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Apple Investigated By France For 'Planned Obsolescence' (bbc.com)
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: French prosecutors have launched a probe over allegations of "planned obsolescence" in Apple's iPhone. Under French law it is a crime to intentionally shorten the lifespan of a product with the aim of making customers replace it. In December, Apple admitted that older iPhone models were deliberately slowed down through software updates. It follows a legal complaint filed in December by pro-consumer group Stop Planned Obsolescence (Hop). Hop said France was the third country to investigate Apple after Israel and the U.S., but the only one in which the alleged offense was a crime. Penalties could include up to 5% of annual turnover or even a jail term.
Very nice, are you ready to pay for a smartphone like you pay for a durable product like a car? A decade of usable life can be arranged as long as you are willing to accept tradeoffs such as price, weight, form factor and features. Not interested? Than STFU. Market delivers what customers are asking for.
Methinks that when I shell out $1000 for an I-phone, it is a durable product. You may have a point with el cheapo $50 smartphones, but then they break. They do not suffer from planned obsolesence.
That's such BS and Apple users pay a premium as it is. "Durable" has nothing to do with "obsolete". I own a "durable" iPhone 4S - arguably the most "durable" phone they ever made - hell, it feels heavy in your hand - it's perfectly functional yet it has been rendered obsolete by Apple which quit releasing updates for it without warning. The day I bought it I had no idea how long it would be supported because Apple doesn't publish this information. That sounds like planned obsolescence to me. When you buy a Mac or iPhone you have no idea how long it will be supported once the warranty expires. Contrast that with Microsoft which publishes that e.g. Windows 7 will be supported until 1/14/2020: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet and they publish this shit like 10 years in advance.
Apple implemented a technical solution that kept phones usable for LONGER than other phone makers. By not shutting down randomly as the battery aged, by trying to maintain a day of battery life in the phone for a longer period of time, Apple was delaying the time when a user might have to repair or replace a phone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've worked in this industry for over a decade (never for Apple) What people don't realize is that batteries age, and so do chips especially when pushed to a limit. Ever wonder why military or even automotive grade chips are running so much slower and cooler? It's because they are rated for much longer lifetime than consumer grade devices - they are limited so they last the required number of years. Consumers want top performance, but they trade lifetime due to stress on the hardware. What Apple did here is cap the device performance increasing the device reliability and potential lifespan.
it's perfectly functional yet it has been rendered obsolete by Apple which quit releasing updates for it without warning.
How is it obsolete?
You can still download apps for it (any apps that originally supported the 4s).
You can still browse the web, or use it for maps/GPS.
You can still email with it.
You can still make calls with it.
Again, it's not obsolete - it just lacks features that newer devices have. But just because newer devices have more or better features does not render a device "obsolete".
My wife has an iPad 2 she still uses. That's not getting updates either but it doesn't matter - she uses it for many hours at a time for Netflix or browsing and it continues to work just fine, as it will until it breaks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where have you seen a phone, laptop or anything with an adequate lithium battery that shuts down randomly due to it being "old"? That thing pushes multiple of it's capacity in current. "Let's heroically overcome the problem we created on purpose!"
They didn't make it run slower in general, they limited the top speed of the CPU. The reason is not to save battery life, it's because the battery could already not support that top speed. All they did was make it not shut down. It's like a car that had a top speed of 120 Mph, but because of age it can no longer safely do that, so it tops out at 100. Any driving below that speed in unaffected.
If you have a complaint, complain that the battery wasn't designed to last longer.
Market delivers what customers are asking for.
Could you please point to the market that thinks that thinner and thinner phones are more important than stability and battery life?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yay for car analogies. Especially if they fall flat on the face because any car that can for some odd reason due to its manufacturer's decision no longer reach the top speed would be subject to recalls...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you look at the trends in consumer electronics over the last few years, designed-in obsolescence has become a feature from a range of different classes of device and a broad range of vendors.
For example, consider laptop/netbook computers, which arrive with major components such as CPUs, batteries, RAM and storage all soldered and/or glued in place. All of this makes it much harder to upgrade or use these products in a versatile way.
The same is true for almost all class of tablet, although I'd note that some Android devices [phones and tablets] do come with micro-SD card slots, which do allow for storage upgrades and flexibility.
On the desktop we are moving away from the "assembled" style of computer offered by Dell or Gateway from the 90s and 00s and now we seem to be trending towards all-in-one systems where, once again, everything is soldered or glued down and the potential for upgrades of individual components is virtually non-existent.
Or in the software business, where the latest editions of software are no explicitly programmed so that they cannot be operated on older generations of processors [which, ironically, may not have some of the vulnerabilities found with more modern chips] but with the net effect of forcing people to upgrade what might have been perfectly reasonable hardware just if they want to run modern software. Nor is this limited to Operating Systems - the same deadly embrace includes things like graphics cards and driver stacks and the compatibility demanded by "modern" games... all of which force upgrades to new GPUs, which in turn force upgrades to new OS editions... which force upgrades in hardware.
The hard part about this - for consumers at least - is that this sort of change is a "self-fulfilling prophecy" from the perspective of a tech company. This is because the companies that follow the trend will make more sales, be more profitable and thus displace those companies who had been willing to put the customer first. In other words, we have a situation in which market forces [profits for manufacturers] actually induce and encourage them to adopt practices which will be harmful to consumers in the long run.
Our society anticipated that situations like this might come to be from time to time, setting up regulatory institutions of government to ensure that consumer rights were protected and that facilities such as "right to repair" and "right to upgrade" were included. Unfortunately we are slowly but surely seeing these protections eroded, either by cuts to those agencies and/or [witness the recent actions of the FCC dumping telecoms disputes on the FTC] woefully overloaded.
We are told that in a capitalist environment, market forces win out and thus the consumer is protected because the market demands that only the best companies survive to offer the best products or services to people. Unfortunately, as we've seen with consumer electronics, the consumer now has virtually no worthwhile protection from any of these questionable practices.
We should applaud what France are trying to do here, and we should hope that this drives positive change.
The Consumer Electronics Industry has been sorely in need of a "Weinstein Moment" for a while now. Forced Upgrades, inability to repair and built-in-obsolescence have been spreading like cancer throughout the modern technology world, making a few companies super-rich at the expense of millions or billions of consumers' pockets.
That needs to change.