Then a company can decide if they're in the business of licencing or selling, and make their decisions accordingly. it could also help establish a line between ownership of the device vs of the license.

Would be nice is somebody like the EU at least required a user replacable battery. Seems insane to replace a top spec phone made out of aluminum and glass just because a battery has died.

Imagine if cars (starting at only 10-12 times as expensive) were thrown away when they needed an oil change. They would last just about as long as phones do.

Activation lock caused something like a sustained 50% drop in phone thefts the year it was implemented. Before that, stealing phones was starting to look like stealing shoes in the 90's. It even had its own slang, "apple picking".

MAKE IT A CAMPAIGN ISSUE!

I care about repairing my stuff, and avoid buying anything that is intentionally designed to being unrepairable. I've specifically not bought any Apple product because of that.

This is weird for me because I've always been able to reliably do my own repairs, even on my previous MacBook Pro. To now realize that my Surface is worthless unless I'm still barely within the warranty period is unsettling.

It's my damn phone!

I think its a salient point that the same companies opposed to or abusing copy left are the same ones locking users out from hardware repairs.

Back in 2012, Toshiba told laptop repair tech Tim Hicks that he needed to remove 300 PDFs of Toshiba’s official repair manuals from his website, where he was offering the information for free. To avoid being sued, Hicks complied, and now fewer people have the guidance they need to repair Toshiba laptops.

Of course, you can still find the manuals if you know where to look, and even complete schematics --- no doubt leaked by those in the far East who actually have access. There's always been an underground repair movement, sharing manuals and other information and reverse-engineering as necessary[1][2]; but that's getting rarer as things get more "secure", and the sites themselves being DMCA'd or otherwise taken down. Perhaps LibGen/SciHub could start a subsidiary specifically for hosting such leaked/"samizdat" repair information, given how they seem to be staying alive despite copyright...

[1] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=446

[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=1970

So even if companies made every little detail about the internals of the product public, it's gonna be of not much use to repair today's cellphones that are held together essentially by glue.

I understand what the EFF is trying to say, but frankly, consumers have chosen with their wallets on this one.

I don't like it, but ultimately I can see our disposable consumer culture really manifested through this situation. Most commercial-off-the-shelf components are not made to last for time to market, material and cost reasons. If they were, the pace of technological development might decrease and cost would probably increase.

Sometimes I wonder if we have progressed "enough" technologically to step back and use the power we have to build some long term support/sustainable technology infrastructure. Yet I fear unless our hand is forced, we will persist in the current trends of using a lot of energy and raw material to produce something that doesn't last long enough, and then sell "recycling" as the solution.

Can the recycling chain really make up for all the energy, and activity consumed and pollution/byproducts produced throughout the process?

Sometimes I wonder if we spent more time on modular, upgradeable designs, long term support components, etc. we might fair better. Easier said than done? Sustainable engineering/manufacturing is a complex, emerging science.

Still, obsolescence is a many headed hydra, whether you do long term support or planned obsolescence. I don't see any easy answers but I'm looking!

Devices that are rooted will not fail to attest via the API. Devices where the user has chosen to install a custom ROM will fail to attest (even with a locked bootloader and no root). Apps from Google Play can use these APIs to decide whether to work on a user's device.

This is macOS SIP taken to a different level. You can't watch Netflix and whatever other app decides to use these APIs unless Google has complete control over your device, including the ability to remotely collect and transmit opaque and arbitrary data at any time. This is a dishonest attempt to disguise a draconian DRM scheme as pro-user, pro-safety, anti-virus/rootkit. We're at the point where you don't even own your own filesystem anymore on a Linux device. I think this is a step beyond traditional DRM, including traditional hardware content protection.

[1] https://developer.android.com/training/safetynet/attestation... [2] https://koz.io/inside-safetynet/

"When you buy such a machine, the hardware becomes yours. But if you ask manufacturers, theyll say that the software inside still belongs to them."

Apple's strategy has been to make repair difficult by restricting information and access to parts.

They can send C&D letters to anyone who publishes information about repair.

But what about users, who are not publishing information about repair?

Apple cannot send C&D letters to users, who are free to use the hardware however they wish.

Apple may have IP covering manufacture and modifications to the hardware, they may have IP covering information about the hardware, but they have no IP on the use of the hardware that they could assert against users.

However because users rely on Apple-controlled software, Apple could manipulate the use of the device via automatic software updates. And that is exactly what they did.

The solution for the user is to select hardware that allows users to install their own choice of open source software instead of giving away control over the hardware to a corporation via corporate-controlled software and "automatic updates".

Consumers don't keep track of every little law or right, and must rely on intuition to guide their sense. Ignorance of the law is a most forgivable excuse to forgetting you have some right or protection in the first place, and a "license to use" breaks a lot of citizens understanding of their legal relationship to the goods they acquired from the market, and the kind of protections their society offers them.

Most citizens don't imagine that they cannot repair or break apart their Ikea furniture. Of course I'm not saying that ordinary people want to break open their phones or laptops, but they may want to take it to a repair shop.

Somehow people think they have the right to buy the brand they like. But this is not how the market works. You can always choose not to buy it.

Don't like how Apple solders everything to the main board and glues the screen glass to the body? Just don't buy Apple.

But this can be a difficult decision because of things like 'status', vendor lock in, greed, and what not.

The feeling that you can't live without Apple, Facebook, Android, Instagram, and so on, is a strange thing. And it's one of the things I don't like about todays society.

And will the manufactures open up their TV OSes to allow 3rd parties to offer support. Of course not, but they will helpfully let you know how great their new TVs are.

However, I think modern phones will suffer other issues before the battery dies.

I'm not going to install some random piece of closed source software that couldn't make it through Apple's review process. No I'm not treating my phone differently than my computer. I have no random software on my computer from untrusted sources. I even bought my last Dell from the Microsoft store so I wouldn't have random crapware on it.

And one of the reasons for GPLv3: the anti-tivoisation clause. You should be allowed to install modified software in your own devices.

People have misconstrued anti-tivoisation that to mean that Apple can't keep malware out of your iPhone by key signatures, but that's not what it means, nor was it the primary reason why Apple wanted to prevent their users from installing unsigned software. It's about giving control to users and giving them both the key and the lock and letting them decide what goes on their own machines. Trying to paternalistically tell users what they can and cannot install has culminated in a method of control for repairs and obsolescence.

I'm extremely skeptical about that. Can you post sources?

And why do you say that these proposals are not compatible with Activation Lock-style schemes?

Unfortunately the first part of the copyright bargain is implicit, not part of the law. With DRM, rightsholders get to have their cake -- our cake -- and eat it too. Not only is the protection granted by copyright now effectively perpetual, but they've purchased additional legislation such as the DMCA and endless copyright term extensions that punish people who are trying to claim their half of the bargain.

IMHO copyright should not apply to anything with DRM. Rightsholders should be forced to decide whether they want a temporary legal monopoly with no technical protection, or a permanent technical monopoly with no legal protection.

Correction: it should be your damn phone. As it stands, it's their damn phone; they're merely being gracious enough to let you use it in the limits they prescribe. And you're paying for the privilege!

My old 1st gen iPad fared a little better - you can still download "the last compatible version" of apps and use many of the streaming apps but it's crash prone trying to display complicated web pages.

Sooner or later smart phone advancement will get to the point where computers are now - a 10 year old computer * can run most modern non game software but we aren't there yet.

Neither of my old iOS devices needed "repairs". While I had long since abandoned my iPod Touch, I just replaced my first gen iPad as a PDF/Ebook reader with a 2017 iPad.

* My parents still use my 2006 era Core Duo 1.66 Mac Mini with Windows 7 and my current Plex Server is 2008 Dell Laptop 2.66Ghz Core 2 Duo running Windows 10.

Apple will say it is necessary to make it as thin and efficient as possible. But that has a smell to it. My Dell XPS 15 9550 can be easily serviced : the SDD, Memory, wifi card and battery are all accessible and it doesn't sacrifice (much) thinness or weight to accomplish.

I sometimes wonder if the customer would be OK with Macbooks being 1mm thicker with user replaceable parts. There is only so thin you can go... If Apple wants claim to tell a sustainability story or to be "green" this planned obsolescence stuff needs to go.

The article was written by Kyle Wiens (from iFixit) and Gay Gordon-Byrne (from Repair.org ). It might not represent the opinions of IEEE Spectrum (the magazine which published the article).

Do you have a link or references to the 'pro DRM' or 'anti-consumer' stance of the IEEE? As an IEEE Member, I would like to know about such things about the organisation.

An example: If I’m Apple and I’m supply constrained on fancy new FaceID sensors I’m not going to want to loose an iPhoneX sale because I have to make a sensor available to a repair depot (internal or external). And the customer that was supposed to get that sensor is not going to like waiting even longer for their phone.

I think those stats sound fishy, but even if they aren't... Activation Lock came around the same time as the Smartphone Theft Prevention Act [0], which probably accounts much more for such a stunning decrease.

[0] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/113/hr4065/text

[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/

2. powerful

3. with options

4. easy to work on without special (possibly custom) equipment

choose two

DRM? Then you have to provide clients, including bugfixes and security upgrades for all paying customers on all platforms.

No DRM: Oh, you just sold a file? The customer can then run it in whatever SW they want.

Why do they think it is necessary?

How does that apply to the John Deere tractors or your next car?

I would love to build and maintain my own PC, but I assume that Intel Management Engine (ME) or the equivilent is going to come with the CPU for the PC I build.

There are plenty of situations where we do not simply let the default selection made by consumers stand, because often that choice is suboptimal or intensely shortsighted. Particularly when economies of scale often push the preferences of a small number of early-adopter consumers onto the rest of the market, whether they have the same preferences or not.

More generally, expecting a consumer operating with very limited information, limited time, and limited interest and incentives, to make a purchasing decision that may have substantial unaccounted (and unpriced!) externalities is foolish.

We should stop treating the consumer's off-the-cuff decision of what to purchase as holy writ, given the many examples of consumers happily trading away the "right" to purchase shitty products in an unregulated market for higher quality products in a regulated one.

Is anyone actually crying out for thinner devices? Or do we just keep getting them foist upon us as the result of some pointless thin-ness arms race manufacturers have gotten themselves into.

I strongly suspect it's the latter: we keep buying thinner (and this is wrongly perceived as demand for thinner devices) because the only options we get are for thinner devices.

How so? Maybe I'm misunderstanding but Activation Lock is tied to the Logic Board as far as I know. You wouldn't replace individual parts on your Logic Board. Everything else can be perfectly replaced without interfering in todays' iPhones. Even the Touch ID Sensor.

I would personally _love_ if we could get proprietary software to become illegal (or for there to be some sort of disincentive such as taxing proprietary software, or enforcing and extending warranties on proprietary software). But large proprietary software companies hold such sway in politics that hoping for that doesn't really help. It would be a much better idea to simply stop buying their crap, and helping others around you "break the shackles" (as it were). Digital Restrictions Management is something that I always mention when people talk about Netflix or other such streaming services -- because once you explain the issues with those kinds of services I find that most people are at least intrigued by alternatives (which usually have features that the DRM systems don't, because DRM has always been clunky as they're trying to accomplish something that is effectively not possible).

[1]: http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/drm.html