5 ms·

Believe me, in general I'm with you. But at the end of the day you just don't have to buy an iphone. Get an android device, flash it with Linux, buy a pinephone

Believe me, in general I'm with you. But at the end of the day you just don't have to buy an iphone. Get an android device, flash it with Linux, buy a pinephone, do whatever you want! But Apple doesn't sell tinker's devices, they sell a walled garden. Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business, when there are plenty of other options? There's a reason I don't have any Apple device: they don't make anything that I want. It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all companies must sell products that I like.

EvanAnderson 6y ago
Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all companies must sell products that I like. We mandate lots of consumer protections. This seems no different to me.
- doteka 6y ago
  You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible. I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how society benefits from taking away the rights of owners.
    - doteka 6y ago
      I’m sorry to say, but your first paragraph is blatantly false. The jailbreaking community has been active since the iPhone product line existed, up to this day. Feel free to look it up. They provide instructions that a high school script kiddie is able to follow. I know because I was one of them. If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did anything wrong here.
      - EvanAnderson 6y ago
        I'm well aware of jailbreaks. I've jailbroken a number of Apple devices and some consoles. In every "jailbreak" case, the manufacturer's intention was to make practically impossible owner control of devices. Jailbreaks are about exploiting bugs. The manufacturer's intention remains the same-- to remove owner control. Just because Apple made mistakes in their implementation of their architecture of control doesn't change their intention. re: impractical for individuals - Try un-blowing an e-fuse in a Nintendo Switch. That's practically impossible. That's the kind of protections I'm talking about.
    - anigbrowl 6y ago
      But you can cooperate with others to figure out to defeat those protections, or not buy into the Apple ecosystem in the first place. I agree they make it very difficult to fully personalize their products and share your dislike, but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access.
      - grawprog 6y ago
        >but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access. Both of those are fairly valid complaints though. Intentionally making a device hard to access or repair is almost as bad as not allowing it at all. That shows an actual concerted effort to stop or make it as difficult for consumers as possible. That's basically the definition of anti-consumer practices. It in no way benefits me to not be able to use a standard screw driver to open something and have to either purchase an expensive proprietary tool or at worst take it to an 'authorized' repair shop that has the license to use the proprietary tool.
- mrzimmerman 6y ago
  Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it? Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to break away form that specific use case, regardless of time and cost to the company and consumers for parallel built in systems or whatever the lift may be doesn't sound feasible to me. I don't know, I'm on your side that I should be able to dismantle my iPhone and use the parts to my hearts content if I want to. But I'm not sure that it's something Apple has to build into the system just in case someone feels like doing it, especially since I could buy any number of other computing devices that might work just as well.
  - EvanAnderson 6y ago
    What Google did with the Chromebooks-- an interlock that zeros the manufacturer-provided root-of-trust-- is a good example of all that I want. No more, no less. Let me flip a switch and make the device "untrusted" so that I can load my own software. I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what they please with their property (at least in terms of chattels).
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      Even with an iPhone, you have the right to flash whatever firmware you feel like. This has been upheld in US Supreme Court cases. Apple simply is under no obligation for it to be easy for you to do so. Jailbroken iPhones aren't illegal. Apple treats them as a security risk, since mechanisms for jailbreaking iPhones exploit security flaws in order to get root-level code execution. I can't say they're wrong to do so! It's no secret that they do. Or that Apple doesn't ship anything but iOS to an iPhone, or that you won't be able to install apps from outside the App Store. These are marketed as features. Most people are interested in solving a task, and their device helps them with this. They are uninterested in general-purpose computers. And there's no shortage of them for the rest of us! Android devices are the obvious choice here, with their user-exposed flashable ROMs. (Not just the OS, but every ROM is exposed through fastboot) Or PinePhone. Or whatever Firefox is doing. You've got choices for tinkerers and general-purpose computation, it just doesn't live in a device with an apple logo.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  I mean if I sell you a brick, it's not gonna connect to wifi. I'm not advertising it as connecting to wifi, so if you buy it than it's really your fault for thinking it will. Similarly, Apple doesn't prevent you from doing anything you want with an I-Phone. You can (if you so choose) saw it in half, open it up and try to figure it out, and interact with it in any way you please. If those interactions don't yield results you want, you really can't blame Apple since they pretty much told you what you were getting. Now there are some real scummy practices that Apple uses, and those should be regulated. Software that detects tampering and shuts down the device? Sure, get rid of it. Some vital service they can (and do) shut down at any time, bricking the device? Regulate it to nothing. But ultimately 'do what you want with your property' is completely different from 'sell whatever I personally want in a device regardless of how others feel'. Apple sells a walled garden by design, and buying one of their devices pretty much entails realizing that.
asdff 6y ago
That's like saying you don't have to buy a car, or you don't have to get an air conditioner. Sure, you could tolerate a 2 hour bus ride and a summer with 90+ degree heat waves, but there is no reason to put yourself through that given the cost of the alternative luxury is not insurmountable even for working people in expensive places. We are in a similar place in the mobile world, where life is getting increasingly reliant on electronic luxuries. If you want to take advantage of the convenient electric scooter or rideshare, you need an app. If you want to cash a check without going to a bank or paying a fee with a third party like a grocery store, you need an app. If you want to get early warnings from the city and/or state about earthquakes of all things, you need an app (MyShake). And for all those apps, you can't build from source on your own hardware. There is rarely a mobile website alternative. You need to get them from one of two centralized and moderated marketplaces, where only sanctioned and licensed devices may participate. You could make a stand here with a dumb phone and yell at the clouds that the world is this way, and it really is bad that it is this way, but you'd realistically be living a decade in the past and miss out on all this useful functionality.
- njharman 6y ago
  No it's not! The parent listed other phones as options, not "do without a phone". Following your weird examples the parent's comment is like saying you don't have to buy a *Ford* car, or a *Carrier* AC. There are many more car and AC options if you don't like Ford or Carrier.
  - InvertedRhodium 6y ago
    They also listed the Pinephone, which had no facility to do most of those things. It's either Apple or Android, and both of these are making it harder and harder over time to run your own software stack.
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  But I mean, you can just buy a different type of car. Like, if you feel really strongly that every car ought to have a headphone jack because otherwise consumers are stripped of their right to play music through a headphone jack in their car, you can buy a car that has one. You aren't forever stuck on the bus, you just have to look at more than one whole car before you decide which one to buy. Same goes for Apple; I would never use an Apple device, because I like to have control over my technology. Somehow, despite my amazingly brave stand against tyranny and capitalism, I still have a phone, running a LineageOS install that took me 20 minutes and an online guide to get running years ago. On the other hand, if I wanted to give my grandma a device I was confident she couldn't somehow force into a bad state, I would like it to be legal to sell me one.
InvertedRhodium 6y ago
As someone who owns a Pinephone, don't buy a Pinephone if you're expecting a functional, usable device. It might get there in a year or more, but it's nowhere near there now.
Silhouette 6y ago
Believe me, in general I'm with you. But at the end of the day you just don't have to buy an iphone. Get an android device, flash it with Linux, buy a pinephone, do whatever you want! The problem with this argument is the same as any essential utility. At some point, it becomes impossible to live a normal life without access to a certain facility. If access is only available through a monopoly provider or a small enough number of providers that they tend to move the market in unison even if not actively collaborating, that can become a serious problem. This is why we have government regulation of essential markets. Regulators might impose pricing limits in violation of the "free market", to prevent exploitation of vulnerable customers (and in this context, remember that most or all customers might be in that category) where competition fails to do so effectively on its own. But laws and regulations can also impose other safeguards, such as requiring honest advertising, adequate privacy and security protections, or interoperability. I think it is no longer credible, at least in my country (the UK) and others like it, to argue that a modern smartphone is a luxury. People use their phones to access government services, shops and home delivery services, banks and financial services. They are by far the dominant communication device of our age, not just for calls but also texts, emails, numerous Internet-based communications channels. Some people no longer have any other reasonably convenient means to access those services and communications. Some of those services and channels are provided exclusively via mobile apps and simply aren't available to those who don't have a phone (which is in itself a problem, because obviously not everyone does, and this is making things very difficult for some demographics during the strange times we are living in). This being the case, it is reasonable to argue that people should not have to choose between two dominant ecosystems for their phone when both have serious problems in areas like privacy, security, reliability and data lock-in, some of which are a direct result of the interests of the providers of those two dominant platforms, without any realistic ability for most people to protect themselves from those risks or with any such ability relying essentially on luck (for example, the availability of jailbreaks and the continued operation of essential apps despite any jailbreak that has been applied).
- ravi-delia 6y ago
  It may well be that internet access in general is an essential utility, though I'd disagree that any device in particular is. However, the fact that the 'two dominant platforms' continue existing is mostly due to people's personal preferences. Besides, saying that Android devices even approach the same level of locked-downness of Apple devices is absurd; I run an open source version of android on all my mobile devices, and not once was it particularly difficult to install. Even more, it doesn't seem to me that cell phone manufacturers are currently moving the market in particular unison. There are still more and less open devices, just as there are more or less expensive ones. Perhaps we're moving slowly towards that, but we're certainly a long way away as of now. My primary issue is the difference between ensuring that no one has to get screwed and ensuring that no one can get a product they want. So long as there are more open devices, no one is compelled to use an IPhone. Anyone who wants to be protected from big bad apple may simply refrain from paying them. A utility is generally regulated not because of its vitality, but because of inherent restrictions on consumer choice. Unless it becomes impossible to just not buy Apple's shitty locked down hardware, it doesn't make sense to constrict.

EvanAnderson 6y ago

Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all companies must sell products that I like. We mandate lots of consumer protections. This seems no different to me.

doteka 6y ago
You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible. I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how society benefits from taking away the rights of owners.
  - doteka 6y ago
    I’m sorry to say, but your first paragraph is blatantly false. The jailbreaking community has been active since the iPhone product line existed, up to this day. Feel free to look it up. They provide instructions that a high school script kiddie is able to follow. I know because I was one of them. If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did anything wrong here.
    - EvanAnderson 6y ago
      I'm well aware of jailbreaks. I've jailbroken a number of Apple devices and some consoles. In every "jailbreak" case, the manufacturer's intention was to make practically impossible owner control of devices. Jailbreaks are about exploiting bugs. The manufacturer's intention remains the same-- to remove owner control. Just because Apple made mistakes in their implementation of their architecture of control doesn't change their intention. re: impractical for individuals - Try un-blowing an e-fuse in a Nintendo Switch. That's practically impossible. That's the kind of protections I'm talking about.
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    But you can cooperate with others to figure out to defeat those protections, or not buy into the Apple ecosystem in the first place. I agree they make it very difficult to fully personalize their products and share your dislike, but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access.
    - grawprog 6y ago
      >but to me this is like complaining about a case being glued shut or requiring a special driver to access. Both of those are fairly valid complaints though. Intentionally making a device hard to access or repair is almost as bad as not allowing it at all. That shows an actual concerted effort to stop or make it as difficult for consumers as possible. That's basically the definition of anti-consumer practices. It in no way benefits me to not be able to use a standard screw driver to open something and have to either purchase an expensive proprietary tool or at worst take it to an 'authorized' repair shop that has the license to use the proprietary tool.
mrzimmerman 6y ago
Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it? Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to break away form that specific use case, regardless of time and cost to the company and consumers for parallel built in systems or whatever the lift may be doesn't sound feasible to me. I don't know, I'm on your side that I should be able to dismantle my iPhone and use the parts to my hearts content if I want to. But I'm not sure that it's something Apple has to build into the system just in case someone feels like doing it, especially since I could buy any number of other computing devices that might work just as well.
- EvanAnderson 6y ago
  What Google did with the Chromebooks-- an interlock that zeros the manufacturer-provided root-of-trust-- is a good example of all that I want. No more, no less. Let me flip a switch and make the device "untrusted" so that I can load my own software. I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what they please with their property (at least in terms of chattels).
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Even with an iPhone, you have the right to flash whatever firmware you feel like. This has been upheld in US Supreme Court cases. Apple simply is under no obligation for it to be easy for you to do so. Jailbroken iPhones aren't illegal. Apple treats them as a security risk, since mechanisms for jailbreaking iPhones exploit security flaws in order to get root-level code execution. I can't say they're wrong to do so! It's no secret that they do. Or that Apple doesn't ship anything but iOS to an iPhone, or that you won't be able to install apps from outside the App Store. These are marketed as features. Most people are interested in solving a task, and their device helps them with this. They are uninterested in general-purpose computers. And there's no shortage of them for the rest of us! Android devices are the obvious choice here, with their user-exposed flashable ROMs. (Not just the OS, but every ROM is exposed through fastboot) Or PinePhone. Or whatever Firefox is doing. You've got choices for tinkerers and general-purpose computation, it just doesn't live in a device with an apple logo.
ravi-delia 6y ago
I mean if I sell you a brick, it's not gonna connect to wifi. I'm not advertising it as connecting to wifi, so if you buy it than it's really your fault for thinking it will. Similarly, Apple doesn't prevent you from doing anything you want with an I-Phone. You can (if you so choose) saw it in half, open it up and try to figure it out, and interact with it in any way you please. If those interactions don't yield results you want, you really can't blame Apple since they pretty much told you what you were getting. Now there are some real scummy practices that Apple uses, and those should be regulated. Software that detects tampering and shuts down the device? Sure, get rid of it. Some vital service they can (and do) shut down at any time, bricking the device? Regulate it to nothing. But ultimately 'do what you want with your property' is completely different from 'sell whatever I personally want in a device regardless of how others feel'. Apple sells a walled garden by design, and buying one of their devices pretty much entails realizing that.

asdff 6y ago

That's like saying you don't have to buy a car, or you don't have to get an air conditioner. Sure, you could tolerate a 2 hour bus ride and a summer with 90+ degree heat waves, but there is no reason to put yourself through that given the cost of the alternative luxury is not insurmountable even for working people in expensive places. We are in a similar place in the mobile world, where life is getting increasingly reliant on electronic luxuries. If you want to take advantage of the convenient electric scooter or rideshare, you need an app. If you want to cash a check without going to a bank or paying a fee with a third party like a grocery store, you need an app. If you want to get early warnings from the city and/or state about earthquakes of all things, you need an app (MyShake). And for all those apps, you can't build from source on your own hardware. There is rarely a mobile website alternative. You need to get them from one of two centralized and moderated marketplaces, where only sanctioned and licensed devices may participate. You could make a stand here with a dumb phone and yell at the clouds that the world is this way, and it really is bad that it is this way, but you'd realistically be living a decade in the past and miss out on all this useful functionality.

njharman 6y ago
No it's not! The parent listed other phones as options, not "do without a phone". Following your weird examples the parent's comment is like saying you don't have to buy a *Ford* car, or a *Carrier* AC. There are many more car and AC options if you don't like Ford or Carrier.
- InvertedRhodium 6y ago
  They also listed the Pinephone, which had no facility to do most of those things. It's either Apple or Android, and both of these are making it harder and harder over time to run your own software stack.
ravi-delia 6y ago
But I mean, you can just buy a different type of car. Like, if you feel really strongly that every car ought to have a headphone jack because otherwise consumers are stripped of their right to play music through a headphone jack in their car, you can buy a car that has one. You aren't forever stuck on the bus, you just have to look at more than one whole car before you decide which one to buy. Same goes for Apple; I would never use an Apple device, because I like to have control over my technology. Somehow, despite my amazingly brave stand against tyranny and capitalism, I still have a phone, running a LineageOS install that took me 20 minutes and an online guide to get running years ago. On the other hand, if I wanted to give my grandma a device I was confident she couldn't somehow force into a bad state, I would like it to be legal to sell me one.

InvertedRhodium 6y ago

As someone who owns a Pinephone, don't buy a Pinephone if you're expecting a functional, usable device. It might get there in a year or more, but it's nowhere near there now.

Silhouette 6y ago

Believe me, in general I'm with you. But at the end of the day you just don't have to buy an iphone. Get an android device, flash it with Linux, buy a pinephone, do whatever you want! The problem with this argument is the same as any essential utility. At some point, it becomes impossible to live a normal life without access to a certain facility. If access is only available through a monopoly provider or a small enough number of providers that they tend to move the market in unison even if not actively collaborating, that can become a serious problem. This is why we have government regulation of essential markets. Regulators might impose pricing limits in violation of the "free market", to prevent exploitation of vulnerable customers (and in this context, remember that most or all customers might be in that category) where competition fails to do so effectively on its own. But laws and regulations can also impose other safeguards, such as requiring honest advertising, adequate privacy and security protections, or interoperability. I think it is no longer credible, at least in my country (the UK) and others like it, to argue that a modern smartphone is a luxury. People use their phones to access government services, shops and home delivery services, banks and financial services. They are by far the dominant communication device of our age, not just for calls but also texts, emails, numerous Internet-based communications channels. Some people no longer have any other reasonably convenient means to access those services and communications. Some of those services and channels are provided exclusively via mobile apps and simply aren't available to those who don't have a phone (which is in itself a problem, because obviously not everyone does, and this is making things very difficult for some demographics during the strange times we are living in). This being the case, it is reasonable to argue that people should not have to choose between two dominant ecosystems for their phone when both have serious problems in areas like privacy, security, reliability and data lock-in, some of which are a direct result of the interests of the providers of those two dominant platforms, without any realistic ability for most people to protect themselves from those risks or with any such ability relying essentially on luck (for example, the availability of jailbreaks and the continued operation of essential apps despite any jailbreak that has been applied).

ravi-delia 6y ago
It may well be that internet access in general is an essential utility, though I'd disagree that any device in particular is. However, the fact that the 'two dominant platforms' continue existing is mostly due to people's personal preferences. Besides, saying that Android devices even approach the same level of locked-downness of Apple devices is absurd; I run an open source version of android on all my mobile devices, and not once was it particularly difficult to install. Even more, it doesn't seem to me that cell phone manufacturers are currently moving the market in particular unison. There are still more and less open devices, just as there are more or less expensive ones. Perhaps we're moving slowly towards that, but we're certainly a long way away as of now. My primary issue is the difference between ensuring that no one has to get screwed and ensuring that no one can get a product they want. So long as there are more open devices, no one is compelled to use an IPhone. Anyone who wants to be protected from big bad apple may simply refrain from paying them. A utility is generally regulated not because of its vitality, but because of inherent restrictions on consumer choice. Unless it becomes impossible to just not buy Apple's shitty locked down hardware, it doesn't make sense to constrict.