Apple are the masters of programmed obsolence with usury prices
My Fairphone 3 is almost as good as new. Although it was behind competition from the beginning, I hope more recent iterations filled the gaps!
I have not much hope for corporations, but what disappoints me the most is other people. Every-time someone needs to buy a new smartphone around me, they just stop considering Fairphone when they find out their latest model is at 700€ and end up buying a 550€ model from Google or Samsung. Like, people complain they don’t want their manufacturer rely on child labor or any dirty sourcing but they actively make that decision on their own to spare a few bucks or not risk the discomfort of having a phone running transitions at 50 FPS instead of 90 …
We can’t fix systemic issues by relying on individuals to make “moral” decisions in a system we are all exploited under.
“Capitalism is when companies piss me off.”
I swear you should have to prove some minimum-level understanding of a term before being allowed to use it.
I read it as profit maximization is a perverse incentive that doesn’t achieve what people promoting capitalism claim.
No its when profits are more important than the customers a company claims to serve, under capitalism companies are incentivised to make products that dont last.
Is this ironically funny?
Like… it’s funny people are stupid enough to believe this nonsense.
I’ll give you a personal story. I’m not saying anything about apple but this is my personal experience with a tech hardware company I use to be an engineer at in Silicon Valley.
We had a product we sold to other companies. Something not consumer grade at all. Think major data center products. This product we’ll call it, Product X, was sold in different levels of speed. So you had the baseline product at speed 1x and another at speed 2x.
Now, due to hardware delays and hardware issues the 1x (which was meant to rollout first) actually got its production schedule pushed back to the point that the hardware testing had been fully verified on the 2x model as well as the 1x. So mass production had not started yet but both models were verified through beta testing and development.
So, it actually ended up being cheaper for manufacturing to only produce all 2x hardware and have me (the software engineer) just reduce the throughput on the same hardware. They would simply just stick a different 1x sticker on the models running the purposely speed limiting software.
The company released 1x the next quarter. Again, with hardware identical to the 2x. And then waited two quarters to release the 2x. Now technically the 1x models could literally be upgraded by a software update. But that would expose this scam. So companies we sold 1x models to that wanted to upgrade would literally throw away the same exact hardware to buy the 2x model.
This is just my personal story. You don’t even have to believe it. But, having worked in the industry now for 10 years, this is not uncommon practice. I would not put it past Apple to do what the above post suggests.
this is standard for a lot of server products: sell the exact same chassis with the same specs and then feature-gate the hardware to under perform
yes, it’s shit… but also, you’re not buying the physical thing: you’re buying the r&d… it’s either that, or they say suck it buy the expensive one we don’t have another option
that’s very different to what’s being expressed in the original image
It’s not though. Only under capitalism would be literally throw away an item and replace it with the exact same item in the same condition. The only reason for this behavior is capitalism and profit incentives. It’s a waste of labor and resources and only benefits the profits of capital.
i agree that it’s wasteful; i just think it’s far closer to paying a contractor (complete this work and i’ll pay you $X and i don’t care what tools you use) than it is to buying hardware from a consumer perspective
Ok. You bring up an important point. And I hope I can take a minute to convince you of something.
What you’re saying is correct. But it relies on fundamental falacy of the way people try to view economics. When we say “capitalism” we’re obviously talking about the entire economic structure; the “rules” for which an economy is organized and the government that enforcess those rules.
The issue with your comparison is that is is not at all comparable to the economic insensitives of massive companies. There is absolutely no valid way to compare a small business or individual hiring a contractor to what I was previously discussing.
I think our economic education suffers in this country because people tend to think of massive economies of scale as just a “bigger” small business. This is not at all comparable. And the waste that this produces is absolutely non trivial.
The “run the country like a business” people have this same flawed logic. They image that any business is just a “coffee shop” but with more employees and customers. But these things are just not comparable. It would be like everyone deciding about how to build an airplane but they assume that the physics are in a frictionless vacuum.
well, i’m from australia so our “this country” is probably different
in general i agree, but economies of scale and things like that apply no matter what - they’re logical conclusions rather than theories
no matter your system you have to allocate resources, and cease to allocate resources to things that aren’t useful
providing a single big product is likely the most efficient thing to (why would they do it otherwise? all other arguments aside big companies are fairly decent at squeezing every $ out of their sales. even if it’s not, i don’t think we have the data to discuss further in that direction), so no matter the system i’d argue this is probably the correct decision
what then follows that? if you’re allocating resources, and there’s only a single $100 item available and you only have $80 to spend on it, you’re SOL: you’d probably prefer there to be an $80 product that’s half as powerful (and in this scenario, the $100 product would likely cost more as well)
either way you’re wasteful - either in discarding performance by artificially limiting the item, or by making smaller products in an inefficient way that makes the whole range more resource intensive to produce
i think there’s no good answer, and as frustrating as it is to know that the big powerful thing is right there, i don’t think it’s as obviously big bad corporate as it seems on the surface
it should also be noted that it’s likely with those products that all the hardware actually doesn’t work - when you produce things like CPUs, some of the cores just fail to pass QA. rather than throwing them out, you can just artificially disable some of the cores and sell it as the smaller products… technically, yes the whole chip for the bigger product is there, but it’s partially faulty (or at least not up to the quality that the company is willing to guarantee)… this also sometimes happens with returns
