about how something looks and feels in their hands over some {insert ideal}
i literally cannot choose that. you're the one who gets what you want.
which is a market failure.
and is literally bad for the planet.
I actually rode around for several hours in the pouring rain with it attached to my motorbike handlebars, and it still worked.
If you like articles like this and want them to continue, link the source.
Sure advances happen but nearly nobody _needs_ the equivalent of avx2048 on a phone.
Windows XP lasted almost an entire generation in computing terms. Sure it probably wasn't the most fun thing to work on by the time it was retired but Microsoft kept that going as the 64bit era launched and pcie and x86 multicore became the norm. Saying it can't be done is just excusing not wanting to go back and fix things or maintain stuff.
It's not that people are trying to make hardware last forever. It's that these devices are being deliberately designed to break down in a couple years. There are actual design decisions to force consumer behavior into purchasing new things every couple of years.
This doesn't just apply to things that follow moores law. Almost every product in existence nowadays is literally designed to break earlier then they usually do. Companies in certain cases actually spend more money creating a design that ensures that a product will break early so that consumers will buy a new thing within some years.
This includes cars, computers, phones, microwaves, lightbulbs. Etc.
Your personal need to buy a new car, new phone and new clothes is the result of market manipulation over the last 10 decades or so... morphing our culture from one where we kept tools around for years into one where we need to buy new things all the time. It was not like this at least 1 or 2 generations ago.
The result of this endless buying behavior is good for business and the economy but it has devastating effects on the environment and our resources.
Worth watching if you have 15 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5v8D-alAKE
The actual story of how companies colluded to make lightbulbs not last as long.
So what about those companies that still include planned obsolescence? You need to vote with your money. Simply don’t buy their product. If you do, if you’re fooled twice, that’s on you.
This is False.
Apple is one of the companies that completely buys into planned obsolescence. They never stopped doing it. They still do it and they practically invented it for iphones and ipads.
If other phone companies are doing planned obsolescence then they most likely learned it from apple. Apple is one of the leaders of this concept.
>So what about those companies that still include planned obsolescence? You need to vote with your money. Simply don’t buy their product.
This doesn't account for how humans are irrational. Tons of irrational people buy shit without knowing their part of an irrational obsolescence cycle (aka you). For example, back in the day, apple shortened the lifetime of their phones by not allowing the battery to be replaced. Yet people still buy apple phones EVEN when OTHER companies offered phones with replaceable batteries.
Now the entire industry glues their batteries inside the phone. Apple is paving the way for planned obsolescence and irrational consumers buy in without ever realizing it. Consumers vote with their money the same way they voted for Trump.
>If you do, if you’re fooled twice, that’s on you.
If you buy apple products and you think they don't do planned obsolescence. Jokes on you.
And not accepting a democratically elected official; again they voted for what was perceived to be in their interests. Trump incentivized. There was no mistake.
There is huge drive to position the products in this way. Consumers including you are manipulated to think this way for products that traditionally aren't thought of this way. It has become so ingrained that you can't tell the difference.
>You cite no evidence.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/03/01/apple-lawsuit-portugal-planne...
https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/apples-planned-obso...
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/04/08/apple-to-pay-34m-...
https://nypost.com/2021/12/02/apple-may-soon-kill-off-older-...
https://www.idropnews.com/news/spanish-consumer-protection-g...
https://wccftech.com/apple-iphone-6-planned-obsolescence-thr...
https://www.makeuseof.com/apple-faces-750m-lawsuit-throttlin...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-244-apples-pla...
https://lawstreetmedia.com/news/tech/apple-receives-planned-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42615378
https://www.icmrindia.org/casestudies/catalogue/Business%20E...
https://actions.sumofus.org/a/planned-obsolescence-is-why-ap...
https://dailytargum.com/article/2019/09/iphones-and-planned-...
https://durabilitymatters.com/planned-obsolescence/
https://www.shacknews.com/article/123046/apple-faces-new-law...
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4134160-apples-planned-obso...
https://dailycampus.com/2022/03/28/dull-and-new-the-truth-be...
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/22/16807056/apple-slow-iphone-ba...
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN29U1BB
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353685307_FROM_PLAN...
https://www.euroconsumers.org/activities/stop-planned-obsole...
https://www.howtogeek.com/681577/how-to-claim-your-cash-from...
https://undergradlawreview.blog.fordham.edu/consumer-protect...
https://www.europastar.com/news/1004088006-tech-trend-thursd...
https://thehustle.co/why-your-iphone-only-lasts-two-years-ma...
https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/planned-obsolescence/ (defines planned obsolescence. first example is apple)
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Apple,_iPhone_...
If you would like more please let me know.
Also you know that video I sent you about the light bulbs? That was just the first part. The Video is about planned obsolescence in general and it talks about APPLE. Watch the whole thing.
> I have the opposite experience first hand.
Oh wow, Ok you win the debate.
I mean where did this fantasy come from that you’d benefit from hundreds of years of work for a couple thousand bucks? And that it would last forever and be maintained and updated by the manufacturer forevermore? What is this utopian dream you’ve dreamt up? Why don’t you take a pile of sand and a pool of oil and a lump of aluminum and go make your very own laptop? Oh right, you can’t do it without other people.
But now the display is getting weirdly jagged at random, odd reboot loops, and so forth. Time ... to die.
Five years, a little more than your average replicant. It's still delightful for my use. The replacement will be larger and will cost me money I would rather spend on other things. With the protective case and the Applecare and the ablative glass addition, my fondleslab will run me over a couple hundred a year, if I include my data plan. I would like just a little more life, father.
I wouldn’t need to update if Apple let me put iOS 16 on it or at least committed to shipping security updates to iOS 15 beyond Sept. 2022.
We don’t all need this years 1000$ (!!!!!!) phone, some of us are very content buying a few years old used phone for 200$.
This said, the problem isn't limited to one company. It's how capitalism works. In order to succeed, whether as a company or individual, you have to convince people to part with something called money they have been programmed to avoid parting with as much as humanly possible... in other words, you succeed not based on the value of what you produce (because wage work's actual cost is literally a rounding error) if you are better at transactions in a zero-sum game than others are. We probably need for money to exist, because trade wouldn't work without it, and because we're still a hundred years or more from true post-scarcity communism, but having a whole society run on an operating system of zero-sum transactions has some pretty clear negatives--neither the smallest nor the worst of which is tech waste--even if it's not always evident how best to fix this. Companies are going to keep producing short-lived crap because it's good for sales, because ultimately anything other than "good for sales" cannot be afforded under this particular economic system where something is either sold or it dies.
Buy a Dell XPS.
I think you just have to avoid gaming notebook.
It’s nice to be able to treat my laptop like I’ve been treating iPads for a decade - a portable device that you don’t have to worry about running out of battery during a day of normal use.
As such, despite running 5.18, Wayland, Firefox, "latest nonfree version of ffmpeg with actual 264 codecs," etc etc etc, GPU accelerated decoding of videos is still too much to ask for in FF or MPV. VLC sometimes does it. Sometimes - usually after making sure I have a version of ffmpeg that actually supports the codecs I want to decode.
I'm still following an ever deeper series of guides on how to enable ASIC decoding for videos.
This is across a few distros (Pop_OS, Fedora Silverblue [using both the bundled FF and the flatpak variant from flathub - not just the Fedora flatpak], Tumbleweed), and it has long been the same story.
On my desktop, I have simply regressed to letting FF/MPV/VLC take an extra 15W of power to render a video. On my laptop, I still am trying to find a solution, since it can hardly spare that extra power consumption.
On Silverblue, I don't recall the exact steps, only that I gave up and just used "enhanced h264ify" to disable h264, in favor of vp9. This still breaks many other websites that use h264, but at least youtube mostly works. Mpv flatpak works, so I just use mpv to render the h264-only videos that youtube still has. Of course, this is one area where snaps has the edge of flatpak, IMO - nice default aliases in the terminal, instead of 'flatpak run io.Mpv.mpv https://youtu.be/watch.......' or having to create my own, or having to use another program to do it.
(I develop on Linux, and use Office 365 without too much trouble but it's far from perfect)
My recent experiment with moving to the cheapest Thinkpad (E14 Gen 3, the one with AMD) was successful and using it for personal projects makes me very happy. I bought the cheapest configuration and added some RAM and the second (!) NVMe disk to install linux in addition to windows (nice to have, but downgraded it to win10 from 11). Linux is so much stable and overall better than macos and windows.
This is obviously not true. People love the products Apple makes - it's really that simple.
Like with GDPR where people imagined all sorts of situations ad absurdum (the grocer on the corner not being allowed to ask for your birthday anymore to give you a yearly free product or some such), these laws generally have exceptions for things where it makes sense. They aren't cooked up overnight in isolation and aren't the oneliner that you read online. I would expect that your mentioned exceptional example probably has an exception cases defined for it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
If it were common knowledge that cookie walls are not required for any normal website operation or statistics keeping, but only a thing required for invasive tracking, then any website introducing one would face questions and media attention rather than it being the norm. The law requires cookie walls exactly nowhere, it requires to ask for consent before doing something you have no valid reason for doing.
There are 5 defined valid reasons, including "it's in the subject's interest" and "it's in our legitimate interest" and stuff like that. O-n-l-y if you can't shove it under any of those, then you need to fall back to politely asking the subject you want to track. Every cookie wall is in this category. We really shouldn't be accepting this, but try educating half a billion people speaking thirty languages who have better things to do. It's not even well-known among the tech community, which continuously surprises me. Maybe we need to outlaw consent that is not part of a bigger contract (so a random website visit, not like research or so), maybe we need to have big website owners set better examples... I don't know.
But anyway I guess I was more interested in the new battery law rather than hosting my fourtieth hacker news gdpr misconceptions session, as I've not yet read the actual legal text of the former.
All a private company - Apple - had to do was create a 5 line rule change and add a setting to iOS and it the entire ad tracking industry including Facebook announced billions in losses.
As is usually the case with legislation, the text of the law will support whatever reading you'd like to assign to it. If you're a booster for the legislation, you are free to claim that it doesn't have any problems. If you're not, there are some readily observable problems.
The text is here ( https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... ), and here are the relevant parts:
> [definition] (23) ‘appliance’ means any electrical or electronic equipment, as defined by Directive 2012/19/EU, which is fully or partly powered by a battery or is capable of being so
> Article 11
> 1. Portable batteries incorporated in appliances shall be readily removable and replaceable by the end-user or by independent operators during the lifetime of the appliance, if the batteries have a shorter lifetime than the appliance, or at the latest at the end of the lifetime of the appliance.
> A battery is readily replaceable where, after its removal from an appliance, it can be substituted by a similar battery, without affecting the functioning or the performance of that appliance.
> 2. The obligations set out in paragraph 1 shall not apply where
> (a) continuity of power supply is necessary and a permanent connection between the appliance and the portable battery is required for safety, performance, medical or data integrity reasons; or
> (b) the functioning of the battery is only possible when the battery is integrated into the structure of the appliance.
> 3. The Commission shall adopt guidance to facilitate harmonised application of the derogations set out in paragraph 2.
So the law literally says "(1) all appliances must use removable, replaceable batteries, UNLESS (2) that would be bad, AND (3) we promise we will eventually set a standard for when it would or wouldn't be bad". But that hypothetical future standard is not part of the law. And we can't honestly say that "don't do something, unless you have a good reason" is a law that can actually be implemented. It will misidentify bad reasons as good reasons while punishing good reasons.