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Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you canno

Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? I need a laptop, a table and a phone. I have been looking for over a year and I cannot find anything I like. 0. I don't want arbitrary software running on my personal devices, fullstop. 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software. 2. I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities. 3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this. This is one of the biggest market failures of our generation. All we have is fake choice, but not a single manufacturer wants to deliver plain open hardware. If you look at buying a car you will end up in exactly the same situation. In fact all consumer hardware of all sorts has the same problem. RMS was right back then, but the problem has recently become much more serious. Back then it was only about laptops. Now I have to worry about my fridge spying on me.

xnorswap 4y ago
> 3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this. That part is I think selfish. I do want to pay a premium to be able to do all that, but that market doesn't really exist.
- alias_neo 4y ago
  It's not selfish if they mean they "can't" rather than they "don't want". If someone doesn't want to spend $2000 instead of $1000 on something that does what they want/need better than the $1000 version; I'd argue that they don't really mean they "don't want" to, they mean they can't financially, whether literally or justifiably. I can't justify spending $2000 on a phone that does things I want it to do better than the $800 equivalent (which we shouldn't forget is also quite a premium to many), so I buy the "cheaper" one and "make it work". If the difference between $1000 and $2000 were inconsequential to me, then I don't see why I wouldn't "want" to pay that premium. So, I argue, GP isn't selfish as you put it, they just choose their words poorly on this point; or you take them too literally. I'd be interested to hear from GP in this regard.
- fsflover 4y ago
  Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.
geraldwhen 4y ago
Just get a MacBook Air. It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop). Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Linux hasn’t gotten in the way of my work at all. When did you last use it?
- thefz 4y ago
  "Just get a Macbook" isn't really a solution. Sub-1000€ customer grade hardware is plenty capable for a lot of tasks people might want, and some other users want the ability to run the OS of their choice too. Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
    If you just need a computer to connect to the internet and occasionally entertain yourself, you can get an OK looking laptop for $500AUD or about $300USD/300EUR. Never mind sub 1000EUR. That’s kind of an insane price when you think about it. And it is too good to be true, because they load it up with junk. But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      I bought Dell Latitude 3410 for $600. It was loaded with Ubuntu with zero bloatware as far as I can judge. Just some Dell logos and some module blacklists. I upgraded it with SSD and RAM, replaced Ubuntu with Fedora and now it's a little beast which can back me up if my main laptop would die.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    In order for that consumer-grade hardware to be that cheap, the vendors add bloatware from other vendors to augment the loss of profits by selling at close to cost, or at least a severely limited margin. This has a knock on effect of making what would be decent enough as a simple daily driver have extremely poor performance.
club_tropical 4y ago
The company that would do those things wouldn't get investment or would be actively railroaded; that's why. There are plenty of underserved markets with huge market demand, you identified one of them, and they will remain underserved, because they are in direct opposition of present-day ruling class interests of real-time granular control.
chx 4y ago
> I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities. This would cost enormous amounts of money for practically no benefit whatsoever to the manufacturer. Modern hardware is complex so drivers are costly and Linux-on-desktop enthusiasts are an incredibly, incredibly small niche. Which, I must add, is just getting smaller and smaller as WSL and ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex subsumes many of the use cases. In fact, I am not even sure what is left.
- funcDropShadow 4y ago
  The manufacturer don't have to make it work with arbitrary software. They could just stop making it more difficult then necessary.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - chx 4y ago
    The amount of work to get a driver use a modern chip to full capabilities is really huge. It almost never happens with volunteer written drivers, whether the manufacturer is friendly or not. The fragmentation is just too big.
Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
The market fails in almost every respect, and it's nothing new. We get sold crap clothes that discolor when it's perfectly known how to make them not to, crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc. I don't know how people can still think that the market optimizing and giving us the products we want at an adequate price is the default, when it's clearly the exception.
- badpun 4y ago
  It is because most people don't actually care about those issues (discolored clothing, crap food ingredients etc.) to any measurable degree. They might in theory, but in practice they exert zero effort to educate themselves on these issues and learn how to discern better products from worse ones. And if the consumer doesn't care, why should companies care?
  - Sponge5 4y ago
    I'd argue most consumers do care, but only after the fact.
    - kjkjadksj 4y ago
      Also being able to care and then act brings the assumption that you have the free time to spool up a mini research project on each and every consumer good you buy.
- k0k0r0 4y ago
  Yeah, it is like a mass psychosis.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  It's easy to hide lower quality but very difficult to hide higher prices. Game theory suggests that the vast majority of consumer goods will be nearly free, relative to their high quality counterparts, at the minimum viable quality.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
rakoo 4y ago
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Counter-question: did you really think the free market was actually working for the consumer ? A free market relies on multiple points: - consumers are rational - consumers have time and energy to compare alternatives - alternatives exist - it is essentially free to create an alternative, and alternatives take 0 time to become mature - consumers have enough money to buy exactly what they want None of those are true. Consumers aren't rational, or else there wouldn't be a multi billion dollars ad industry whose point is exactly to instill artificial demand. Consumers have too little free time to spend on chores, family, going out; they won't spend a weekend spreadsheeting a smartphone. The last competitor to the current duopoly failed because it didn't gain traction, and it was a multi billion dollar company. The income inequality keeps rising, people have to make a choice between paying rent and buying a new smartphone. The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life but of shareholders' profits. A barely working, ad-ridden, slow as molasses smartphone that prints money just by being turned on is the expected outcome of those incentives.
- q-big 4y ago
  > The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life No economist would claim that (and I seriously ask from where you got the "markets maximize consumers' quality of life" claim). Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kibwen 4y ago
    > Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources. Where, in practice, "efficient" is conveniently circularly defined as "whatever the market decides". In the case of the OP, there's nothing "efficient" about grinding a computer to a halt under an oppressive layer of crapware, thereby wasting the user's time and energy (in both a literal and a figurative sense). The stark lesson of the modern age is that markets are hopeless at pricing in externalities.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Convenience > everything else Also- just because it's a big deal to you and me, doesn't mean it actually is. How much does it actually hurt you? That's why people don't care. In the grand scheme of things is a wicked "first world problem". We live extremely privileged lives if this is really a huge annoyance (it is to me btw). I wish things were more open. Would the entire streaming community ever have happened without a general purpose computer? It is hard to know what alternate future we have been robbed of by being force fed closed and locked down platforms.
oytis 4y ago
The requirements sound like you want Linux and open-source BIOS. All doable with today's consumer-grade laptops, although I never cared enough to install custom BIOS.
chopin 4y ago
My personal devices are a Fairphone with e/OS and a Purism laptop. The laptop probably fails no. 3, but they do fulfill 0.-2. imho. There are alternatives. And for the prices I suspect that there is not enough demand for prices to come down. Our family laptop and my personal desktop run Linux Mint. Those do not have open firmware, but that's it.
- awiesenhofer 4y ago
  Do banking apps run on e/OS?
  - chopin 4y ago
    Good question, I don't run any banking apps on Android out of principle. I don't like authenticator apps either but they are better than SMS verifcation which I despise. Where possible, I use a Yubikey or other separate read-only device. Banking is only done on a laptop booted from a read-only stick and with a TAN-generator.
goodpoint 4y ago
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? The most common type of market failure is monopoly/oligopoly: you can choose Microsoft or Apple. They have a suffocating grip on OEMs, making it very difficult to develop alternatives. The real question is: Why is human society tolerating oligopolies on software, CPUs and hardware in general?
- ansgri 4y ago
  It seems that at a scale that matters with high technology, there is no 'human society', only empires and corporations.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  Downvoted for saying this. HN is becoming a hybrid of 4chan and linkedin.
bootsmann 4y ago
The market isn't failing, it's just that the subset of users that care about such things but aren't just switching to linux dwarfs the number of people who don't care about this at all. There is no incentive for companies to cater to the wishes of this minority.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  As the meme goes, "that just sounds like a market failure with extra steps".
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  There's also a group (maybe the largest group?) that might care if they knew what the benefits are. Alas, free software doesn't have a lot of money to spend on marketing.
ipython 4y ago
Easy Answer: consumers decide on one factor and one factor alone: price. And no need for the exaggeration, in many cases you can buy an iPad for less than that crappy windows laptop with all the spyware. Even for a fully featured Air, the price difference is way less than $1000
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  It seems like every other commenter is missing this. People would rather pay for a $200 TV and complain about the ads on it than buy a properly priced TV.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    I'm not aware of a price point where TVs come with no ads: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unremovable_ads_on_my_2500_samsung_smart_tv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unrem...
    - bobsmooth 4y ago
      Buy a commercial display. Not only will it last decades with regular consumer use there's no built-in OS to slow it down.
m12k 4y ago
>Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? This is just typical late stage capitalism, no? The step after commoditization isn't "and then they just quietly settled for being treated like a utility and not having huge profit margins anymore". It's more often "and then they tried to find other ways to monetize by selling ads and demographics information" or "then they bought up their competitors and raised prices again" or "then they formed a cartel with their competitors" or "then they tried to de-commoditize the product category by charging 200% more for a 20% performance improvement, while stopping production of the previous version" or "then they started charging more for related services and maintenance" (cf. printer ink cartridges and razor blades). Being the "winner" or "last/biggest company standing" of a product category means you get to do all of the above consumer-hostile fuckery to try to keep profit margins high.
throw0101c 4y ago
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Just like the market is "failing" when people complain about bad airline experiences… but continue to buy the cheapest flights/seats they can find? Why do you think the seats are so cheap?
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
"Let the market decide" doesn't work, that's the gist of it. It's only capitalist-idealists that still believe that. I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. Since websites didn't self-regulate when it came to tracking people, legislation came in to make them do so, making everything worse for everyone because then instead of removing the trackers, corporations decided to apply dark and annoyance patterns to make people just hit the easy accept button. Even self-regulation doesn't work. A decade ago, MOST of the smartphone manufacturers self-regulated and settled on using micro-USB for charging. Apple refused to cooperate, so now legislation came in.
- RunSet 4y ago
  > I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. If NSA / CIA types don't have access to the Intel Management Engine backdoor, I will eat my own mouth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine Thanks, government oversight.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    So, funnily enough, there's a secret ME disable that Intel made specifically because someone at the CIA or NSA got cold feet about the whole "secondary boot-up processor that can pwn the main processor cores" thing.
    - RunSet 4y ago
      It is telling that the feds are unwilling to eat their own cooking. Although "disable" is not the same as "remove" it is better than nothing. https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/disabling-intel-me-11-via-undocumented-mode/ https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/disabling-intel-m...
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        I don't even think it's the Fed's cooking. Large enterprises were asking for a way to detect, wipe, and reset a compromised machine, remotely, while the compromised OS was still running. Intel ME was their solution to this.
otikik 4y ago
The market is still concentrating wealth into a few select hands, so it is not failing.
christophilus 4y ago
The free market always tends to fail if there’s a monopoly. A duopoly is apparently also a failure mode, here (regarding phones). But in the case of laptops, I’m not sure the market has failed. Apple is selling MacBooks like hotcakes. The Framework laptop is attacking at a different angle, and I have high hopes for System76 and friends. Yes, there’s loads of hot garbage, but there are really good alternatives.
Zigurd 4y ago
The market failed in part because it appears to goose up productivity when you cut team size, outsource, and OKR your way to "measurable performance." Nobody was left with any willingness to call this crap out. Nobody was incentivized to say the bloatware was causing product returns. How to fix this? It has to come from every CEO, down through management, to empower the people who ask expensive questions like "Why is the bloatware so shitty?" This doesn't happen because most CEOs cannot grasp that that is how Apple gets to charge so much more for their laptops, and that they have to give up managing by the numbers to get there. (Not that Apple hasn't got numbers people, especially on the supply chain side.) You don't need open source systems to get there. Open source in commercial systems can help, but it isn't fundamental to getting the bloatware under control. Microsoft does it with Surface in part to put pressure on their OEM customers, like Google does with Pixel. This isn't just to be good to their end-users. They would probably kill their OEMs if they could and be more like Apple, if they could.
mritzmann 4y ago
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? In my environment, more and more people are switching from $BRANDXYZ to Apple (or Linux). To me, it doesn't look like the market is failing, rather the opposite. But of course, this is not a Representatione evaluation. The problem is, however, that not everyone wants to or can afford this.
znpy 4y ago
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Because the market is too free, and needs some additional,heavy and very restrictive regulation. I hope the EU will do something in this sense, sooner or later.
dschep 4y ago
easy: the market is far from infallible.
JustSomeNobody 4y ago
Because you cannot just sell hardware anymore. There is no MRR from that and investors expect their quarterly returns. It's that simple. Runaway capitalism has fucked the promotion of the interests of consumers.
hopeful122 4y ago
> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? It didn't. There are Apple stores all around the world, full of people ready to help seniors in person or over the phone, on a really nice computer.
- f1refly 4y ago
  >Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? Hmmmm
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
It comes down to incentives. No one on the supply side is incentivized to make a product the average consumer WANTS. They are incentivized to make something that the consumer will wind up BUYING. And all of their incentives are extremely short-term, from the CEO on down, and UP, to the shareholders. All we care about is stock price. That's it. Everything, inside and out, tracks back to the singular god of share price. You can say that the trade press cares about something else, but, no, they don't. If internal metrics are making middle managers hit their KPI's, then that tracks with share price, no matter how screwed up those KPI's are. It's all just so perverse and incestuous.
tweetle_beetle 4y ago
One of the reasons is the value assigned to spyware/crapware subsidises the cost of the physical product and increases over time in a race to the bottom. It's especially clear on items that the market suggests you need to upgrade every couple of years to keep them competitively priced, but even long cycle items like laptops and tvs are suffering from it. To start with it looks like you're getting a discount from one manufacturer, but you can spend more for a clean slate, then they all abandon the clean slate models and you can't even buy control. Can you even buy an everyday consumer Windows laptop from without crap on it these days?

xnorswap 4y ago

> 3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this. That part is I think selfish. I do want to pay a premium to be able to do all that, but that market doesn't really exist.

alias_neo 4y ago
It's not selfish if they mean they "can't" rather than they "don't want". If someone doesn't want to spend $2000 instead of $1000 on something that does what they want/need better than the $1000 version; I'd argue that they don't really mean they "don't want" to, they mean they can't financially, whether literally or justifiably. I can't justify spending $2000 on a phone that does things I want it to do better than the $800 equivalent (which we shouldn't forget is also quite a premium to many), so I buy the "cheaper" one and "make it work". If the difference between $1000 and $2000 were inconsequential to me, then I don't see why I wouldn't "want" to pay that premium. So, I argue, GP isn't selfish as you put it, they just choose their words poorly on this point; or you take them too literally. I'd be interested to hear from GP in this regard.
fsflover 4y ago
Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5 https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

geraldwhen 4y ago

Just get a MacBook Air. It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop). Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.

christophilus 4y ago
Linux hasn’t gotten in the way of my work at all. When did you last use it?
thefz 4y ago
"Just get a Macbook" isn't really a solution. Sub-1000€ customer grade hardware is plenty capable for a lot of tasks people might want, and some other users want the ability to run the OS of their choice too. Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
  If you just need a computer to connect to the internet and occasionally entertain yourself, you can get an OK looking laptop for $500AUD or about $300USD/300EUR. Never mind sub 1000EUR. That’s kind of an insane price when you think about it. And it is too good to be true, because they load it up with junk. But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I bought Dell Latitude 3410 for $600. It was loaded with Ubuntu with zero bloatware as far as I can judge. Just some Dell logos and some module blacklists. I upgraded it with SSD and RAM, replaced Ubuntu with Fedora and now it's a little beast which can back me up if my main laptop would die.
- sbuk 4y ago
  In order for that consumer-grade hardware to be that cheap, the vendors add bloatware from other vendors to augment the loss of profits by selling at close to cost, or at least a severely limited margin. This has a knock on effect of making what would be decent enough as a simple daily driver have extremely poor performance.

club_tropical 4y ago

The company that would do those things wouldn't get investment or would be actively railroaded; that's why. There are plenty of underserved markets with huge market demand, you identified one of them, and they will remain underserved, because they are in direct opposition of present-day ruling class interests of real-time granular control.

chx 4y ago

> I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities. This would cost enormous amounts of money for practically no benefit whatsoever to the manufacturer. Modern hardware is complex so drivers are costly and Linux-on-desktop enthusiasts are an incredibly, incredibly small niche. Which, I must add, is just getting smaller and smaller as WSL and ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex subsumes many of the use cases. In fact, I am not even sure what is left.

funcDropShadow 4y ago
The manufacturer don't have to make it work with arbitrary software. They could just stop making it more difficult then necessary.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chx 4y ago
  The amount of work to get a driver use a modern chip to full capabilities is really huge. It almost never happens with volunteer written drivers, whether the manufacturer is friendly or not. The fragmentation is just too big.

Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago

The market fails in almost every respect, and it's nothing new. We get sold crap clothes that discolor when it's perfectly known how to make them not to, crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc. I don't know how people can still think that the market optimizing and giving us the products we want at an adequate price is the default, when it's clearly the exception.

badpun 4y ago
It is because most people don't actually care about those issues (discolored clothing, crap food ingredients etc.) to any measurable degree. They might in theory, but in practice they exert zero effort to educate themselves on these issues and learn how to discern better products from worse ones. And if the consumer doesn't care, why should companies care?
- Sponge5 4y ago
  I'd argue most consumers do care, but only after the fact.
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Also being able to care and then act brings the assumption that you have the free time to spool up a mini research project on each and every consumer good you buy.
k0k0r0 4y ago
Yeah, it is like a mass psychosis.
MichaelZuo 4y ago
It's easy to hide lower quality but very difficult to hide higher prices. Game theory suggests that the vast majority of consumer goods will be nearly free, relative to their high quality counterparts, at the minimum viable quality.
lotsofpulp 4y ago

rakoo 4y ago

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Counter-question: did you really think the free market was actually working for the consumer ? A free market relies on multiple points: - consumers are rational - consumers have time and energy to compare alternatives - alternatives exist - it is essentially free to create an alternative, and alternatives take 0 time to become mature - consumers have enough money to buy exactly what they want None of those are true. Consumers aren't rational, or else there wouldn't be a multi billion dollars ad industry whose point is exactly to instill artificial demand. Consumers have too little free time to spend on chores, family, going out; they won't spend a weekend spreadsheeting a smartphone. The last competitor to the current duopoly failed because it didn't gain traction, and it was a multi billion dollar company. The income inequality keeps rising, people have to make a choice between paying rent and buying a new smartphone. The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life but of shareholders' profits. A barely working, ad-ridden, slow as molasses smartphone that prints money just by being turned on is the expected outcome of those incentives.

q-big 4y ago
> The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life No economist would claim that (and I seriously ask from where you got the "markets maximize consumers' quality of life" claim). Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kibwen 4y ago
  > Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources. Where, in practice, "efficient" is conveniently circularly defined as "whatever the market decides". In the case of the OP, there's nothing "efficient" about grinding a computer to a halt under an oppressive layer of crapware, thereby wasting the user's time and energy (in both a literal and a figurative sense). The stark lesson of the modern age is that markets are hopeless at pricing in externalities.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Convenience > everything else Also- just because it's a big deal to you and me, doesn't mean it actually is. How much does it actually hurt you? That's why people don't care. In the grand scheme of things is a wicked "first world problem". We live extremely privileged lives if this is really a huge annoyance (it is to me btw). I wish things were more open. Would the entire streaming community ever have happened without a general purpose computer? It is hard to know what alternate future we have been robbed of by being force fed closed and locked down platforms.

oytis 4y ago

The requirements sound like you want Linux and open-source BIOS. All doable with today's consumer-grade laptops, although I never cared enough to install custom BIOS.

chopin 4y ago

My personal devices are a Fairphone with e/OS and a Purism laptop. The laptop probably fails no. 3, but they do fulfill 0.-2. imho. There are alternatives. And for the prices I suspect that there is not enough demand for prices to come down. Our family laptop and my personal desktop run Linux Mint. Those do not have open firmware, but that's it.

awiesenhofer 4y ago
Do banking apps run on e/OS?
- chopin 4y ago
  Good question, I don't run any banking apps on Android out of principle. I don't like authenticator apps either but they are better than SMS verifcation which I despise. Where possible, I use a Yubikey or other separate read-only device. Banking is only done on a laptop booted from a read-only stick and with a TAN-generator.

goodpoint 4y ago

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? The most common type of market failure is monopoly/oligopoly: you can choose Microsoft or Apple. They have a suffocating grip on OEMs, making it very difficult to develop alternatives. The real question is: Why is human society tolerating oligopolies on software, CPUs and hardware in general?

ansgri 4y ago
It seems that at a scale that matters with high technology, there is no 'human society', only empires and corporations.
goodpoint 4y ago
Downvoted for saying this. HN is becoming a hybrid of 4chan and linkedin.

bootsmann 4y ago

The market isn't failing, it's just that the subset of users that care about such things but aren't just switching to linux dwarfs the number of people who don't care about this at all. There is no incentive for companies to cater to the wishes of this minority.

ceejayoz 4y ago
As the meme goes, "that just sounds like a market failure with extra steps".
AlexandrB 4y ago
There's also a group (maybe the largest group?) that might care if they knew what the benefits are. Alas, free software doesn't have a lot of money to spend on marketing.

ipython 4y ago

Easy Answer: consumers decide on one factor and one factor alone: price. And no need for the exaggeration, in many cases you can buy an iPad for less than that crappy windows laptop with all the spyware. Even for a fully featured Air, the price difference is way less than $1000

bobsmooth 4y ago
It seems like every other commenter is missing this. People would rather pay for a $200 TV and complain about the ads on it than buy a properly priced TV.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  I'm not aware of a price point where TVs come with no ads: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unremovable_ads_on_my_2500_samsung_smart_tv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unrem...
  - bobsmooth 4y ago
    Buy a commercial display. Not only will it last decades with regular consumer use there's no built-in OS to slow it down.

m12k 4y ago

>Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? This is just typical late stage capitalism, no? The step after commoditization isn't "and then they just quietly settled for being treated like a utility and not having huge profit margins anymore". It's more often "and then they tried to find other ways to monetize by selling ads and demographics information" or "then they bought up their competitors and raised prices again" or "then they formed a cartel with their competitors" or "then they tried to de-commoditize the product category by charging 200% more for a 20% performance improvement, while stopping production of the previous version" or "then they started charging more for related services and maintenance" (cf. printer ink cartridges and razor blades). Being the "winner" or "last/biggest company standing" of a product category means you get to do all of the above consumer-hostile fuckery to try to keep profit margins high.

throw0101c 4y ago

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Just like the market is "failing" when people complain about bad airline experiences… but continue to buy the cheapest flights/seats they can find? Why do you think the seats are so cheap?

Cthulhu_ 4y ago

"Let the market decide" doesn't work, that's the gist of it. It's only capitalist-idealists that still believe that. I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. Since websites didn't self-regulate when it came to tracking people, legislation came in to make them do so, making everything worse for everyone because then instead of removing the trackers, corporations decided to apply dark and annoyance patterns to make people just hit the easy accept button. Even self-regulation doesn't work. A decade ago, MOST of the smartphone manufacturers self-regulated and settled on using micro-USB for charging. Apple refused to cooperate, so now legislation came in.

RunSet 4y ago
> I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. If NSA / CIA types don't have access to the Intel Management Engine backdoor, I will eat my own mouth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine Thanks, government oversight.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  So, funnily enough, there's a secret ME disable that Intel made specifically because someone at the CIA or NSA got cold feet about the whole "secondary boot-up processor that can pwn the main processor cores" thing.
  - RunSet 4y ago
    It is telling that the feds are unwilling to eat their own cooking. Although "disable" is not the same as "remove" it is better than nothing. https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/disabling-intel-me-11-via-undocumented-mode/ https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/disabling-intel-m...
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      I don't even think it's the Fed's cooking. Large enterprises were asking for a way to detect, wipe, and reset a compromised machine, remotely, while the compromised OS was still running. Intel ME was their solution to this.

otikik 4y ago

The market is still concentrating wealth into a few select hands, so it is not failing.

christophilus 4y ago

The free market always tends to fail if there’s a monopoly. A duopoly is apparently also a failure mode, here (regarding phones). But in the case of laptops, I’m not sure the market has failed. Apple is selling MacBooks like hotcakes. The Framework laptop is attacking at a different angle, and I have high hopes for System76 and friends. Yes, there’s loads of hot garbage, but there are really good alternatives.

Zigurd 4y ago

The market failed in part because it appears to goose up productivity when you cut team size, outsource, and OKR your way to "measurable performance." Nobody was left with any willingness to call this crap out. Nobody was incentivized to say the bloatware was causing product returns. How to fix this? It has to come from every CEO, down through management, to empower the people who ask expensive questions like "Why is the bloatware so shitty?" This doesn't happen because most CEOs cannot grasp that that is how Apple gets to charge so much more for their laptops, and that they have to give up managing by the numbers to get there. (Not that Apple hasn't got numbers people, especially on the supply chain side.) You don't need open source systems to get there. Open source in commercial systems can help, but it isn't fundamental to getting the bloatware under control. Microsoft does it with Surface in part to put pressure on their OEM customers, like Google does with Pixel. This isn't just to be good to their end-users. They would probably kill their OEMs if they could and be more like Apple, if they could.

mritzmann 4y ago

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? In my environment, more and more people are switching from $BRANDXYZ to Apple (or Linux). To me, it doesn't look like the market is failing, rather the opposite. But of course, this is not a Representatione evaluation. The problem is, however, that not everyone wants to or can afford this.

znpy 4y ago

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? Because the market is too free, and needs some additional,heavy and very restrictive regulation. I hope the EU will do something in this sense, sooner or later.

dschep 4y ago

easy: the market is far from infallible.

JustSomeNobody 4y ago

Because you cannot just sell hardware anymore. There is no MRR from that and investors expect their quarterly returns. It's that simple. Runaway capitalism has fucked the promotion of the interests of consumers.

hopeful122 4y ago

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect? It didn't. There are Apple stores all around the world, full of people ready to help seniors in person or over the phone, on a really nice computer.

f1refly 4y ago
>Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? Hmmmm

deleted 4y ago

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TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

It comes down to incentives. No one on the supply side is incentivized to make a product the average consumer WANTS. They are incentivized to make something that the consumer will wind up BUYING. And all of their incentives are extremely short-term, from the CEO on down, and UP, to the shareholders. All we care about is stock price. That's it. Everything, inside and out, tracks back to the singular god of share price. You can say that the trade press cares about something else, but, no, they don't. If internal metrics are making middle managers hit their KPI's, then that tracks with share price, no matter how screwed up those KPI's are. It's all just so perverse and incestuous.

tweetle_beetle 4y ago

One of the reasons is the value assigned to spyware/crapware subsidises the cost of the physical product and increases over time in a race to the bottom. It's especially clear on items that the market suggests you need to upgrade every couple of years to keep them competitively priced, but even long cycle items like laptops and tvs are suffering from it. To start with it looks like you're getting a discount from one manufacturer, but you can spend more for a clean slate, then they all abandon the clean slate models and you can't even buy control. Can you even buy an everyday consumer Windows laptop from without crap on it these days?