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I'm not sure what you are talking about. The consumers won, hackers lost. My mother (or father if he wasn't an engineer himself) doesn't care about replacing th
by Dobbs 10y ago
I'm not sure what you are talking about. The consumers won, hackers lost. My mother (or father if he wasn't an engineer himself) doesn't care about replacing the camera, how much ram it has or replacing the battery. She wants it to work. She wants it to have an efficient battery. And when it breaks she wants to take it to the store and have them fix it or replace it.
This is what Apple provides. By removing connectors between replaceable parts they are able to reduce the size and increase battery size. So on so forth.
Hackers lose the ability to swap out parts and customize it to their liking but your average citizen has no clue how to replace a DIMM stick and doesn't want to care. They don't care about managing files on their phone or any of that. They want the phone to be safe from malware, they want the device to work and to be easy to use.
They have chosen to specialize in something else. To understand fashion, chemistry, politics, something. Their brain power is spent on something other than how computers work. And that is ok. Our job as technologists is to empower them in that. To allow them to achieve more in their love without getting in their way by managing device drivers.
- apatters 10y agoYou're reducing the entire market to fools and nerds. There's plenty of room for people in between. You didn't have to be an engineer to add more RAM to your system, you just had to be the geeky kid down the street who wasn't afraid to open up the box. Or you can at least create something open enough that a third party can service the engine, install an aftermarket exhaust upgrade, whatever. We've been making things that could be hacked since the beginning of time and the current crop of mobile device manufacturers is against it.
- uniclaude 10y agoThis. Heck, even my mother is able to change the battery of her Samsung phone when she's out all day taking pictures, and she's as far as it gets from an engineer. Bringing the argument of "consumers want something that works" every time some are looking for a repairability/upgradeability path only leads to this false dichotomy of splitting the world between nerds and fools.
- NoGravitas 10y agoYep, it's not necessarily that every customer needs to be able to upgrade/customize. It's that every customer should be able to go to the local computer shop to upgrade/customize.
- Nullabillity 10y ago> but your average citizen has no clue how to replace a DIMM stick and doesn't want to care. Sure, but it'll still be far cheaper to pay someone to replace the DIMM stick than to buy a new phone/computer/whatever. Plus there's the environmental aspect, too.
- marcosdumay 10y ago> Hackers lose the ability to swap out parts and customize it to their liking Economy of scale means that it's cheaper to include every kind of hardware anybody may want than to customize. Hackers lose the ability to swap parts, but didn't lose any single kind of (hardware) functionality that is available on the market. (Still lose anything that we invent by ourselves.) I don't call that a loss, at least not on mobile devices. We still have desktops and development boards for hacking.