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The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist because they're banking on there being enough people that care about this sort of thing to buy into
by least 5y ago
The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist because they're banking on there being enough people that care about this sort of thing to buy into their device rather than buying from a well established brand. That assumption will be put to the test very soon and advocates for this sort of device have a great opportunity to do so. The bitter reality though is that there might be a market large enough to sustain a company like this, but it won't make any big waves in the industry as a whole. Because people generally don't care.
> Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier
You're making a conscious decision about what sort of compromises you're willing to make with regards to your devices, just as everyone else is that buys electronic devices. There are plenty of phones with headphone jacks that have premium hardware specs. Sure, Apple doesn't have it. Samsung doesn't. But plenty of other manufacturers do, and people aren't buying them. Sony's top of the line smart phones have a headphone jack. LG's Vx0 line had headphone jacks and a fancy DAC built into them. ASUS's RoG phones have a headphone jack too. There's plenty of choice if it's actually that important to you. Buy those devices and hope that you can convince enough other people that the feature is as important to them as it is to you.
You don't need to shit on other people's choices nor assume that they aren't informed about the choices they make to want for the things that you do.
- goodpoint 5y ago> The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist The "free market" is controlled by a very small set of conglomerates. They get caught red handed deploying anticompetitive strategies every other week.
- least 5y agoYet this product is still coming to market despite that.
- vimacs2 5y agoWhich doesn't really disprove anything. Nobody is arguing that there are armed gunman that target any company that dares deviate from the chosen path of planned obsalescence. The argument though is that the market is overwhelmingly controlled by those that do practice it and furthermore, this practice has nothing to do with serving the interests of the consumer but that of the shareholder. The fact that there are some that have been persuaded through years of concentrated marketing that bad engineering decisions are desirable is more of an example of manufacturing consent than the "free market of ideas".
- least 5y agoIt's incredibly arrogant to assume that the only reason why people might come to a different conclusion from you is that they've been manipulated into thinking that way through marketing. It's simply impossible that the indoctrination only occurred to other people and not yourself, right? Your entire argument seems to be that "not every manufacturer's top of the line devices matches my vision for what is an ideal device, so I want to force them all to change to match that." Not everyone wants the same device as you and no, it's not just because they're all ignorant morons that've been manipulated into thinking differently from you. Why are you so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions?
- vimacs2 5y agoI never recall being "so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions". I also am not under any delusions that I have some unique ability of being immune to marketing. Nobody is a moron here and in reality the only way to truly be immune to such things is being literally brain dead. Most people are too busy to absorb tonnes of domain specific knowledge of often questionable relevance to their own lives. However, it's honestly pretty ridiculous to pretend like marketing does not have an immense influence on the trajectory towards consumer desires or that it cannot lead to worse choices by many objective measures. See cigarettes, fast food, hell, even the stupid obsession with buying bank bustingly expensive diamonds for marriage proposals. There would definitely still be a market for all of the above (and personally I am against any regulations limiting the freedom of purchasing even cigarettes for legal adults) but it was marketing that turned it into a cultural norm, not organic consumer demand. It also does not need to be something that starts off as a bad thing. Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices. Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7. If your family have been purchasing Samsung devices predominately, chances are you will just assume that it's best to just get one of the latest one because it's reassuring to get a familiar brand and surely the latest automatically means better, right? Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable. Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive. Humans don't have perfect knowledge of the market and the leaders of that market will not only dominate airtime, they can afford to absorb bad PR if they deem that an unpopular decision will lead to better profits long term.