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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.
*Planned* obsolescence is a crime in France, not obsolescence per se. Thus, your comment is moot.
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.
I can say that the 'el cheapo' (well it was 180 when it came out, and ~50-80 when it was discontinued) has lasted me far longer than basically everyone I knew with a 600+ dollar contract phone. Basically all of them replaced it before the 2 year replacement period due to physical damage, failed batteries, or drops in the toilet.
While my phone wouldn't have survived that last one, it survived the former for years and is still running to this day. It won't be replaced until 2G GSM is turned off for good.
Maybe. Cars have never been better, so "more like a car" is quite appealing, actually. I know I don't want my smartphone (or the other airline passenger's smartphone) to behave like a Samsung Galaxy Note 7. It shouldn't electrocute anybody, it should be secure (and not only when the manufacturer first shipped it), and it should fully honor my privacy requirements. It should be repairable and not more fragile than a snowflake in Bangkok. I should be able to use it to summon an ambulance or police officer reliably, with my correct location, and even if I don't have the correct SIM and only have a weak signal on another carrier's tower (or a Wi-Fi connection). It should support truly important public safety alerting, such as "tornado approaching." It should not jam the signals of the whole neighborhood's baby monitors. If I ever get a hearing aid, I ought to still be able to hear the other caller.
In short, yes, there is some appropriate role for government regulation of smartphones.
Related to this.. but not 100 % ontopic..
Every time I updated my samsung s3 (i still use it) it got slower and slower.. until i just gave up.
Everybody I talked to said the same thing, about other manufacturers too.
I gave up updating my phone. I don't have anything I cannot live without on it (it's a phone people).. I don't install apps on it except maybe 2-3 apps such as Chrome, Guitar Tuner and LINE Messanger.
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.
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!"
you don't really get it do you? they made it run slower on purpose.
but they will use their excuse that it was to save battery life and money for the customer.
never mind dude that.. it's made on purpose to not be repairable and you cannot change the battery and the battery fails after 2 years as per spec to the level where they started slowing them down on purpose, without telling the customer.
and yeah most people would accept such tradeoffs. but you can't buy a high end internals phone with a removable cover and battery nowadays.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Everything I've ever owned with lithium batteries has this problem. Eg: My first netbook got cooked in the sun with the power off ... it would vanish from 50% after that.
I don't own a single Apple product, but maybe I should start buying ...
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.
All Apple had to do was advertise this from the start as a feature and let you turn it off if you wanted to; competitors would have been rushing to copy it! They've been strung up by their own controlfreakery and secrecy. Idiots.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
And no security updates.
Learn to love Alaska
You're posting on Slashdot and you don't consider a network connected device that no longer receives security fixes to be obsolete?
Odd.
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.
By dropping it.
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.
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.
Oh, so customers asked for phones to be made entirely of highly breakable glass? Non-removable batteries? Indiscernible display resolution upgrades? Removing the headphone jack? No memory expansion option? Software behind a walled garden? No ability to install 3rd party OS? Massive amounts of telemetry? So thin it bends and breaks in your pocket? Proprietary physical connectors requiring dongles?
Vendors have been following the manufacturing mantra that caters to one thing and one thing only; Profits. They don't give a shit about what you want. You'll get what what makes them the most money. And they've been doing this for years now, so STFU about them delivering what consumers are asking for.
Greed knows no limits when consumer demand is immeasurable. We thought a $1000 price point would never be eclipsed. It's now been crushed. The $1500 smartphone is coming soon. After all, I'm sure you asked for acoustical sound, vibra-touch interface, and a 16K display resolution...
The fact they hid it, and never left it in user hand is suspicious, especially since they DO have a mechanism that at 20% you battery you can switch to a low power mode. They could have it pop up like "your telephone is discharging rapidly we will put you in lower power mode". But no, they hid it. to me that is an evidence they were well aware of potential backlash.
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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.
You're missing the point. The phone already cannot handle the top speed. The difference is that now instead of crashing it simply doesn't go that fast. The flaw is in the battery design itself, not what Apple did to mitigate it.
No, it is not a durable product. It is a piece of crap that breaks very easily marketed cleverly so you'll ignore its problems. I can sell you $40 worth of parts for $1000 and it'll still be $40 worth of parts. iPhones (not I-phones) are not made much better than cheap Android phones if at all. iPhones often break the second one of the slippery bastards slides out of your hands, so you shell out another $1000 and get a big fat rubbery Otter Box hard case to fix the poor design. My current phone is a few years old and has been dropped more times than I care to remember. It did not break. It is not obsolete. I have to clear caches on it from time to time due to the limited internal storage but that's about it.
When you shell out any money for an iPhone, you're not getting "a durable product," you're getting swindled.
So yeah, unless you care about handling, feel, or visibility, new cars are better.
Visibility depends on the particular car. There have always been cars with good and with bad visibility. The 1976 Chevy Impala I drove in high school definitely did not have good visibility (or handling, or fuel economy, or acceleration, or comfort). The safety features of newer cars are a consideration but visibility and safety are not mutually exclusive and never have been. Not to mention that new cars have cameras, sensors and other safety features to provide situational awareness not dreamed of by cars from back in the day.
As for handling, the argument that old cars handle better is quite simply nonsense unsupported by any evidence. As a general proposition, new cars handle better in pretty much every measurable way, even allowing for their generally heavier curb weights as long as you compare vehicles in similar categories. (no comparing a 1976 Ferrari to a 2010 half ton pickup)
but they will use their excuse that it was to save battery life and money for the customer.
That's not quite what they said. They said as the battery got older and didn't work as well, a surge of activity could cause the phone to draw more power than the battery could deliver, which caused the phone to turn itself off. They already had functionality to throttle the CPU in order to save battery life, so they adjusted the way that functionality worked to prevent the phones from crashing.
So Apple is lying, because the 4S had its production halted in February of 2016. So why the fuck is the 4S no longer getting updates?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
The problem with Apple is that they always feel they should make these decisions FOR people instead of telling them it is happening and letting them make the choice.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You don't have to be an expert to say 'Allow my phone to reduce speed to extend battery life' or 'Always run at full speed'. You could even add a car analogy.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Except your tires have indicators that say how much tread is left so that you can service them rather than continue to operate in lower performance mode UNBEKNOWNST to the operator. Instead of throwing on a low Tire pressure dash light, it just throttles the top speed. Why the fuck do people not get this is the crux of the problem?
That's because you didn't understand the argument.
Disagreeing does not mean I didn't understand the argument but thanks for the condescension.
The cars themselves from 20 years ago were mechanically the equal of cars today, power output aside.
I'm an automotive engineer with 20 years in the industry and run a company that makes parts for car companies. That argument is simply not true. Pick any measure you want and any automotive engineer worth their salary can show you how cars today have overall improved on cars from 20 years ago. Reliability, performance, power, traction, safety, durability, handling, materials, etc. It doesn't matter - cars today have as a whole improved across the board even in the fact of additional complexity. Your argument that cars haven't improved mechanically in the last 20 years is easily shown to be false as a general proposition.
If you want to argue that we are into diminishing returns on the improvement in cars then I can probably get on board with a reasonable argument to that effect. But claims that car mechanicals peaked in the 1990s and have gone no where since is just preposterous.
Anyway, back on topic; the cars of 20 and even 25 years ago had all of the important things we demand from cars, like being able to go over bumps gracefully, but none of the things we didn't, like remotely compromisable infotainment systems.
Saying cars 20 years ago could go over bumps adequately is true but it's false to say cars today don't do it any better. To argue otherwise is to claim that tens of thousands of automotive engineers have wasted their time for the last 20 years.
Therein lies the rub: If vehicles have become substantially heavier, and tires have only gotten a little wider, then handling is actually compromised
The width of tires is not remotely the only consideration. What tires are made of matters FAR more and that has improved. Furthermore, there is a lot more to handling than simply the tires. A car can be heavier and have better handling. While weight does play an important role, it isn't even close to the only factor that matters. Handling is a function of the sum of the parts and there is more than one equation to get it right.
People love the BRZ because it returns to that lightweight formula. The new Miata could have had more power, but that would have made it heavier.
Seriously? You're using a 2 seat sports car as an example of why all cars are no better than ones from 20 years ago? People love the BRZ and Miata because it's a fun and inexpensive little sports car for people who want fun and inexpensive little sports cars that drive well. Not everyone wants that and it's inappropriate to extrapolate that market segment to cars in general. It's one way to get a great handling car but not the only way. Good handling can be achieved in many ways. You'd be daft to argue that a Corvette or a BMW M4 doesn't handle well but light weight wasn't the primary goal of those cars. The lightweight sports car is merely one way to get excellent handling and not the only way. But even staying with the example you provided the Miata of today is measurably better than the one from 20 years ago.