Marketers manage to convince tech-savvy people that their device is almost unusable by manipulating percentages. For example, “50% brighter screen, 30% more energy efficient”. It even worked for me when I didn’t want to buy a previous phone model just because the latest generation had a 50% brighter screen. But then I realized that I was perfectly happy with the screen of my 4 year-old phone.
Planned obsolescence isn’t even in my top 10. The worst things about Big Tech are existential, like its use for mass espionage and murder by evil regimes.
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Planned Obsolescence is a problem across all consumer electronics that depend on the software being updated. It’s not limited to Big Tech.
The only way I see to solve it is to force vendors to release hardware specs and unlock bootloaders so you can install your own software on it.
An even better solution would be to force vendors to release their software when the hardware is end of life via their planned obsolescence.
It’s great to see small advances in right to repair for hardware, such as replacing the battery or access to new parts, but those don’t help when you are stuck on an outdated OS version.
The only way I see to solve it is to force vendors to release hardware specs and unlock bootloaders so you can install your own software on it.
Would that actually solve it? Just because a phone has an unlocked bootloader doesn’t mean random ass people are going to want to support it. And even if some random dude on XDA makes updates for it that doesn’t mean most people are even going to want to use it. Like yeah it’s cool than a Galaxy S4 can run the latest version of Android, but that shit is buggy as hell and IDK anyone who would unironically want to use that.
