i was reading some blog that talked about how Apple is really a finance company that makes tech shit on the side. in light of that this kind of fuckery makes sense
They only got the market share they did because everyone else was eaten alive and cannibalized by Microsoft. They didn't stay alive by trying to outcompete with tech, just by spending everything on marketing and investment.
Just going to drop this here: The Onion: Apple introduces revolutionary laptop with no keyboard
"I'll buy almost anything if it's shiny and made by apple" CUT
Or the fucking camera that sticks out the back. Remember when you could lay your phone flat on a table without a case? I remember, and I refuse to buy a new phone until someone fixes it.
But cameras are good now... I’d much rather take the improved camera imo
Fair, but they could just make the phone as thick as the camera lens and slap a bigger battery in there.
I have a very old HTC Evo lying around at work (wanted to use the FM radio for NPR listening back in my lib days), it's thick, small, and fits very well in the hand. Thin phones were a dumb idea.
I actually think this is a good thing? Like, removing the headphone jack was terrible and shitty, but removing the charger literally creates less waste. Everyone* has eight million USB chargers already, or enough USB ports on computers, power strips, outlets, etc., or a wireless charging station, that this shouldn’t matter. Plus their pack-in headphones suck and mostly sit at the bottom of desk drawers before going to the landfill.
In a slightly better world, iPhones would have USB-C, a standard headphone jack, a replaceable battery, and nothing else in the box. The box would be made entirely of recycled materials. I dunno what smartphones would look like in a perfect world.
*everyone who is going to buy “the new iPhone”
The Soviet smart phone weighs six pounds. You talk in to a handset attached by a cable. It has terrible call quality but gets reception anywhere on earth. If you open it up you'll find a replaceable wet cell battery, a complete circuit diagram, spare fuses, and a worrying sealed box with a nuclear trefoil on it. All parts are replaceable by hand. It has 70% parts compatibility with your microwave, your radio, and your lada.
Unironically love this. The Pinephone and Fairphone are closer to that ideal, but not completely.
Communist smartphone - open source software, components built to last minimum 30 years, easy to repair
If you're happy with a thicker phone, you can have separate PCBs you can switch out to improve components or for easier repairability
Needs a big enough of a production run that software devs are forced to optimize their software well enough to actually run on the things.
Also you can get a bunch of free CPU power on it and all other devices by ending advertising.
Can you imagine how much more powerful, performant, and capable all existing technology would be without ads? Without constantly wasting resources digging through your whole life to feed your essence into a machine that just spits out an annoying message like “buy the new Carbon X2 Smart Toaster, now with AutoButter and Twitter integration. Burn your favorite tweets into your breakfast. Only 149.95 at Best Buy and Amazon”
take everything you like about the iphone and remove everything you don't. the public/government could just hire 300 engineers and pay them very good wages to develop and produce a smart phone, but tell them to make it without a profit motive in mind, make it as useful as possible, and that it should be as cheap and reliable as possible. (where as the engineers at google are told make it as profitable as possible, while maintaining enough usability to not hurt sales)
I've had to get new bloody chargers every phone (which admittedly isn't too often) because the Chinese phones I buy have significant increases in charge speed.
The Xiaomi Mi Ultra 10 charges at like 100 watts.
You don’t have to charge it at warp speed, though. Everything still charges at the standard USB spec, it’s just slower.
Charging for five hours isn't particularly attractive to save resources on a $20 charger. However if you had more expensive smarter chargers in the first instance that could have firmware updates and more repairability, then you'd avoid the need to update (e.g. the first 100W usb power delivery standard was agreed almost a decade ago).
I do wish phones were more repairable though - I've accidentally cracked a replacement screen and stabbed a battery in the past when replacing broken bits on my phone.
I haven't had a phone for years so this would fuck me completely. Why don't they do two models, one without the accessories and one with? Surely that's the actual best way to do this? But then they'd have two prices and wouldn't be able to charge the same I guess.
Lifehack: go to any hotel, explain to the front desk “I stayed here a few days/weeks ago and left my charger in my room. It was an [Android/iPhone] charger. Do you think you guys might have picked it up?”
Boom, free charger.
Then you have to have two different models in the stores. Estimating how many of each to produce would be weird as well. I think Apple is amusing that most people are upgrading from an older iPhone and already have the lightning cable and wire
As someone who will never buy this, I actually back this move. At least its more environmental
If the goal is to be more environmental, they should make it a free opt-in option upon purchase
Would a store have to have the accessories on hand with each phone just in case someone opts in? In that case they would be manufacturing the same amount, and you would have two boxes instead of one
Well no they would just have to manufacture and stock the same amount they are going to manufacture under the current release strategy
Not everyone buying the phone will buy a charger, but more people will opt-in if it's free even if they don't need it.
Sure, so they'll need slightly more to account for that. I would hope that most people wouldn't opt-in though
I wanna say thats dumb, but i buy the cheap chargers all the time anyway. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Good thing they're making it cheaper to compensate. Oh, they're not. It's a good thing the markets haven't failed us.
The victims of fraud are often dupes, but I hate the fraudster more than I look down on the dumb victim. A crime against a sap is still a crime.
I agree with that too - we should have an enforced universal format for chargers. I buy a new phone about once a decade so my old chargers never fit my new one.
Pretty sure the EU does enforce some kind of usb, or at least they tried to a few years ago.
I tried looking that up and it sounds like it's voluntary, not enforced. Better than nothing, but short of the goal.
Idk if mobile phone makers were going that direction already, but I seem to remember that they mostly, except Apple obvs, got on board with USB about that time.
Wait, is this saying that you are forced to use inductive charging, or just that it doesn't come with the charging cable?
It is a stupid thing to get upset about, but they also won’t be passing along those savings to the consumer or the workers
Problem is charging technology changes over time, so your other chargers won't be able to utilize the full charging performance of the new iPhone that people are spending what, 1000+USD on? The whole thing is just irrational, imagine spending over 1000 dollars on a phone, that is a massive waste of money, I've never spent over 250 on one, and then you get no charger. And you can't use the full charging performance (ultra fast charging, etc) without buying a new charging brick separately, this negating any positive environmental impact if you actually want to use the full performance of the iPhone
Simple idea: include the chargers when charging tech has upgraded, don't do so when it's remaining stagnant.
Apple hasn’t included a charger that charges any of their phones at full speed in almost a decade.
