The only way out of the planned obsolescence hellhole.

[Ertio]

TLDR: We need to build our own stuff.

 

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The right-to-repair movement is taking a wrong approach. That approach is begging to lawmakers who couldn't care less. Hoping and begging is a futile strategy. We can't rely on bureaucrats to give a damn.

 

And brands keep spouting that "we listen to our users" crap. Oh, really? Where are the replaceable batteries we have been asking for since 2015, Samsung? Exactly. In limbo.

 

Samsung be like: "Ha, ha, you keep buying our stuff anyway! Why would we give a damn?"

 

The reality is that there is no incentive for phone manufacturers to make repair-friendly products. Why would they? Samsung realized Apple got away with pulling this off, so they thought "let's throw our principles over board and do it too! For those sugar-sweet profits!". Remember, shareholders buy shares to get profits, not to give you an amazing user experience.(more details in reference [1] at the bottom)

 

Making products hostile to repair increases their profits and us users keep buying their stuff regardless because smartphones are a necessity in this world. With new technology come higher social requirements. Smartphones used to be an optional extra, but now it is difficult to live without one, so smartphone vendors have the ultimate leverage.

 

The most realistic way to get our user-friendly products without planned obsolescence and other evil anti-features (examples at the bottom [2]) is to manufacture them ourselves.

 

Granted, I have no idea how we are supposed to achieve this, but if a few hundred of us and intelligent people like Louis Rossmann and Jody Bruchon came together, perhaps we could do something. It is by any means far more realistic than praying to lawmakers could ever be.

 

Making our own stuff has already worked to some extent on the software side. Sure, Kdenlive and InkScape are less sophisticated than Adobe's counterparts, but still quite useable! And you truly own your copy of them. No one can remotely disable your InkScape, where as Adobe can revoke your access to their software whenever they feel like.

 

It took the EU almost two decades (20 years) to respond to non-replaceable batteries. During that time, non-replaceable batteries escalated to serialized batteries, like a cancer that grew. And then not only smartphones but also laptops had them. This is what happens whenever evilness is not nipped in the bud in early stages: it grows and then takes over.

 

If I could have changed the law, I would have nipped non-replaceable batteries in the bud before the sunrise of January 10th, 2007. I would have said "no more" to this utter nonsense. Why did it take the EU this long to make such an obvious decision?

 

This shows that relying on greedy corporations who throw repairability under the bus to earn 1% more, or lawmakers who are compromised by lobbyism to create us paradise on earth, is a ravenous waste of time.

 

If we want our paradise, we have to build it by ourselves.

 

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References:

 

[1] On the keynote of the Samsung Galaxy S6 in March 2015, their public relations guy Justin Denison said "we refused to do this for some time until we were absolutely sure that people would be confident about charging their phones", which is utter nonsense because a battery with a limited lifespan that can't be replaced does quite the opposite of making the user confident about charging. Remember, batteries die no matter how well they are cared for.

 

[2] Examples for anti-features include planned obsolescence (notably non-replaceable batteries), kill-switches (your product can be remotely disabled), serialization (denial of third-party repairs), less than three USB ports on laptops (dependence on USB hubs), locked bootloaders (you can not run the operating system (OS) of your choice), software-as-a-service (can be remotely disabled), login enforcement (see iOS, Mac OS, Windows 11), mandatory pull-to-refresh (see Chrome mobile and Safari mobile, causes accidental refreshes), mandatory updates (vendor can remotely modify your operating system at will, see Windows 10 and 11).

 

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This post is released under Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution ShareAlike.

[LAwLz]

Okay, so what are you going to do?