Raymond Chen already discussed this. Microsoft wants to sell Windows. Windows exists to run software. If Windows doesn't run software, Microsoft doesn't make that sale.
If your business runs on some obscure piece of software for which updates are neither cheap or easy, you're not going to buy Windows if it doesn't run that software.
Name and shame doesn't work because the developer isn't part of the transaction.
> The rule is just a bandaid on Apple's lack of true sandboxing for apps.
That's not it at all. If an app can run arbitrary code then it can run other apps and that can by-pass the app store. They are specifically trying to prevent something like Wechat on the iPhone. It's not about security, it's about money and control.
Wechat is large enough to be able to negotiate requirements with Apple. They are the gateway to an entire continent and close to 2 Billion users. And since they are a 'everything app' the frequency of use and reliance is likely compounded.
Apple's not picking up the phone for 50 million users. So we shouldn't expect anything different here.
Luckily there are other phones and mobile os's to develop for.
You didn't say why this is a bad solution. The government mandates that cars get safer every year and fatalities are down 78% from the 1960s. Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit.
> One of the things macbook users praise the most is "build quality", which often means the solidity of the device, lack of flex, etc.
It seems like the Macbook Neo has a lot of those properties as well for a very inexpensive device that is extremely easy to repair.
Car safety is a bad counterexample because the risk is otherwise often externalized i.e. your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal. And as GP stated, regulating this sort of thing would definitely force a particular trade-off on everyone. A lot of people would be pissed to have MacBooks with worse "build quality" even if they were more reparable. Having a choice is better.
I disagree. The lack of repairability has external costs not born by the purchaser or the manufacturer -- more toxic trash unnecessarily added to the environment.
Forcing a particular trade-off on everyone is entirely the point. It's the point of car safety, it's also the point of minimum warranties, electrical emission regulations, safety standards, etc.
Does this also mean only using "standard" parts? Or does the manufacturer have to over-produce the parts for, lets say 7 years, and then warehouse and ship those parts, probably multiple times. Or keep a low rate production line running for 7 years? What happens to the parts that don't get used? Are they scrapped?
That "what if" cost is going to be built into the cost of the laptop. Repairability doesn't always keep the cost low. The purchaser will definitely have to foot the cost otherwise it isn't sustainable.
> Does this also mean only using "standard" parts? Or does the manufacturer have to over-produce the parts for, lets say 7 years, and then warehouse and ship those parts, probably multiple times. Or keep a low rate production line running for 7 years? What happens to the parts that don't get used? Are they scrapped?
None of that is relevant in this context: The parts are available, but the laptop is designed and built such that the alone keyboard cannot be replaced.[1]
[1] Not sure if this is possible on that specific laptop, but with a steady hand, a tiny drill, maybe a magnifiying glass too, you can maybe drill out the rivets, then replace the keyboard, then either re-rivet it back again or tap very tiny thread into the laptop and use screws.
The laptop is deffinitely designed in a way that the keyboard is extremely hard to replace. Took me like 5 hours across 2 days. Rivets are not even the worst part, I used tiny drill and carefully glued in the replacement keyboard using phone screen glue (B7000) between the keys. (glue needs to go both on the frame and on the keyboard as there is a gap that needs to be bridged) Since there are screws along 3 of its edges, I deemed it good enough. drilling and tapping or riveting would have been extra painful.
What makes the repair more complicated is that
1) you need to take out basically everything to get to the keyboard. There are many different screws, luckily ifixit has a disassembly guides with their sizes. Still it was a bit painful to reassemble.
2) One of the things you need to take out or at least lift is the glued in battery - this took a lot of careful prying with thin plastic sheet and dousing it in ipa.
3) backlight is glued on to the case in an extremely fragile way, so it needs to be replaced with the keyboard or will probably look uneven after repair. (i reused the old one as I don't mind it but still, it could just have been glued to the keyboard itself and it would be easier to repair.
Repairability definitely doesn't keep the costs low. If it was cheaper and easier, it wouldn't have to be regulated. As for supply chain management, companies that get that equation correct are going to benefit. Which is exactly how it should be.
We define the rules of the game and companies that can best implement those rules will succeed. That is capitalism.
It won’t self resolve because consumers don’t fully factor in every detail while buying, and they often don’t get such granular choice anyway.
It’s easier and more profitable for companies to make a product that catastrophically fails around about when the new model is out. So that’s what they do. Until just now when the EU is reeling them back in line.
> Does this also mean only using "standard" parts? Or does the manufacturer have to over-produce the parts for, lets say 7 years
Why not? I don't understand how it's legal for manufacturers to produce absolute trash that can't be replaced and will just end up in a landfill. I think 7 years is far from enough, but because computers evolve quickly maybe 15 years is ok. For the rest of electro-mechanical goods, 50 years should be the baseline.
If a car or fridge from 50 years ago is still working with proper maintenance, that should be the minimum to be expected from products released today.
It's much more effective and economically efficient to deal with externalized pollution costs with deposits to incentivize proper disposal.
A ton of normal users will simply never bother to repair their own laptops no matter how easy it is, but you don't even have to recycle your own bottles and cans to see the effectiveness of bottle deposits work. Someone will usually come and recycle them for you in any big city.
> It's much more effective and economically efficient to deal with externalized pollution costs with deposits to incentivize proper disposal.
Or to just mandate devices that doesn't need to be dispose so often.
> A ton of normal users will simply never bother to repair their own laptops no matter how easy it is
Doesn't matter, because simplicity contributes directly to prize and when you can get your existing device fixed for cheaper than getting a new one, you likely will do it.
I already pay a deposit and "recycle" all my electronics. And some recycled electronics are already repaired and repurposed. If that was easier, more electronics would get a second chance at life.
Right now if you have two broken MacBook Neos, one with a broken motherboard and the other with a broken screen, you can make one working MacBook Neo without even needing to solder anything in just the time to takes disassemble both and reassemble one (which has been demonstrated in minutes).
It is a given if someone could have made a superior product in the last 15 years, i.e. more repairable laptop with higher build quality, they would have.
> It is a given if someone could have made a superior product in the last 15 years, i.e. more repairable laptop with higher build quality, they would have.
Most of the PC competitors of the last 15 years have struggled to even come close to achieving similar build quality.
I'm not sure who this mythical competitor could be, who is supposed to not only match unibody aluminium MacBook build quality, but also solve repairability, and come in with a final product that is cheaper?
No, it is certainly possible to come up with an innovation that allows progress.
But the tone I get from discussions about repairability and performance is that it would be trivial to make the device, if only businesses wanted to.
However, given the fact that it hasn’t happened yet from a variety of alternative manufacturers, the probability seems very low that the ideal device is possible with current technology at a price that is viable.
Basically, it is a competitive market (or was), and what won out was what was possible. Barring some leap in technology, it is unrealistic to assume we can do better without suffering tradeoffs.
A lot of the recent car safety features are cameras and ADAS which make it safer for pedestrians. The problem is it makes the car so expensive no one can afford to buy it or to repair it. There needs to be some standards to drive down the cost.
Do you have a source for the cameras and ADAS driving up the cost of the cars dramatically?
The €14k Dacia Sandero ships with camera-assisted emergency braking and lane assist. By the time you get up to a €24k MG 4, you get full level 2 driving. These don't seem like very high price thresholds
Cars have much longer lifecycles that the repurposed consumer technology in the ADAS. A camera module is cheap, but a camera model for this particular make/model/year is outrageously expensive if not unobtanium 10 years later. Theres the famous f150 story where the tail light housing with blind spot monitoring cost $5k.
>> your car can easily hurt a total stranger whereas the consequences of your choice in laptop are strictly personal.
You know that safety for pedestrians is also a very tightly regulated car safety category, right? Obviously, there's not much that can be done if you get hit by a car going 70mph, but the fact that most people should survive a 30mph impact with a modern car is mostly thanks to regulations requiring crumple zones specifically designed to protect pedestrians in a collision. And yeah, there are huge trade offs - I imagine people would generally prefer a car that doesn't need incredibly expensive repairs after a minor collision because everything at the front just crumpled, but then they would be guaranteed to cut off legs of any person hit - it's a trade off.
Not in the US. Specific pedestrian safety features are not included in cars sold there due to lack of regulation.
FMVSS was planning a regulation modelled after ECE R127, then the administration changed and no progress since...
It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.
Or mandate in car cameras that record the driver to a blackbox to determine if the driver’s negligence caused others to be damaged. Also a cheap implementation that would immediately make drivers be more attentive.
>>It would be trivial to limit a car’s speeds in residential and urban areas based on GPS, and that would dramatically decrease risk to people outside of cars.
Only partialy agree. As in - yes I agree in principle, but I don't agree it would be trivial.
My sister had insurance with a black box policy, where everything she did in the car was recorded. And on her drive to work, she would always get a threatening email saying "we've recorded you going 70mph in a 20mph zone, if this continues we will cancel your policy". We had to ring them up and demand the GPS trace, and guess what - at one point she was going on the motorway above a 20mph road, but the system probably just did "what is the speed limit at X/Y coordinates" and was getting 20mph for the nearest road. We've had to do this several times when she had the policy.
My own Volvo XC60 frequently tells me I'm going over the speed limit as it thinks the road I'm on has a 50mph limit when in fact it's 70, and in another place it thinks it's 30 when in fact it's also 70.
Not to mention that the speeds entered on Google Maps are often just wrong and take forever to update. And it's funny when people like Harry Metcalf say that every new car he tests insists that his own private drive has a 20mph limit when obviously there is none. Imagine if you couldn't turn that off!
So yeah, very easy to implement(and it's a great idea!) but in practice it's one of these "looks easy on paper, but in reality it's super hard to do reliably".
> Backseat industrial designing through legislation is not the answer.
Again, why not? It's not mandating design, just minimal standards for repairability that should be obvious. If Framework and Lenovo can do it and Apple can do it on a $600 laptop, why can't everyone do it?
What everyone is missing: Because other manufactures do not have to; the profit margins are too good to give a shit, and they allow some pretty fierce competition within the target demographic:
<soapbox>
Sadly, the general public still just wants the cheapest option to consume their bullshit content, even if it needs to be replaced a year from now after their cat walks on it and causes critical damage.
The MacBook Neo is brilliant in that Apple takes a share of this market with a premium and affordable product that is basically just their previous generation phone, with the expensive bits likely sourced from their exchange program or surplus supply. Products that at some point the same people would've loved to have, but couldn't afford. Now repurposed with a larger screen, sporting the envied Apple logo, at an affordable price, and targeting that same demographic as the hot new thing, just one generation later.
I have a feeling we'll see this pattern continue, and it's genius. Minimizing waste, maximizing profits, and giving the consumers what they want, while maintaining a gap between low-end and high-end -- people that spend $$$$ still want to feel special, of course.
Don't get me wrong, the Neo is great, especially for us hackers, but it is absolutely not meant for us in any way. What is in our favor: it does, at the very least, raise the bar for these other manufactures that product absolute garbage.
</soapbox>
Someone needs to be a reference as to what is feasible in order for a standard to be established. Apple, Framework, and I guess Lenovo are the ones doing this these days. RIP the others.
> Backseat industrial designing through legislation is not the answer.
But it _could_ save us from Lenovo or Dell or any other company copying Apple's design practices (and the latter largely already has), while, as another poster mentioned, not mandating design per se, but rather just setting minimum standards.
I don't understand your math. The 1mm (the wall) was there already, so why is it being counted here? Plus, multiplying by 1 doesn't do anything? Also, the 2mm extra won't be solid plastic (they'll be solid air, since that's why we're adding the extra thickness, for the room.
If anything, the extra material for the case would be the perimeter length times the perimeter wall width times the height.
The post was fixed about 30 seconds after making it - due to the *s being interpreted as italics. It is a shame there isn't a preview button when composing posts.
There's a new field in your profile called delay. It's the time delay in minutes between when you create a comment and when it becomes visible to other people. I added this so that when there are rss feeds for comments, users can, if they want, have some time to edit them before they go out in the feed. Many users edit comments after posting them, so it would be bad if the first draft always got shipped.
Delay is initially 0. The maximum effective value is 10. It only applies to comments.
That may not even be where the devices are most toxic to the environment :\
How about all the energy waste for manufacture of what are "engineered" as effectively disposable components & assemblies in numerous facilities?
Also scattered local emissions, not only at the factories and delivery ships & trucks, but consumers kick up all kinds of exhaust and waste just earning the money to participate in such a scheme. And way more so for short-lived products that are the least bit overpriced compared to how they could be from the same factory.
> You didn't say why this is a bad solution. The government mandates that cars get safer every year and fatalities are down 78% from the 1960s. Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit.
That's widely incorrect. EU mandates some active systems (TC, ABS) and some basic level of physical protection, but majority of gains there have been driven by manufacturers trying to ace eachother in EuroNCAP rating
EU makes sure woefully unsafe car can't be sold, sure, but most of the progress here has been manufacturers, and non-car-related road safety improvements.
The innovations that mattered were seat belts and airbags. After that you have to correct for all the electronic gadgets that also actively distract or make drivers over-confident. Real numbers are not available, but governments keep mandating all kinds of questionable safety features that increase the price of vehicles (and insurance) and reduces competition in the market.
I'll grant you some of the more recent driver-attention monitoring features, but you'd be hard put to make the case that the blind-spot warning during lane changes, the cross-traffic warning when reversing out of a parking space, and the emergency brake when the car in front of you brakes hard, don't all save lives (and, perhaps more relevantly to the industrial players, collision insurance claims)
Those things could save some lives of course, but it's a small drop. And then there's the issue of people trusting on those safety systems and driving more reckless than before.
It also helps not to live in a country where everyone is driving trucks ;)
> The government mandates that cars get safer every year and fatalities are down 78% from the 1960s. Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit.
On some metrics. On affordability, new cars are considerably more expensive. Whether that's a worthwhile tradeoff is beside the point. The GP's point is that there's no free lunch, and your example doesn't address that.
No, they are more nutritious just like that bland protein-shake is. All those cool hot-rods from the 70s will crush you to death easily while wasting more gas to do it.
The fear is that regulations ossify industries and that's why heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years. If you mandate that all electronic devices must have USB-C cables, how can anyone invent something better than a USB-C cable? And for what, so people don't have to have multiple cables? That's not even in the top 100 problems that a government body as large as the EU should be concerned about.
> Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit.
Healthcare, education, transportation, and housing would all be counterexamples depending on how you want to frame "benefit."
> It seems like the Macbook Neo has a lot of those properties as well for a very inexpensive device that is extremely easy to repair.
This is counter to your point, no one regulated that Apple make the MacBook Neo easy to repair. Apple is incentivized to follow the market.
> If you mandate that all electronic devices must have USB-C cables, how can anyone invent something better than a USB-C cable?
That already happened with Micro USB. The EU initially mandated that manufacturers agree on a standard socket, because the absolute zoo of charging ports back then was counter-productive and only generated e-waste. Ultimately they agreed to use Micro USB, but obviously that's not what's used today.
These regulations are not just dumped on the manufacturers - there's a period of consultation and a grace period to implement them. If something actually better came up, you'd eventually see it mandated.
> If something actually better came up, you'd eventually see it mandated.
While I generally am quite content with that particular mandate and it does more good than bad, I would have to disagree on this. Something better doesn't come from nowhere - hell, USB itself has gone through a long and arduous path until it came to the (messy) standard it is today. This is essentially banning any other standard to grow and be improved upon with feedback and iteration.
I don't believe other paths would yield better results.
It took Apple a looong time to adapt USB-C, which was already running circles around Lightning five years after the introduction of the latter. Ironically Apple participated in the development of the standard. They just couldn't be arsed to implement it.
Multinationals don't do anything unless they absolutely have to. Apple notably all but threatened to move out of the EU due to USB-C regulations. They were actively preventing their users from having a better standard because it hurt their bottom line in the field of accessories.
The argument about ossified connectors is obviously made in bad faith, since it obviously didn’t happen. USB-C isn’t the first mandated connector, that was micro-usb. And when the time came to upgrade, the mandate was changed. None of that imagined ossification happened back then, and it won’t happen when we go from USB-C to USB-D or whatever.
> and that's why heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years.
Not to get distracted, but aren't these three all incredible examples of innovation over time? Healthcare alone is significantly better than it was 50 years ago and it's not really close. 50 years ago, this hip new treatment called electroshock therapy was being used to "treat" being gay. It was also within touching distance of getting a lobotomy for depression or anything else your husband thought was a problem.
The rates of depression in the US are at an all time high [1]. The primary theory behind the cause of depression and mechanism of most antidepressants has been abandoned [2]. Not treating homosexuality as a disease isn't an innovation, it's a cultural change.
You could maybe argue mRNA vaccines or semaglutides are big innovations, I think we've made a ton of progress against HIV, and it seems like we've made progress against cancer, but when you factor in how much government money goes into this research and compare it against the advancements we've seen in computational technology it's a lot less impressive. You could buy a raspberry pi for like $50 today that outperforms every computer made 50 years ago, whereas the cost of most medical imaging has actually increased [3]. Likewise the inflation adjusted cost of college degrees and building new rail lines or really any infrastructure has increased precipitously since 1970.
Age verification just requires that one be able to provide an age when setting up an account. Like, for example, when you setup an account for your child on the device. This doesn't seem to require any sort of online account requirement as far as I understand it.
It doesn't really matter anymore. When .NET 10 is done, there will be .NET 12 and all your apps will run just fine on it.
.NET framework used to get new versions as well; it's just that it's not anymore. After moving on to newer versions, .NET framework feels clunky now. Also you end up missing out on a decade of new libraries.
> Why wouldn't you program a GUI with a GUI if one is available? Avoiding the use of WYSIWYG editors when making GUIs is like avoiding the use of musical instruments when writing songs.
I've been a developer for a long time; I've built pretty large applications in all sorts of technologies and I now just prefer defining GUIs using text. Having a live GUI preview is great but actually dragging and dropping stuff is not more efficient to me.
To fit your analogy, using source code is like writing a song using musical notation. I'll write the song, then play it, and then go back to notation to fix it or expand on it.
If your business runs on some obscure piece of software for which updates are neither cheap or easy, you're not going to buy Windows if it doesn't run that software.
Name and shame doesn't work because the developer isn't part of the transaction.
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