> Consumers have no way to tell that a phone gives "privacy" or even to understand the implications of that to their life.
This is the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.
The reason that doesn't work for white label microwaves is that the manufacturers don't want it to. The off brands exist so they can make sales to people who prioritize price, and they purposely change the company name every month so no one can find a review of the off brand and the same company can sell the same microwave with a higher margin to other people who will pay more for the name brand.
Whereas when your company makes a phone with better privacy etc., you want everybody to know that so they buy your phone instead of a competitor's.
> They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"
Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one. (It's actually a pretty decent red flag that your bank has a cargo cult security team.)
> This is obviously false. It's the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.
It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".
This Motorola thing has (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".
Consumers don't understand and they don't care. Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.
How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?
> Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one.
If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.
> It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".
That's the marketing noise from the company itself. Then you go to Reddit or similar and ask technically competent people what they recommend.
> Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.
The phone that supports open operating systems is the one that's less of a hassle. It doesn't go out of support even though there's nothing wrong with it, it isn't full of spyware and weird bugs because people can actually fix them when the OEM doesn't, it has a working ad blocker etc.
> How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?
Windows market share was >90%, now it's 67% and still falling. And that's just desktops; Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated. By most accounts Windows Phone was actually decent but being from the notorious company whose OS nobody uses unless they're locked in was a death sentence.
> If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.
You're not switching banks to buy a new phone, you're switching banks because when you bought a new phone it made you realize that your bank sucks. Which annoyed you enough to spend five minutes checking out other banks, at which point you realized there are credit unions that not only support your new phone but pay better interest rates and charge lower fees.
Then you remember that time when they charged you that fee for some BS reason last year and you swore you were going to get a new bank but never got around to it, and decide that you'd rather get on with what you always intended to do sooner rather than later instead of replacing your new phone that you otherwise like.
>Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated.
This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps. They didn't have apps because they rewrote between Windows Mobile 6 and WP7, and rewrote between WP7 and WP8, and rewrote between between WP8.1 and WP10. That's a lot of work for developers and they didn't have enough users to justify developers rewriting their apps that many times. Combine that with some companies refusing to build apps at all (YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client) and users didn't want to put up with the lack of apps either.
> This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps.
They didn't have apps because nobody likes them. If you're a user and you expect them to be well-liked then you buy the phone expecting others to buy the phone and developers to target it. If you're a developer then you make apps expecting enough users to buy the phone.
But if you don't like them and you're not sure anybody else is going to like them then you play wait and see instead, and so does everybody else, and so they have no apps and no users and people start to see that they have no apps and no users.
Which is why they kept changing things trying to force people to do it, giving Windows 8 that widely-disliked tablet interface on desktops etc.
> YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client
Oh no, did someone with a dominant OS market share do an anti-competitive thing to Microsoft?
You're asking why people don't pick up Linux faster but you can see the symmetry when it's going the other way. It's not that they don't want to, it's that 80% of enshitification is lock-in.
People have been saying that because it's such an outrageous dichotomy, but it's also not really what happened in those cases.
To begin with Epic picked a disadvantageous test case because mobile is only ~6% of Fortnite with the large majority on PCs and consoles. So when Apple banned it on iOS, most of the iOS users just bought their Fortnite stuff on their PCs and consoles instead and Apple could say "see? not a monopoly" which got them a market definition that included Google Play. The market definition is about the single most important thing in antitrust cases.
But it wasn't really Google Play that people were switching to after Apple banned them and that could turn out a lot different for apps primarily used on mobile rather than trying to go after a mobile company over an app primarily used on consoles. That was the main reason Epic lost against Apple -- Epic had an app where people would actually switch to something other than iOS and Apple had enough evidence of that to convince the judge.
In principle that could have been the case for Google too, but they got a different judge, a jury trial instead of having the judge decide the facts, a correspondingly different market definition, and then it went the other way.
What confuses people is that Google partially got in trouble for things like forcing third party OEMs to install Google Play on the home screen of their Android devices, which is not a good look, whereas Apple isn't forcing third party OEMs to do anything because they don't have any third party OEMs. But the thing they got in trouble for wasn't having third party OEMs, it was strongarming them, which is obviously not the same thing.
And -- this is probably the most important part -- locking down the device isn't what gets you out of a market definition of "aftermarket for customers of that OS". It was more that Apple presented evidence that customers would actually switch to alternatives specifically in the case of Fortnite and their judge bought that but a jury in a different case didn't.
If anything the lesson for Google here should be to not strongarm third parties, because that's plausibly what pissed off the jury. And I'd be interested to see a case against Apple where the plaintiff is doing >50% of their business with iOS users instead of a single digit percentage, i.e. the ones where they actually have market power, though of course you then have the irony that those are the ones most afraid to bring the case.
It's not just that. How many bugs or ridiculous misfeatures do existing phones have because the OEMs are teaching to the test for benchmarks or just don't care to fix them?
You were reading something on your phone, switched to a different app for 3 seconds and then back, and now it's an error page because you're in a poor cell coverage area but the device is nefariously aggressive at unloading apps to try to eek out a marginal advantage on battery life reviews. Worse, for well-behaved apps that actually degrades battery life because having to reload the app requires the device to do more work than letting it stay idle in the background.
Separate the software from the hardware and you don't have to worry about that, because they can mess up the stock image however they want for the reviews and you just have someone replace it with a version with those bugs removed.
In theory an iPad is a computer and then you could run whatever you want on it. So maybe the better question is, why can't you run whatever you want on it?
> It's more like a speculative investment that just happens to be easy to exchange
That's what money is. Being easy to exchange is the main ingredient.
It's slightly more convenient if the value doesn't have large swings over short periods of time, but there are government currencies that aren't immune to that, and that only really matters if you're holding large amounts over significant periods of time. Which is to say, it only really matters to speculators.
Especially if the thing actually is easy to exchange, because then it's only speculators who hold it for non-trivial periods of time at all. Suppose you could exchange stocks for cryptocurrency and then cryptocurrency for goods and services over the internet, both in less than a second. If you're inclined to invest in stocks rather than cryptocurrency then do you care about day to day volatility of cryptocurrency? No, because you'd never be holding it for more than a second even if you use it to pay for things.
But that can't demonstrate that there are no genuine accidents. Indeed, there almost certainly are, because people don't stop being incompetent just because some other people are malicious.
> Instead, people who like having kids should have more kids.
To make this work you need some kind of cross-subsidy (e.g. large child tax credit), because having a larger number of kids requires the means as well as the will and the people willing to do it aren't all billionaires.
But then we do essentially the opposite and drive up housing prices when larger families need more house. Higher housing prices are essentially a transfer from young and future families to retirees.
The interesting middle ground might be to prohibit anyone from serving more than two contiguous terms in the Senate or four in the House. Then if you've done your two terms in the Senate, you can run for a House seat, do three terms there and then your old Senate seat is back up for reelection. Except your old Senate seat now has a new incumbent who is only on their first term and you're running as the challenger. Meanwhile there are more seats in the House than the Senate, so if you hit your limit in the House you could go work for an administrative agency or run for a state-level office for two years and then come back, but then you're the challenger again.
The result is that you can stay as long as people keep voting you back in, but you lose the incumbency advantage and end up with a higher turnover rate without ending up with a 100% turnover rate. And you make them learn how other parts of the government work. It wouldn't hurt a bit to see long-term members of Congress do a two-year stint in an administrative agency once in a while.
Interesting idea and I do agree that contiguous is OK but total is not.
I think I'd suggest a more generous Senate term limit. Three terms (18 years) would allow for someone to see out a complete Presidential super-cycle, for example.
The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.
>The word Senate is etymologically related to "senior", it's a place where you _want_ people to be able to develop a lot of institutional experience.
I’m not disagreeing with the rest of your comment, but I’m going to challenge the notion that this etymological connection carries meaning. The word comes from Roman Senate, and in that context in Latin “senior” really meant people with higher status rather than age. Latin is full of these weird double meanings. Compare to seigneur in French or señor in Spanish. Also, the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.
This is an interesting idea. Would be curious to hear from someone who thinks this is a bad idea (why).
edit: I see the "term limits are anti-democratic" takes elsewhere in the comments, so I guess let me narrow the above ask to "someone who isn't opposed to term limits, but thinks this idea is flawed."
Fill the arena with HR ladies and have them do a battle royal to produce a half decent set of interview questions.
Put the electables in isolation cells fromwhere they one by one end up on the Tee Vee, give voters an app with AYE, NEY and Uhh? The questions are red by the winning HR lady but also appear on the app.
The applicant writes the fizzbuzz etc etc
Then, after the job interview, we give the job to the most satisfying candidate!
It's not necessary but I would also add a series of certificates and diplomas for the voter to show they actually have some kind of idea what the job involves. The level 1 certificate should be supper simple and easy to create. It will grant you 0.1 extra vote power. There could be as many levels as we want but to grow beyond [say] 50 votes should require a mythical effort impossible to attain for 99% while we aim to reserve the right to cast 5000 votes for 1 to 5 people with supper human abilities.
The top 20 should have to explain their AYE's and their NAY's to the Tee Vee audience.
Fill the arena with all the HR ladies, and then feed the winner to a lion. After that you might actually find someone capable of interviewing an applicant.
> I can fully understand that they don't want to weaken that by supporting fundamentally insecure devices.
Except that there is nothing fundamentally insecure about them, they just don't support a specific convenience feature. You can straightforwardly support PIN-based unlocking by encrypting the PIN in ordinary persistent storage using a longer passphrase that only has to be entered during boot.
This is arguably even more secure because it allows the PIN to be dumped from active memory and require the longer passphrase again after a timeout, a limited number of bad attempts or in response to a panic button on the lock screen. Then the device doesn't contain the long passphrase whatsoever, instead of having it permanently stored inside of an opaque enclave that itself could (and often does!) have its own vulnerabilities.
This is the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.
The reason that doesn't work for white label microwaves is that the manufacturers don't want it to. The off brands exist so they can make sales to people who prioritize price, and they purposely change the company name every month so no one can find a review of the off brand and the same company can sell the same microwave with a higher margin to other people who will pay more for the name brand.
Whereas when your company makes a phone with better privacy etc., you want everybody to know that so they buy your phone instead of a competitor's.
> They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"
Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one. (It's actually a pretty decent red flag that your bank has a cargo cult security team.)
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