71–80 of 334 posts
I don’t know. I already have to click cookie buttons on every goddamn web site I visit, it’s annoying as hell. These EU initiatives can be a bit pointless. Battery needs to be replaced like once every 2-3 years. Why change the device design to make battery user-replaceable when I can bring it to the repair shop?
"I don't care about cookies"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-a...
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In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years. I've had multiple reports of acquaintances complaining about their phones getting slow after a few years, and I've always assumed that they were just full of apps... until it happened to me. I can't find an unambiguois explanation; my guess is a mix of CPUs deteriorating over time d…
It's not a mystery at all. Planned obsolescence is a thing and manufacturers have all kinds of perverse incentives to ensure that your perfectly serviceable phone gets traded in for a newer model.
Rather the opposite: they don't try to keep your old phone working. The devs probably have the latest phone, and write code that works well with them. This code can be inefficient, as long as it works well on the newer phone, even if it makes older phones slower.
Maybe I am being pedantic, but I think it is different: it is _not_ that manufacturers actively pay their devs to make the phones slower (which would be planned obsolescence), but rather they _do not pay_ the devs to make sure the old phones _do not get slower_. The latter is "passive", that's (to me) premature obsolescence: the manufacturer could fight premature obsolescence, but it has a cost (and obviously they don't want to pay for it).
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> I don't know about any EU smartphone brands outside of Fairphone. That's your problem then, don't you think? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_phone_brands_by... Now, whether all of these are actually manufactured locally or not is another matter, but the EU definitely is regulating its own market. As they have been empowered to do so. I'm all for it. And I would love to see standardized battery packs fo…
The wp article does mention gigaset and https://www.shiftphones.com/ but not Fairphone nor https://www.carbonmobile.com/ who as with shift and gigaset are building manufacturing in Germany (mostly north east). Shift has a plant in China and just does finishing in Germany. But that's a given, I believe. Can't source all things in one country. Or?
I think this is fantastic news. It will be interesting to see how it affects the amount of phones that get discarded. I think the next bottleneck is likely to be software longevity. This has improved a lot lately! But basically I think phones have now reached a place like laptops and desktops where HW capabilities are stable, and there's no good reason for devices to be obsolete in 5 years any more. I wonder if regul…
In my experience, the current bottleneck with (Android) phones is that the get very slow without any apparent reasons after a few years. I've had multiple reports of acquaintances complaining about their phones getting slow after a few years, and I've always assumed that they were just full of apps... until it happened to me. I can't find an unambiguois explanation; my guess is a mix of CPUs deteriorating over time d…
There was one Android device my wife had that got slower and slower and it was a known issue with the disk.
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It is their market to regulate. And right to repair is very much a part of EU regulations. Without those regulations you'd be in a far worse situation. https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/automotiv... If BMW idiocy gets you upset: don't drive BMW. My car is 25 and I can do just about anything I want on it. Your beef is first and foremost with BMW, and I'm fairly sure that if the EU deems this kind of b…
It is their market but they don't have any significant participation in it, which is why regulation is easy. There isn't any significant downside to it for them. I don't have beef with BMW, that was just an example. "Don't drive a BMW" is the equivalent of "Don't buy an iPhone" if you care about repairability. It shouldn't be like that.
The number of EU companies affected by EU regulations is far larger than the number of companies from abroad. Your example fails because the same amount of regulation that applies to EU car manufacturers also applies to manufacturers from abroad. The EU is in that sense one of the fairest players.
According to your philosophy no amount of regulation on mobile phones would be acceptable because the EU has no big name phone manufacturer any more. But as others have already pointed out this legislation affects far more than just mobile phones so your argument simply fails.
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The second proposed legislation from the article seems to require that at least 5 years of updates must be provided after the device was last sold. This is far more than many low-end and mid-range Android phones, moreover many Android phone manufacturers start counting after the device was released, not last sold. Interestingly, they also seem to put upper bounds on how quickly these updates should be rolled out. Eg.…
Is it? It is going to meant that Android can't take advantage of the high end features of the new phones that are being released, and that old and slow phones are going to get updates that makes them run even slower. To top it of, it is not like manufacturers are into throwing away money, so this will likely mean that prices on the cheapest phones will increase more.
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It is their market but they don't have any significant participation in it, which is why regulation is easy. There isn't any significant downside to it for them. I don't have beef with BMW, that was just an example. "Don't drive a BMW" is the equivalent of "Don't buy an iPhone" if you care about repairability. It shouldn't be like that.
You see correlation and infer causation but maybe the better way to see this is to realize that the EU is large, has a ton of work on their plate already and relatively limited budget to work with whereas manufacturers will always just see how far they can stretch it. The number of EU companies affected by EU regulations is far larger than the number of companies from abroad. Your example fails because the same amoun…
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Disagree. First, the devices with removable batteries are exceedingly rare right now. They also often enough are niche products. Second, it is not reasonable to expect every consumer to always think about what is right, and not instead to follow what marketing tells him to buy. This is exactly what regulations are good for and historically have solved.
Interesting argument against democracy that you have in there - we should go back to monarchy. After all, it is not reasonable to expect every citizen to think about what is right, since instead they follow propaganda.
Though a consumer decision is not the same as a political vote, at least the latter is not supposed to be similarly thoughtless, so there is no need to interpret my comment that broadly.
Interestingly, the regulation apparently also applies to small devices like smart watches and wireless earbuds.
That's not great - those devices really do not have space for a replaceable battery. And no, I don't want them bigger than they already are.