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Comment by acd | Hacker News Reader

We shall demand legislation with enforces that phones and other devices can be used like normal computers. Ie demand open boot loaders, open specs so that open source software can run well on phone devices.

If we can run open source software the length the devices lifetime last will be greatly extended. This will minimize electronic waste and e-waste pollution.

Its essential that all electronic devices can run open source software. That boot loaders and access to devices are not monopolized or crippled by device vendors.

Vendors have one main interest to is to sell new devices to consumers and maximize profit. Consumers and the government have different intrest in that devices last longer so we minimize the impact on the environment.

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Come on, they don't even make phones with user replaceable batteries anymore, some even caught red-handed deliberately slowing down old devices which were actually perfectly fine. The reason behind all those malicious behaviors is simple: user maintainable and repurpose-able devices are bad for business. I don't believe governments are not aware of that, but nonetheless it still happened, why?

Formally my Samsung A40 has no user replaceable battery. Actually you can find plenty of videos on YouTube that explain how to dissect that phone and replace almost everything. I don't trust myself to replace the screen but I replaced the camera after the n-th crash on the floor (20 Euros) and the battery after 3.5 years (40 Euros). All it takes is a flat piece of plastic to open the frame and glue to close it again.

Was it better when that operation was a matter of 5 seconds? Yes.

I’ve replaced the screen and battery on 2 different iDevices, the scary amount of heat generated by both have completely turned me off to even trying. They absolutely would have exploded at some point.

Now almost everything is glued on. Even with proper tools, opening without damaging is almost impossible.

most of the use cases i can think of would have the phone plugged in somewhere permanently, digital photo frame, home assistant controller etc, so whether the battery is worn out wouldnt matter so much

>whether the battery is worn out wouldnt matter so much

Old phone batteries bloat up and become fire hazards. Ideally, phones could run permanentaly plugged in with the battery removed, but from my experience, they won't even power on without a battery present.

Some laptops too, it’s infuriating.

Isn't this because the charger cannot provide the same peak power that the battery can? I don't know how laptop power supplies work.

were that true the charge time would be longer than the run time (not strictly true, if the load is bursty what you say could conceivably be true)

its somewhat difficult and fussy to do power management in the way you would expect - that the input power is used to power the computer, and whatever is 'left over' is used to charge the battery.

this is just skimping on engineering bandwidth and a few extra components

Yep, purely malicious, no plausible reasons at all to reduce peak power drain on old batteries, in fact - batteries only get better with age!

If we repeat this lie long enough we might believe it ourselves!

Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious.

The fact that phones have no option to bypass the battery when plugged in is another obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose. In fact, I built a relay that connects to home assistant to turn off my charger when the phone reaches 80% at night. My battery is much healthier for it. It would be dirt simple to add this option to your phone OS.

OEMs seem to be getting better about this.

I see batter limiters in MacOS, Samsung phones, Framework laptops, Microsoft Surface devices. Now we just need to normalize it on budget devices.

Samsung seems to have added a battery care feature that will detect if your device is mostly plugged in all the time and charge to 85% instead of 100%.

> Well.... If you cycle a battery between 30 and 80% its lifetime increases by almost 10x. The battery management on phones is terrible. Either the manufacturer is stupid or malicious.

As pointed out by sibling comments this is somewhat common nowadays. iPhones will IIRC default only charge to ~80% overnight, stay there, and only charge up to 100% when it thinks your normal wake time is approaching. I remember Macbooks starting to do this at least 10-15 years ago. I'm not sure well this aligns as "an obvious decision to kill batteries on purpose". Is it possible that it isn't a grand conspiracy, but instead a natural consequence of having to quality and expense of parts vs what one thinks the market can support?

The other option from your proposal of course is never to charge above 80%, or call 80% "100%", in which scenario you would almost certainly have the same sources accusing them of being underhanded and anti-consumer by "artificially limiting battery capacity".

There is obviously no conspiracy. It's common business sense to not care about battery life in a product with a 2 year lifecycle. The fact that SOME phones don't overcharge your phone battery shows that it's a business decision rather than a technology challenge.

> It's not the crime, it's the coverup.

They may well had a technical reason, but I certainly don't appreciate them being underhanded about it. I don't have an apple device right now, so I'm generally out of the loop, but it seems like right now people can toggle the slow down, and also go get their batteries replaced. That seems like a pretty good end situation. Did I get that right?

Underhanded? As a response to the incident they have made it so you can explicitly turn it off, sure. But people trust the phone to make a thousand other decisions on a moment-to-moment basis about the tradeoff between CPU and battery, is it reasonable to call it being "underhanded" when singling out a specific one of them retrospectively? Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think I know a single person who would choose to trade an hour or two's battery for a 5% CPU bump.

Much like the iPhone 4 reception fiasco. Nothing actually changed reception-wise, except they changed the way they calculated and displayed the signal. But people were now seeing _different_ signal profiles than they expected, and apparently Apple decided (eventually) that changing it back and giving everyone a free case was better marketing that continuing to try and persuade people of that.

It wasn't even trading an hour or two battery for a 5% bump, it was "when you open the camera, the phone rebooted" - or when you did anything else which demanded a short burst of high power the ageing battery could no longer supply. Imagine arguing that you would prefer 'broken phone' instead of 'working slower phone'.

How did we find out about the battery thing?

Haha, you reminded me of the days when some of my friends arguing iPhone's signal wasn't that bad but just could not make the call when everyone else could.

It's never the device vendor's decision to make on how users should their devices. That's not something to argue about.

> If we can run open source software the length the devices lifetime last will be greatly extended. This will minimize electronic waste and e-waste pollution.

i think you are overestimating the impact of such legislation. compare how many phones are sold each year with how big the open source community is, then how many devices will actually be used by that community after they’re no longer used by their initial owner. i fear the numbers are so small they won’t even register.

All the more reason to require open boot loaders and the like. If the community is that small, it will minimally affect the ability of manufacturers to move new product. At least at first, until people find out they can do more with an old phone than throw it in a drawer.

You need more than bootloaders. You need drivers compatible with somewhat maintained kernels too.

My phone's bootloader is unlocked and if I fix my broken USB port I could flash any Linux system onto it, but Linux has no drivers for most of the phone's hardware. The WiFi and Bluetooth probably won't work and the GPU probably won't be doing anything useful and the camera or fingerprint scanner will never in a million years perform like they do on Android.

You can't really continuously operate a smartphone without disconnecting the battery or it will swell up and die. Doing so with this phone will require careful removal of both the screen and the back plate with heated pads, suction cups, spudgers, and lots of tiny screws.

I may one day get around to replacing the battery and bad USB board, but if I do so it'll take at least a day of YouTube-guided work, maybe more. Then I'm still stuck with an outdated version of Android or an unofficial LineageOS fork by Some Guy because projects like postmarketOS have so far given up on my device (one maintainer broke their phone, the other gave up "for their sanity").

Until parties like Qualcom start working with the Linux kernel instead of against it, and Apple opens up their bootloaders, I don't expect these devices to be usable for anyone for the next couple of years. It sounds quite enticing to have an ARM cluster of relatively quick trashed phones, but the work you need to put into each phone separately to get it to work just isn't worth it.

WiFi and Bluetooth not working would be a feature for me. I travel a lot and all my phones inevitably get hacked, usually via bluetooth and surreptious network updates.

In that case, give postmarketOS a go on your device. You get the benefits of packages that actually receive security updates and an up-to-date mainline kernel at the cost of hardware support being very unlikely.

I note that there are a lot of exploits that enable replacement of proprietary firmware and operating systems:

https://wiki.debian.org/Exploits

This would be great also with MacBook with newer M1/M2 chips, instead of throwing then away because they're locked

but where's the money in doing this?

no money, no nothing.

Legislation is the key word here.

senators also use money, lots of it, way more than average.

so my question is still valid

Fair enough.

No thanks. I’m happy with my iPhone as is.

Didn't Apple just release an patch that covered the 5S? The phone's 9 years old, now. An open bootloader is a different story, but so far, Apple's delivered on long-term support.

That's a great to hear, but unfortunately nobody else is doing it and Apple does so many other bad things to more than make up for that from an environmental pov.

And you can continue using it as is. But let the rest of us have full access to the hardware to extend its capabilities and lifetime.

Device reusability is an environmental issue, so your happiness is utterly irrelevant here. Making devices (or their parts) easy to keep using or repurpose means fewer need to be created and fewer end up in the landfill.

> an environmental issue, so your happiness is utterly irrelevant here

Ah, the insanity of the progressive left.

The changes you’re describing aren’t free and would have minuscule benefit overall. Instead, they would just increase prices for everyone else without any tangible benefit.

Yes, smartphones are more capable than they were. No, people aren’t going to fill up racks with them in lieu of actual desktop hardware. All of the infrastructure required to ice and maintain an old phone isn’t worth the effort and high failure rates. OSS firmware doesn’t solve those issues.

Pigouvian taxes.

Right, because that has worked perfectly every time so far...

1. The added cost will simply be passed down to the consumer. Since a perfect alternative doesn't exist and the market isn't free anyways, customers won't switch. And since the number of customers stays the same, profits stay the same, so the producer won't change.

2. The money from the tax won't actually solve the problem. Perfectly usable electronics will still be discarded, landfills will still fill and new devices will still be unnecessarily manufactured. The harm done is the same, only now the government has some extra change.

This perspective has a huge following on Hacker News and it's baffling. This site celebrates clever reuse of technology, creative thinking, and open source. But when Apple comes up, some people close down completely and the sharply defined cognitive dissonance looks very cult-like.

HN consists of multiple people who can each have different opinions. It's not a single person that simultaneously holds anti-closed-source and pro-Apple mindsets. A small number of people here might seem to, but I bet if you asked them to explain their position, it would make sense according to their worldview.

I like using what Apple builds and I don't like forcing people to operate by coercion. Apple builds and sells a product. If you don't like it... use something else.

As a customer would I personally put pressure on them? Sure. But the authoritarian coercive approach proposed by some is harmful at best.

If believing in freedom is a cult, count me in.

apple has acted against principles of free speech quite often.

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