A notable exception to the trend of poor/unknown quality in consumer products is the outdoor product market. I buy a lot of gear for skiing, canyoneering, climbing, cycling, backpacking, and other sports. In these sports, the safety and functionality of gear is critical. And you spend enough time using and evaluating the gear that many (if not most) users become experts. Perhaps this type of market is the exception that proves the rule.
> Signaling, however, grows stronger the larger the out-group is – as long as the out-group knows about the in-group. This is why luxury car manufacturers deliberately extend their advertising campaigns to people who will never be able to afford their cars: they are increasing the size of the out-group by educating people about the in-group.
I assumed that car advertisements were only targeted at those who might possibly buy the car. I didn't think that car advertisements could be "educational material" about how cool your friend/acquaintance is for driving this car.
I recently switched from Android to iOS just for iMessage. SMS is quite unreliable even in 2023. SMS messages don't have the same delivery guarantees as IP-based messaging services. And often I have internet access, but spotty cellular service. The thing that pushed me over the edge was that my carrier happened to block all my SMS for a day. I only found out about it later in the day, after I had missed many (unrecoverable) messages. To avoid this, I could either blindly trust some other carrier, or use IP-based messaging. In my area, all my friends use iMessage. Ideally, people would use Telegram, WhatsApp, or even Matrix, but they don't. It's not uncommon to leave someone out of a group chat just because they don't have iMessage--the alternative is a subpar MMS experience. At some point, I'll probably buy a cheap Mac Mini and run BlueBubbles, but for now it's nice to not have to worry about messaging reliability, and I get the added bonus of being able to Facetime my family members, who all use iOS.
As a European living in the US, it's been baffling to me. Everywhere else in the world people use WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc. This iMessage green/blue bubble nonsense just isn't a thing outside the US.
My understanding is that unlimited SMS text messages have basically been included free with cellphone plans in the US for a very long time while that's generally still not the case in Europe. So there hasn't been a need to find a cheaper way to send messages.
Apple has 56% of the US market compared to just 36% in the EU, afaik the number gets even higher as you go younger so the clique-iness is a lot stronger.
I mean, isn't this just trading one bad monopoly for another? It's weird to me that everyone's like "oh, the backwards US where they gave in to the Apple monopoly. We enlightened rest of the world use Facebook's Whatsapp like real free people".
FaceTime is the real lock-in service for me. I use it for all my video and most of my audio calls, it’s second to none in terms of reliability and quality. I wish that was accessible from my work laptop!
I don't understand, why don't you force them to use Whatsapp (or Signal, or whatever) to contact you? Get an app that rejects by default SMSes coming from certain numbers. They want to text you at all? They need to use Whatsapp, otherwise they can go fuck themselves. (It worked for me when a friend wanted to force me to contact him on Telegram rather than Whatsapp- I resisted for weeks but at the end I gave in).
Once you automatically reject SMSes from those contacts, such that you don’t even know they're trying to contact you, the ball is entirely in their park to take action.
Yes, it's a legitimate question. If you wanted to keep up with a friend from Japan, would you not install LINE to talk to them (or them installing Whatsapp or Discord, or whatever you are using)?
And it's not like there' some gigantic combinatorial explosion of apps you have to install. The vast majority of messaging around the world is about 5 apps. Facebook's Messager, Wechat, Instagram, Whatsapp, Discord. Between these, you'll reach the vast majority of the world's population somehow. And then you'll need one or two more locally-used ones like LINE or KakaoTalk depending who you're talking to.
No one? I did. Normal, if you really care about that guy. In any case, the app is free, what does it cost you? Plus, the more people do it, the easier is for everyone to move to an app that works for everyone.
Sounds like you'd prefer to keep inflicting to me and to yourself a degraded experience rather than making the tiny, one-time effort of installing a free app. Because that's the whole point of this issue: the fact that you can still get what you want (reaching me) is what prevents you from making the smallest effort to make both our lives better and easier. And I also don't expect my friends to behave like that.
I was just thinking of doing this myself. I'm hoping Apple doesn't shut it down. I recently switched to an iPhone because all of my friends use iMessage (I'm in the US). I'm not happy about having to switch, but it's how they choose to communicate and it's a heck of a lot better than SMS/MMS. I'm planning to buy a used Mac Mini and connect it to some messaging gateway or build my own. Then I can use whatever phone I want (used to be a pinephone user).
Look up BlueBubbles. It’s pretty easy to setup a server on a Mac with almost all the features. It’s how I get iMessage on my work laptop (linux), so I don’t have to pull out my phone when my wife messages at work.
I use Arch on my Pinephone (https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch) and I have used it for the last year. Call audio quality (outgoing) is very poor for me (I think I need to configure ALSA or something). SMS and MMS now work well. Web browsing works. Everything is quite slow (2-10 second delay to open calls/messages/web browser).
Previously I used SXMO and Mobian. SXMO is fun to script. I got tired of having to script everything after a while. Mobian works out of the box. But they don't have the newest software, so I switched to Arch.
I use US Mobile (https://www.usmobile.com). They're an MVNO on the T-Mobile and Verizon networks. I use their T-Mobile offering because I couldn't get MMS to work on Verizon. To fetch MMS, I use the T-Mobile APN (fast.t-mobile.com) instead of US Mobile's APN.
Would it be possible to create a business where you:
* Buy the cheap hardware at wholesale prices
* Strip the surveillance tech and/or re-flash the firmware
* Sell the "dumb" product for the same price as the "smart" one
In this case, the "smart" vendor would likely lose money if they're selling below cost. So the only difficulty would be a legal one... I'm not sure if it's legal to buy a product, modify it, and then re-sell it.
I feel certain there was a court case about this, but can't remember it. It's similar to the company that re-sold edited versions of popular movies.
Doing this as a sale, for electronics, you'd probably fall afoul of certification problems (e.g. whatever boxes Underwriters Lab had ticked wouldn't apply to the modified version). There would be branding issues. And regardless of whether it turned out to be legal, you'd 100% draw a lawsuit from the original manufacturer.
If it were to work out at all, this would probably have to be done in a way that (legally at least) the customer is not buying the device modified from you. They would have to purchase the device first, then bring it to you to modify, for which you charge a fee. Even then you'd probably still get sued.
Not a lawyer, though, so this is just speculation based on following tech over the years.
