5 posts tagged ‘Unauthorized Repair’
Autoenshittification, YouTube, and Disenshittify or Die
Cory Doctorow (July 2023, Hacker News): Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket.[…]The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing […]
How to Be Optimistic About Technology Now
Nick Heer: If you measure your level of optimism by how much course-correction has been working, then 2023 was a pretty hopeful year. In the span of about a decade, a handful of U.S. technology firms have solidified their place among the biggest and most powerful corporations in the world, so nobody should be surprised […]
iPhone Parts Pairing
Tripp Mickle, Ella Koeze, and Brian X. Chen (via Hacker News): Unlike cars, which can be repaired with generic parts by auto shops and do-it-yourself mechanics, new iPhones are coded to recognize the serial numbers for original components and may malfunction if the parts are changed.This year, seven iPhone parts can trigger issues during repairs, […]
Apple’s Trademark Exploit
GiovanH (via Hacker News): Apple puts its logo on the devices it sells: not just the outer casing, but also each internal component. The vast majority of these logos are totally enclosed and invisible to the naked eye. This seems like a strange practice — especially since Apple doesn’t sell these parts separately — except […]
The Average Lifespan of a Smartphone
Isabel Rubio (via Hacker News): While Marcos Fernández managed to last six years with his previous device, the average lifespan of a smartphone is much lower. In Europe, for instance, it’s about three years, according to the European Environment Office (EEB). This figure is far less than the 25 years that a phone would need […]