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On one hand, I think companies should make their hardware easy to hack on- all sorts of cool creativity comes out of those projects. On the other hand, I think

On one hand, I think companies should make their hardware easy to hack on- all sorts of cool creativity comes out of those projects. On the other hand, I think of the customer support team we have at my small company, and understand that TE (or other companies) might not have the bandwidth or skill set in that department to help customers that are bricking their devices in novel ways. I’m curious how to balance that.

tomashubelbauer 6y ago
Personally I think the correct balance is this: you mess with your device = you void your warranty, but we don't issue take down requests for reverse engineered firmware, schematics, tools etc. Just let the parallel hacker universe exist without C&Ding it into oblivion, but don't encourage it if you don't want to. I'd be curious to hear counterpoints to this approach, the most obvious one I can think of is customers either pretending they didn't break their device by modding it when they in fact did or not even pretending and instead trying to cancel the company for having this policy because they feel entitled to support even if they venture on their own path and are warned beforehand it's a territory outside official support. "True hackers" IMO would not try to do this, but I think there is a certain group of people who want to try these cool hacks, but don't want to suffer the consequences.
- dillutedfixer 6y ago
  >>the most obvious one I can think of is customers either pretending they didn't break their device by modding it when they in fact did or not even pretending and instead trying to cancel the company for having this policy because they feel entitled to support even if they venture on their own path and are warned beforehand it's a territory outside official support.<< That would be my guess. The device is $1300 now. If faced with losing that much money my guess is most people would try to return it to TE and say it just failed.
jlarcombe 6y ago
Korg have been excellent at this in recent years.

tomashubelbauer 6y ago

Personally I think the correct balance is this: you mess with your device = you void your warranty, but we don't issue take down requests for reverse engineered firmware, schematics, tools etc. Just let the parallel hacker universe exist without C&Ding it into oblivion, but don't encourage it if you don't want to. I'd be curious to hear counterpoints to this approach, the most obvious one I can think of is customers either pretending they didn't break their device by modding it when they in fact did or not even pretending and instead trying to cancel the company for having this policy because they feel entitled to support even if they venture on their own path and are warned beforehand it's a territory outside official support. "True hackers" IMO would not try to do this, but I think there is a certain group of people who want to try these cool hacks, but don't want to suffer the consequences.

dillutedfixer 6y ago
>>the most obvious one I can think of is customers either pretending they didn't break their device by modding it when they in fact did or not even pretending and instead trying to cancel the company for having this policy because they feel entitled to support even if they venture on their own path and are warned beforehand it's a territory outside official support.<< That would be my guess. The device is $1300 now. If faced with losing that much money my guess is most people would try to return it to TE and say it just failed.

jlarcombe 6y ago

Korg have been excellent at this in recent years.