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> I don't see how consumers and society benefit Actually, you do see. The price of your phone would be higher if Qualcomm had to hire competent engineers to ma
by dmitrygr 5y ago
> I don't see how consumers and society benefit
Actually, you do see. The price of your phone would be higher if Qualcomm had to hire competent engineers to make properly designed kernel changes for their hardware.
- TeMPOraL 5y agoHow much higher though? If you were to take the total extra expenditure on increased salaries for those engineers, and divide by the number of phones produced, the result is what? A dollar?
- mathstuf 5y agoSure, but when applying Marketing Math™, remember that all prices need to end in "49" or "99" to "sound cheaper" than the next incremental bump. So you'll end up with a device that is either $50 or (more likely) $100 more than otherwise. Or they'll eat that $1 from their profit margins…eh, who am I kidding?
- Dylan16807 5y agoIf they're rounding to the nearest $50, they're doing it based on the final cost. They're not going to base it on a what-if scenario of having a cheaper development team. So it's more or less a 2% chance of the price going up $50.
- goodpoint 5y agoThe price of your phone would be much lower if the software stack was truly Open Source, allowing distribution to remove clutter and spyware, and make older phones perfectly usable again. Planned obsolescence is designed to increase TCO