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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

The problem isnt technical feasibility it is market incentives.

Most companies have no incentive to let you hold your data when they can just hold it for you.

If they do this they can mine it for data to improve their product as well as sell or otherwise indirectly profit from it. And, it's easier.

Also, while the market for privacy focused products isnt nothing, the number of people willing to pay a lot extra to compensate for the missed opportunities companies get by collecting your data is, i think, smaller than many people imagine. Which is sad.

I think the only way it will grow to an appreciable size is by seeing up close and personal what a really vicious stasi-like secret police does with dragnet surveillance and come out the other side, with scars. I believe we've only seen a small taste of this.

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> The problem isnt technical feasibility it is market incentives.

This is understating it honestly.

The software industry has become completely reliant on renting data access back to users to maintain subscription revenue. One effect of this is it has devalued the actual software in the eyes of users to such a degree that virtually no one will pay for alternatives, certainly not enough to compensate the development cost.

You got the market incentives wrong.

Most people have no incentive of owning their data. Otherwise the companies which don't give you that would die out because people wouldn't use them if they cared.

Same fallacy as believing smartphones are giant and with non-user swappable batteries because somehow smartphone making companies are forcing this on the market, instead of the real reason which is that it's what consumers want.

I don't think it's so black-and-white. There are multiple forces at play simultaneously.

I agree that people don't care enough about owning their data for it to matter more than what the companies want to push, which is of course monetizing the data and maximizing user lock-in.

Similarly, I think it's in the companies' interests to use non-swappable batteries: simpler and cheaper to manufacture (I think this is the main reason) and the device is made obsolete earlier which is an added bonus. Maybe small improvements in size etc., but that's a very small difference. Modern phones are already larger even with non-swappable batteries so I'm not sure it mattered. But again, having a non-swappable battery has to be weighed against other features, and availability of alternatives. In the end, people just care more about the other features, even though swappable battery would be a good thing.

Just to conclude: I don't believe markets work to fully cater to what customers actually want. It's more like customers (and other parties) get a compromise between what different parties in the market want.

> the real reason which is that it's what consumers want

Consumers want what they're told to want by a constant barrage of commercial propaganda.

Devices are large and non-serviceable because this way they can be sold with a higher profit margin. Side effect being that the larger screens make the embedded commercial propaganda more effective and easy to deliver.

I get what you're saying.

People want vendor lock in...otherwise they wouldnt pay for it.

People want bait and switch sales tactics...otherwise they wouldnt work.

People are perfectly fine with high rents...if they didnt, they would not pay them.

People want their smartphones to be deliberately slowed down when they get old...otherwise theyd vote against it with their wallet.

Of all the big name corporations Apple is the only one I can see doing this.

I'm still hoping they release an Apple TV Pro with fully local LLM capability that's shared with everyone in the family - adding a few TB of disk space to it for local data storage and backups wouldn't be a massive thing.

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