Microwaves are a bad example. The cheaper ones are white labels basically all made in the same factory in China. The customer has no way to know if the slightly more expensive one is actually more durable or, much more likely, just the same, but generates more profit for the intermediaries. In this situation it is wiser to get the cheaper one.
Consumers have no way to tell that a phone gives "privacy" or even to understand the implications of that to their life. They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"
> Consumers have no way to tell that a phone gives "privacy" or even to understand the implications of that to their life.
This is the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.
The reason that doesn't work for white label microwaves is that the manufacturers don't want it to. The off brands exist so they can make sales to people who prioritize price, and they purposely change the company name every month so no one can find a review of the off brand and the same company can sell the same microwave with a higher margin to other people who will pay more for the name brand.
Whereas when your company makes a phone with better privacy etc., you want everybody to know that so they buy your phone instead of a competitor's.
> They have a significantly easier time understanding an error message that says "because your device has an unlocked bootloader, you can't use the <name of bank> app"
Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one. (It's actually a pretty decent red flag that your bank has a cargo cult security team.)
> This is obviously false. It's the sort of thing anyone can look up on the internet before buying one.
It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".
This Motorola thing has (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".
Consumers don't understand and they don't care. Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.
How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?
> Indeed, it immediately lets them know that their bank sucks and they need a better one.
If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.
> It's not something that's quantifiable, and it's easily manipulable. The iPhone(tm) has a twelth-generation quantum superconducting wonderflonium chip that enables (pile of technobabble garbage) and "privacy".
That's the marketing noise from the company itself. Then you go to Reddit or similar and ask technically competent people what they recommend.
> Even the ones with technologically savvy friends don't want the hassle, they want something that works.
The phone that supports open operating systems is the one that's less of a hassle. It doesn't go out of support even though there's nothing wrong with it, it isn't full of spyware and weird bugs because people can actually fix them when the OEM doesn't, it has a working ad blocker etc.
> How has 30 years of "Microsoft is anti-consumer and <pile of complaints>, you should use Linux" worked out for consumer market share?
Windows market share was >90%, now it's 67% and still falling. And that's just desktops; Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated. By most accounts Windows Phone was actually decent but being from the notorious company whose OS nobody uses unless they're locked in was a death sentence.
> If you think even 0.1% of consumers would switch banks to buy some new phone, this conversation is not worth continuing as you and I don't live in the same reality.
You're not switching banks to buy a new phone, you're switching banks because when you bought a new phone it made you realize that your bank sucks. Which annoyed you enough to spend five minutes checking out other banks, at which point you realized there are credit unions that not only support your new phone but pay better interest rates and charge lower fees.
Then you remember that time when they charged you that fee for some BS reason last year and you swore you were going to get a new bank but never got around to it, and decide that you'd rather get on with what you always intended to do sooner rather than later instead of replacing your new phone that you otherwise like.
>Microsoft was completely abandoned in the mobile market because they were so widely hated.
This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps. They didn't have apps because they rewrote between Windows Mobile 6 and WP7, and rewrote between WP7 and WP8, and rewrote between between WP8.1 and WP10. That's a lot of work for developers and they didn't have enough users to justify developers rewriting their apps that many times. Combine that with some companies refusing to build apps at all (YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client) and users didn't want to put up with the lack of apps either.
> This was not a factor. Windows phone lost because they didn't have apps.
They didn't have apps because nobody likes them. If you're a user and you expect them to be well-liked then you buy the phone expecting others to buy the phone and developers to target it. If you're a developer then you make apps expecting enough users to buy the phone.
But if you don't like them and you're not sure anybody else is going to like them then you play wait and see instead, and so does everybody else, and so they have no apps and no users and people start to see that they have no apps and no users.
Which is why they kept changing things trying to force people to do it, giving Windows 8 that widely-disliked tablet interface on desktops etc.
> YouTube refused to write an app and sued to block Microsoft from writing their own YouTube client
Oh no, did someone with a dominant OS market share do an anti-competitive thing to Microsoft?
You're asking why people don't pick up Linux faster but you can see the symmetry when it's going the other way. It's not that they don't want to, it's that 80% of enshitification is lock-in.
Motorola omitted a magnetometer in some of their models. This was especially heinous as the "compass needle" can be emulated to some degree by fusion if gps and rotation/acceleration sensors, so the user wouldn't immediately notice the total lack of a compass.
Since then I am always wary of what seemingly essential part of a phone they will omit this time...
In fact Motorola did the opposite: they recently announced that in their opinion they found a loophole in the EU ecodesign regulation that they will exploit in order to not provide updates for some of their cheaper phone models.
After that, why would anyone trust any of their promises for other models?
I looked into this and it seems like Motorola is coming up with a contrived interpretation of the ecodesign regulation (EU reg. 2023/1670, annex II, "Design for reliability").
Specifically they seem to be interpreting this to mean that they only need to make the update available (i.e. downloadable) for 5 years iff they release an update.
> (a) from the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system;
However recital 7 makes the intent crystal clear:
> It is currently not possible, or extremely difficult, for the owners of mobile phones, including smartphones, and tablets to change the operating system of their device, which is chosen and maintained by the manufacturer through regular updates. Such updates generally lead to the establishment of a range of major and minor versions. Updates may be used to ensure the continued security of a device, to correct errors in the operating system or to offer new functionalities to users. They may be offered voluntarily or might be required to be offered by Union law.
> In order to improve the reliability of devices, therefore, it needs to be ensured that users keep receiving such updates for a minimum period of time and at no cost, including for a period after the manufacturer stops selling the relevant product model. Such updates should be offered either as updates to the latest available operating system version that has to be installable on the device, or as updates to the operating system version that was installed on the product model at the moment of the end of placement on the market, or subsequent versions.
They're not getting any points for this, it's anti-consumer and makes a mockery of the law, but I don't think it's an actual loophole and they'll be punished for it if they don't comply.
However all other OEMs are acting equally poorly in other areas so this really shouldn't be the reason for anyone to pass on GOS-powered Motorola devices, especially since this is the one area that's ~guaranteed to be completely different in partnership with GrapheneOS.
Motorola Signature (2026) has 7 years of support. It's a subset of Motorola's future devices in 2027 and later which are going to support GrapheneOS since the current ones in 2026 didn't quite meet all of the requirements yet. The intent has never been to support their existing devices but rather for future devices to provide everything needed and official GrapheneOS support. There's a lot of work to do. Meeting all of our requirements on low-end devices is currently unrealistic but can be a goal further down the road.
Motorola, the one company that still tries to evade the EU ecodesign regulations?
Other vendors just provide the required 5+ years of updates, but Motorola loudly and publicity announced that they saw a loophole in the wording and would use it as an excuse to not provide updates for some models.
This is despicable and worthy of a boycott.
"Operating system updates: From the date of end of placement on the market to at least 5 years after that date, manufacturers, importers, or authorised representatives shall, if they provide security updates, corrective updates, or functionality updates to an operating system, make such updates available at no cost for all units of a product model with the same operating system."
Motorola has committed to 7 years of support for the 2026 variants of the devices which will provide GrapheneOS support in 2027. There's still a lot of work to do in order to meet the GrapheneOS hardware requirements and there isn't going to be support for the existing devices. The whole point is they're working with us to improve their updates and hardware-based security features so that all our requirements are met. The stock OS is also a different thing than the official GrapheneOS support where we'll be making builds with their help. We'll be continuing to provide security preview patches and intend to move to newer kernel LTS branches than Qualcomm if they don't do it themselves.
GrapheneOS won't have to use their stock OS to get firmware, etc. as we do for Pixels.
Unfortunately not. They will use even the most privacy preserving protocol to push remote attestation of end devices. Which in itself is a stepping stone making their next steps much easier.
They actually already do in the EUDI wallet reference implementation. There, as this is part of a more general ID system, they probably want to avoid that people duplicate or export IDs.
In case of a privacy preserving age check, the fear could be that a copied private key could be enough to generate unlimited age proofs, indistinguishable from the original app instance.
In another thread someone gave an even lazier argument: the eudi wallet requires hw backed keys by law regardless, and the laziest implementation would be device attestation...
Why would I allow a government to tell me which devices I own can or cannot be approved? People have a short memory of history. Government works for the people, not the other way around.
It is not at all like TLS. With TLS you at least can get your own certificate signed by an official CA, and use that private key on whatever system you want.
It is literally TLS in a trench coat with some json sprinkled on top.
Where I think we are not in agreement the question of "who to trust" and "for what purposes".
Are you going to trust me when I tell you that I'm over 18 if I provide you with the document signed by my cousin, Honest Ahmed?
Are you going to trust me when I show you the document signed by my government?
(this is the trick question, you don't have a choice, law says you must; there's a list of who you need to trust and for what purposes; like a certificate root store in your browser)
You forgot to mention the additional remote attestation shackles you put on that trenchcoat.
Note that I - as opposed to the posts parent - used an official trusted CA as an example.
TLS: I see your ID with some governments signature in your hand, I trust you to be you.
EUDI: I see a note you wrote and I see some signed documents that you have just been to the government brain scanner, which attests you are not faking that note, and as a nice side effect the scanner scans other things in your brain, e.g. that you watch every advert diligently, send your current location regularly to your local police office and other things.
The problem is you are not creating a government issued single purpose device but you are confiscating something many user experience as a brain extension to be under the government's control as a whole.
Now your EU government requires you to have an unmodified Google or Apple device to use any age restricted services. Cementing the US mobile OS duopoly and locking out any free systems and desktop etc. forever.
Any governmental service taking part in this is a violation of civil rights and even if you don't care about those, maybe you care about digital sovereignty.
This is so lightly handwaved away, almost as if attention needs to be drawn away. By the looks of this I'd say the end of general computing might be the actual goal, and all the age verification is just yet another "think of the children" pretense?
On Linux it is even worse: there is apparently no USB dongle that would support isochronous audio and recent enough BLE versions. Only some very limited selection of newer PCIe Wi-Fi cards.
That dongle has its own Bluetooth stack and is exposing a standard audio device via USB.
Indeed that currently seems to be the only way, but then the stack need config input somehow, which in case of this one requires a proprietary Win/Mac Software.
I would agree of there was a choice or actual free market. But there isn't, and your argument is fundamentally flawed. Because there often is no actual choice, the options are artificially restricted. Starting with, many phones cannot be rooted. Then, if you can root, multiple functions are suddenly unavailable, not because of a fundamental technical problem, but because Google, the phone OEM or the app dev decided to not give you the options you wanted.
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