I wanna meet the engineer who designs devices to do this kind of thing. Like the people who work for apple and deliberately create proprietary interfaces and closed systems. Planned obsolescence. Machines that can’t be reused and end up in landfill. These people have received a technical education. Isn’t this way of creating technology obviously unsustainable to a highly educated person?
I’m wondering the same when I’m watching disassembly videos. So much of that stuff is obviously deliberately made to be unrepairable. Like charging ports soldered onto the motherboard. Never mind glued in batteries that you almost can’t replace without destroying the screen. Soft screws that fall apart. And little details too, like layouts pointlessly changing with every model so you can’t use your knowledge from a year ago, or use the same parts even for the most trivial things.
No sane designer can desire that.
It comes from the top. CEOs, marketing, sales. Sell more shit. Convince people to buy more shit by inconveniencing them.
It’s the only way that makes any sense. Some machines are designed for profit and profit alone. That is the legal obligation of a corporation. Some of the choices I’ve noticed even seem to go beyond profit and are anti-people. I was creating a wireless access point to extend a home network. Found a British Telecom router, seemed ideal. The firmware was locked out for use with BT only. Raspberry pi, on the other hand, configured in minutes for the task. RPI is a good example of how to design a sustainable machine. I believe they still make profit but it hasn’t interfered with their ethical compass.
I have to admit, I do hate the “companies need to make money” argument. It’s true of course, but the other half is that customers need to get a good product.
Unfortunately people aren’t smart customers. We’ve even happily accepted the “consumer” designation instead. And that really says everything.
If customers won’t stop buying products that are deliberately designed to fuck with them, then that’s what the companies will do. It’s a downhill slope too, like with the batteries example.
You give company a finger because “it needs to make money” or you just don’t care enough, they’ll take the whole arm.
It’s okay for companies to make money. But the problem right now is that simply making profit isn’t acceptable for shareholders. You need to make the maximum profit possible and keep it growing.
So here we are right now with subscription based printer.
Yea, and what I mean is that customers should reject this crap and not buy such products. But we know that only a few actually care, most will just get dragged along, and eventually they’ll wear us down and subscription ink and whatever other nonsense will be normalised.
It’s always like that. Look how hard have videogames devolved into just being monetisation schemes in the last couple years.
Totally agree. The solution is a mix of factors. Customers should understand what they are getting into when they buy something. Part of that is general education level but also product information. Regulations are a last resort and a necessary evil. A good example is the fight against producers of farm machinery. Farmers tend to maintain their machines DIY but the manufacturers are producing machines that cannot be maintained except at great cost by the dealerships. This came to court in the form of a ‘right to repair’ campaign and who should turn up at the hearings? The undisputed champion and final boss of closed, proprietary systems, Apple.
If these damned companies would stop relying on this stupid sub model and just offer decent products at a decent price and not worry about neverending growth, this wouldn’t be a fucking problem. God I hate the way shit is going.
My mother bought this HP shit behind my back and asked me to install it. Even though I work in IT in a publicly listed corporation, I fucking couldn't do it without creating any accounts. I asked her to return that shit.
Some time ago I borrowed a HP scanner from a friend. It was a big old thing, probably from the early 2000’s. The driver package was about a gigabyte of all kinds of bloatware, absolutely incredible. I extracted the two driver files I needed, worked without a problem.
Can’t imagine the crap this stuff has to come with now.
Assuming I don’t want to buy an Epson printer from the late 90s, what are some actual options for DRM free no subscription printer? Or the entire industry is fucked?
Brother might be the best there is, but I still had issues with ink continually drying out. Check with your local library. Mine allows me to print more pages than I need each day for free; I just bring a thumb drive with me out there. Considering how much clutter I avoid at home, it’s preferred in my case.
my canon mf3010 lazer printer pretty decent i guess.
i mean it works, even with linux and even my phone over an usb otg adapter, scanner is a but quirky and hard to get working in windows
it got no bullshit like wifi and stuff
The battery life (on mine at least) was bad. The saucer part (which is the charger) broke on me twice. The pogo pins that connect to the contact ring on the bottom of the mug broke. It was often a crapshoot whether the mug would connect with the app on my phone.Which was a pain in the ass to have to use the app all the time to make changes to the temp (or see what temp you were at) and I actually discovered the I like the way the flavor and of coffee (and especially tea) change gradually as they cool (this isn’t a fault of the mug of course) and having the liquid always be hot robs you of that gradual flavor change (especially with tea). I also found the coffee to have a strong cooked flavor if you had to walk away and stop drinking it for a while. I also found it annoying to have to hand wash the mug every day (instead of throwing it in the dishwasher and grabbing a new one). And at the end of the day, since it was a corded object. You always had, at the very least, a saucer with a cable coming out of it running across your desk whether you were wanting to use the mug or not.
TL;DR; it’s a fun novelty, but so much more hassle than just using a normal coffee cup. Also, had some quality issues with mine.
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