Because most office workers outside of hardcore techies have no need for full-on computers at home since they can have most of their on-line needs met on mobile devices which can be used one handed on the couch, bed, kitchen, etc. so it makes no sense for them in investing in furniture and peripherals that will stay unused.
The only sales you can control are the ones that happen in your own country. I'm sure you can buy seat belts from Ali Baba at a fraction of the price, they'll probably be hilariously non-compliant to your country's safety standards, whether or not they work can be modeled by a fair dice roll, and I'm sure your insurer will deny any claims you make after installing them. But you can certainly buy them.
It's likely that if you literally fly out, buy them, pack them in a suitcase and fly home they'd make it, but if you try to buy a crate of obviously non-compliant Product X and it arrives at a port there's a reasonable chance somebody says "This Product X is non-compliant, so, why the hell is that here?" and you're not going to receive it.
You might think well, surely they don't look in most crates. And they don't. They don't look in the forty identical crates of compliant seatbelts going to Ford, because why would Ford be like "Hey, let's order 39 crates of complaint ones, but order 40 crates with #8 non-compliant to kill a few customers as a joke" ?
They're going to look in your crate because you never ordered any crates of seatbelts before, and "Bo Yang Belts" never sent anybody in your country a crate of anything before. Because their products aren't compliant to anybody's standards and so you're their first foreign sale.
But actually you may never even get to buy them. The huge first world economies like the EU and US order such enormous volumes of stuff and require compliance to their standards that it just often doesn't make sense to make Product A for them and then also Product B that's much worse but a bit cheaper for domestic use. I wouldn't like to guess if seatbelts are such a product.
Your answer seems logical but it is a real problem, see this article about Amazon repeatedly called out for selling deathtrap infant seats:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51497010. They really do exist and really do make it across the fairly strict borders in the UK regularly.
Because technology progresses faster than laws and by the time the laws catch up there are already powerful corporations established based on the lack of those laws.
For example its an obvious public and environmental benefit to require that all phones have a user replaceable battery but until recently they almost all did and now it's too late because every phone maker would lobby against it.
> Because technology progresses faster than laws and by the time the laws catch up there are already powerful corporations established based on the lack of those laws.
I see another aspect of this. Societies have allowed tech companies to run unregulated in a trader-off between safety and technological advance.
Medical equipment, cars or planes are examples were regulations were put in place as safety failures have more dangerous consequences.
As devices are more ubiquitous and the economy and lives depend more on them, further regulation will be pushed forward.
> and now it's too late because every phone maker would lobby against it.
I agree that will take political will to regulate the tech industry. But, in the same way that phone manufacturers do not want replaceable batteries the rest of industries will see their costs reduced by such a regulation. So, there is also opposing forces that want big tech to play nicer with the rest of the industry ecosystem. And, in democratic countries, population will also push for change as their lives are disrupted by the lack of regulation.
Wouldn't that also have precedence in the history of the automobile? Pretty much a free-for-all while development was advancing fast, large & powerful corporations dominating the industry and good chunks of the economy - and then a Ralph Nader[0] comes along and at the right place and the right time with the right tenacity, things change.
It's not difficult to fix. It's just that corporations want you to throw out and buy a new phone every year. This is what happens when you let the same company make the software and the hardware.
> This is what happens when you let the same company make the software and the hardware.
Not sure that follows, it seems a quite Android-centric view? (Which I guess is valid in the context of this discussion...)
Apple do a remarkably good job (in my opinion) of providing software/security updates to older iOS devices. iPhones as old as an SE or 6S are still getting current versions of iOS.
I have a _much_ harder time keeping similar aged Android devices up to date (My Galaxy S6Edge has been stuck on Android 7 forever. I'd need to root it and install a 3rd party ROM to upgrade it. I haven't done that because I use it still as a mobile app test device, and I don't personally "trust" not stock OS installations to be particularly valid test devices for work apps...)
