I totally agree.

I just made a note on my phone today about how in future if there wasn’t some kind of a law to protect “owners” of hardware they “purchased” from cross promotion or added inconveniences due to upselling services I would be quite sad.

For e.g. the experience of backing up your iPhone photographs to a external hard disk could be A LOT better if Apple was satisfied with the money they make from selling the device and didn’t want to sell us their iCloud service.

I so hate growth at all cost mindset that is visible in every business these days. I wish investors would just get used to lower growth rates.

> growth at all cost

Capitalism.

It used to be about making a great product, and people would buy it.

Then it became "We can generate a fake demand with various psychological tricks" to get people to buy it.

Then it became "Give away the razor and charge $$$$$$ for the blades".

Then it became "Buy the thing and subscription and save!"

Then it became "Buy this crippled thing so we can sell you the subscription for recurring income" <- This is where we're at.

Point being, it's not about making a great product. It's about using emotional tricks to get people to buy a thing AND a subscription, to get what 10y ago would have been a lump-sum you-own-it thing.

When we calculate inflation do we calculate this factor? That a product has become more expensive to buy, more expensive to maintain, more expensive to run and you have to pay for features you used to get as part of the product purchase.

Where's "convince government to build a moat around our industry" fall on your timeline?

That's the brown smear underlining the whole thing.

I don't think it appears on the timeline because it is something every company does when they get an opportunity. When a company had a chance 50 years ago to do it, they did it. When a company today gets a chance to do it, they do it.

That's not a step - it's whenever you are large enough or have the right connections to do that. I was talking about large trends of how capitalist thought in the USA is going.

And at this moment in time, the "best" strategy is to milk customers with recurring purchases. And it turns out the value-add didn't work. So feature-removal-and-sell-back recurring purchase is the current phase.

We're seeing that everywhere in IOT, gadgets, kitchen consumer gear, vehicles. Basically, it's the manufacturers exerting control post-purchase with the implicit threat that they can and will brick your stuff.

To put bluntly, we need government oversight over these realms. First-sale doctrine needs to cover "functionality sold at bill of sale". "No bundling" (of additional services that "complete" a thing) also needs to be strongly enforced. And if/when companies do stuff later and remove features (PS3 for an easy example), that they need to be dealt with as if a hacker did that - as C-level ordered felonies with prison, direct massive compensation to the wronged parties, and massive fines (company-ending if need be).

Still the devices I currently own are the best devices I ever had. And the services I subscribe to are incredible services that never even existed before.

Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.

Considering I'm not talking about you personally, nor do I know what things you personally have, that sort of dismissal is pretty pointless.

> Still the devices I currently own are the best devices I ever had.

"Own" - that's the key word here where the contention is. If the entity you bought this thing from still retains control over your thing, that's a rental.

> And the services I subscribe to are incredible services that never even existed before.

Considering you're not naming said "incredible services", it's irrelevant to dispute.

> Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.

Absolutely sure? That sounds extremely over-simplistic to reduce every possible legislation and governance down to "always sure government intervention worsens the situation".

And part of my recommendations are not needing new laws, but maintaining product truth-in-advertising in the face of remote access. And frankly, if I put in remote control, sold the machine, and then remotely destroyed it, I'd be brought in for felony hacking charges.

But really, the level of discourse of "guvernment baaaadddd" is damned distressing, and unfortunately a result of Reagan's very successful campaign to say that, defund public facing gov orgs, and then point at lack of performance for underfunded orgs, thus doing another round of underfunding.

IMHO a clear example of govt intervention being beneficial is the EU enforcing USB C for charging, and before that, USB for phones charging. Compared to the complete mess, inconvenience and waste of virtually every single model of phone requiring a proprietary charger.

But of course there are a zillion other examples, if you bother to look, it's just that those benefits disappear into the fabric of society.

nope.

Of course if you mandate a very narrow standard, completely inflexibly, you may have this kind of problem.

But from where I am, it looks like the 'swashbuckling free market' has stagnated due to monopoly power (Apple lightning), whereas the 'evil plodding government' has ensured compatibility, reduced waste, gauging, etc, while accommodating the incredible evolution of the USB standard.

The free market was doing just fine, thank you very much. It converged by itself into two pretty good standards (none of the previously EU-recommended micro-USB abomination) - one private one open but each having a big enough market to make sure there was very little of that much-pretended "waste". On the contrary - the e-waste next year when millions of Apple users have to throw away perfectly fine cables and charges will be absolutely gigantic.

Apple will have no problem complying as they already had a separate European nano SIM model. Or maybe they were ready to switch to USB-C anyway (a standard they helped develop), as they did with iPad Pros and MacBooks. While us users will swallow the cost as always while bitching about downgrading to USB-C.

But now innovation in this domain was made illegal. There is no way a company will invest in researching a new connector when they cannot legally bring it to the market. So Europe is becoming dependent on American creativity in yet another area. A small and maybe negligible one, of course, but this is a symptom of a larger disease: the EU is voting to mandate stagnation. And the worst part when outlawing innovation is this: you don't even know what you are missing. Because nobody is allowed to invent that future anymore.

>Free markets are not always providing perfect solutions, but I am absolutely sure government intervention could only worsen the situation, never improve it.

We don't live in anything remotely resembling a free market. Tens of thousands of pages of government regulations govern every facet of our commercial markets. The only question is how these regulations should be written.

What would change your mind?

Same things that would change anybody's mind: logical arguments and real-world examples.

Let me guess, there aren't any logical arguments, and no real-world examples that apply?

There are plenty of both but most are supporting my current beliefs, that is why I still have them.

I could just as well ask people who disagree with you and they would say the same thing, so that just says people find examples and arguments they already agree with. It's a bias indicator, which isn't really worth much.

If you wanna be really cynical, then thats not a step the company takes, politicians are quite willing to do it for them, and all by themselves.

There's a degree of symbiosis here. Politicians may be willing to seek such opportunities out on their own, because it helps their constituents (short-term, at the expense of others), or at least creates an appearance of it, which helps them and their party.

You can literally configure a Mac with a couple of clicks to offload every image from an iPhone to whatever folder you want locally. It's honestly hard to think of a way it could possibly be made easier.

Where it becomes hard is if the photos only exist on icloud. I have a good 60gb i cannot move off icloud. First party tools dont work. The download website apple provides for icloud data doesnt work. Photos app crashes to desktop. Third party command line interface tools don’t work. I’m at a loss. These data are being held hostage.

Backing up iPhone photos to an external disk is pretty easy. It's not the happy path because most people cannot handle their own backups.

this is false. Apple does not support this. If they did, you could connect a USB drive to your phone or tablet and save the photos.

To some extent this was eventually solved by third party vendors laboriously creating lightning flash drives and creating an app to talk to them.

But it is definite that you cannot backup your phone. Even apple's backup method is crippled.

I would like an image backup - where you could back up every bit of phone data - but apple gets in the way of that.

You can have it automatically generate an image over WiFi to a computer with an external drive. I mean, it requires iTunes, but it's trivial.

But compare that to an Android phone, where I have no idea how to get access to anything more than pictures without ADB.

I don't believe you can create an image even with itunes.

afaict it doesn't back up apps and app data. You can restore your phone, but the apps download again and app data is lost.

I believe this means if you are on version 10 of an app and 11 is the latest, a restore will upgrade you. And it you have say kindle books downloaded, you will have to re-download them again.

This is where Android shines. I have everything on my phone daily backed up to my personal Nextcloud server. If I ever get in a bind, with a few gestures I can wipe my whole phone and then later restore everything. One can alternatively use Syncthing to sync files to a PC.

Well, I suspect you are rooted for this and a whole bunch of app complain about rooting. I have android and appreciate the ability to backup, but it's infuriating what apps are doing.

I am not rooted, but I am using GrapheneOS which is technically a fork of Android. I am using the built in Seedvault for app backup to Nextcloud. Files are synced with Nextcloud client.

Can you just connect a external disk into the iPhone and click on "Backup" or it requires more than that?

They make special external disks (that may require an iOS app). I bought some for a friend.

But you can also have it connect to a computer over wifi and auto-backup. Does Google let you do that?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying, but idevicebackup2 does exactly that.

What's stopping me from setting up a Linux computer to do that?

Not if you want to avoid itunes or icloud.

I mean, "avoiding backup software on your computer" seems like a big ask for organized backups.

But, yeah, I have lightening drives that connect directly to download pictures onto (well, purchased as a gift).. They even also have USB to be read in a computer.

If you have macOS you don't need either, just plug your iPhone open up "/Applications/Image Capture.app" and it will show your photos. You can select and drag and drop to a disk and delete them all from this app.

Having it happen automatically is what I was after, and that isn’t particularly easy to achieve. There must surely be a better way than my nasty hack, but I do now have automatic backups of iPhone photos onto a nas:

A VM running macOS and a script. Open Photos.app and sync with ‘Download Originals’ checked. Quit Photos.app and rsync the folder ‘Originals’ out of the app bundle and onto a NAS. Once finished, reopen Photos.app.

It’s quite horrible getting the script to run as permissions get tricky with chrontab, so I used Lingon X to schedule it.

Maybe try it with an app on the phone instead? I've been using Synology's photos app to automatically upload everything in my photos library to my NAS for a couple of months now, and it's been seamless. Other apps, like PhotoSync, seem to offer similar functionality in a platform-independent way.

Thank you - I’ve had this suggested before but just couldn’t get it to work. I’ll have another go as that is obviously way better (and saves running a very large VM).

Modern versions of iTunes and modern iOS versions can be set up so that whenever they are on the same network iTunes automatically backs up over WiFi in the background. Then it's just a matter of a cron job pushing the files to the NAS.

That’s not a million miles off what I’m doing. It’s unhelpful that there isn’t a built in way to get images out of Photos.app as downloading a full library can use a lot of storage.

My bad, I misunderstood. Do you do all of this with an AppleScript? I would be really interested to look at this if you have it hosted on a repo somewhere.

You can use an adapter:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MD821AM/A/lightning-to-us...

Image Capture.app, which is built in to macOS, is very no-nonsense and works great.

To give them their due, they do a good job of at least appearing to offer superior service through vertical integration - as a long-time Android user, I am probably going to make the switch at the iPhone 15 release to make the most of this while it lasts.

Car companies can't offer anything close; this subscription features thing from Intel, Mercedes and BMW is bold-faced grifting and needs to be stamped out with extreme prejudice.

Running your own software on your own iPhone requires a $99 a year subscription. Just for code signing, it's basically pure profit, and there's no practical way around it.

It's a classic masterpiece of platform gatekeeping: Getting money for doing nothing, but being the only one who can do it.

Mercedes used to have high resale value due to durability. They even commissioned an internal study (when deciding if they should cheap out to compete with companies like Nissan) the study found that car companies that have high resale values have higher profit margins.

Locking quality behind a subscription is 100% incompatible with that pattern. Some short-sighted executives just sold Mercedes’ long-term future for a couple extra bucks.

Just blacklist and ignore them, they’ll figure it out eventually.

This is another great but underrated statement.

Instead of endlessly debating if Mercedes should have done this or not, vote with your wallet. if you dont agree with what they did dont buy the product.

If enough people dont buy it, they will change. it isnt like Mercedes has a lock on the market like you see in other areas.

I've already decided the same, and my current vehicle is a 2015, before they started this new wave of nonsense.

I drive a truck. I think I'm going to get my favorite body style of F150 (late 70s/early 80s) and put a brand new engine in it, and whatever else it needs to make it 100%. I don't need any tech except one of those things that turns AUX into FM radio.

When I bought this truck, it replaced a 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee with 318,000 miles (512,000km). I can live without luxury. I'll miss my heated steering wheel, though.

As a young man I used to drive a 1980s Ford Ranger. It had manual transmission, an AM/FM radio, shitty A/C, bare metal interior, crank windows, and a bent driveshaft that meant it could really only safely go about 50 mph. You had to carry a few gallons of water in the bed in case the radiator needed a refill.

It was genuinely, with no sarcasm, my favorite vehicle I ever owned. It was mine and it felt like freedom. (Also, with no upholstery, no amount of smoking could stink it up, so an extra helping of freedom).

I miss the shit out of that busted old pile of junk.

For someone considering this, to expound on I don't need any tech except…

• depending on your era the radios are easily replaceable with something that has aux in and bluetooth.

• towing insurance, the kind that actually pays for the tow, not the garbage my insurance includes which will pay part of a really expensive tow leaving you with more than you will find if you shop around.

• a flexible schedule.

• a greater than average tolerance for vehicular death.

I use a 1990s F250HD when I need a truck, love it, can't stop to put fuel in it without someone coming over to talk truck stories. It has more miles on it than the Artemis space capsule. But, it does strand me from time to time (water pump bearing, transmission, instant total brake failure on a downhill grade into a contested intersection with 4 tons of boat on the hitch…)

As much as I use it for its truck super power, I would be money ahead to sell it and just rent Home Depot/Menards truck for in town use and an Enterprise 3/4 ton for long distance towing. But, its "my truck", and I'll keep it until the next transmission or engine.

>instant total brake failure on a downhill grade into a contested intersection with 4 tons of boat on the hitch…

You're free to drive into a tree of your own accord, but please don't let your personal choices kill my girlfriend or mother. If you drive an old vehicle, especially if it's a large truck used for towing, ensure before any drive that the brakes will not fail, and that you have the requisite backups required by local law.

I totally agree! The truck was recently safety inspected for the state, and brake systems are supposed to fail front and back independently. Front and the rear failed in different ways, though the front failure was precipitated by the extra pressure when the rear failed. The mechanical emergency brake was fine.

Safety features and emissions regulations might put a dent in that as a long-term plan.

Old cars are nearly always grandfathered in to those kind of things. In my state we have yearly inspections, but they are waived if you have an """antique""" which is 25 years old or if you go through the work to get it certified as a "hot rod" type vehicle, IE a custom build.

pre 2008 models are your best option, a bunch of privacy violating electronics have been mandated in the US since then. Many of them have confirmed backdoors

if it wasn't for these regulations I think there would be a huge market for "dumb" cars that just have the essentials without a bunch of added stuff. Same goes for TVs, I' love to buy a dumb flat screen TV

at this point seems like corporations are using dystopian sci-fi for ideas and inspiration rather than as something to avoid. Stuff like this a few years ago was literally parody material, now it's actually happening

Nobody is forcing you to plug a smart TV into Internet and no smart TV has the capability to talk to 5G free/marketing channels yet.

Some TVs are known to look for open WiFi networks in order to connect to the internet and send data back home.

Which ones? The vague "Some TVs" screams FUD.

Past conversations about this on HN suggest that this is almost certainly a complete fabrication, not something that has actually been documented.

It's alright, the quality of non-luxury makers has never been better and honestly, a top model Hyundai, Honda or Toyota is still pretty comfy and nice.

But what’s preventing those companies from adding subscription features?

The notion of value plus their clientele. Same reason they currently offer luxury features for so cheap. They could poach a lot of business by simply not adding these things.

Except Toyota already came up with a subscription to start your car over on https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/12/22831105/toyota-subscrip...

I was ready to purchase a Rav4 this year but went with Ford instead precisely because of this. I have no reason to believe Ford won't _eventually_ follow suit but at least, for now, I don't have to pay to use the remote start.

They already do. A modern corolla will lose access to remote start after an initial free subscription period.

Comfy and nice and also packed with "features" that monitor all manners of your activity to phone home and report. I don't want a car that has tires that spy on me and report my activity to the tire company.

Exactly the reason I've always avoided European luxury cars. Imagine buying a full car for a hefty price and having to keep paying extra to use the features you already bought

Like Tesla might do with their upgraded autopilots and seat heating? They have also started talking about subscriptions for these, don't know if they actually have implemented it yet..

I think all luxury manufacturers will experiment with this unfortunately. Best you can do is don't buy into it...

I think there's a case to be made for autopilot subscriptions; once autopilot finally does what is says on the tin.

These things require access to accurate and up-to-date road and traffic info, need updates to stay compliant with local regulations, and may (need to) include insurance.

These are all factors that nudge towards a monthly subscription, instead of a one-time purchase. Once the seller goes bust, you wouldn't be able to use your 'purchase' anyhow.

>These things require access to accurate and up-to-date road and traffic info

Which they will probably steal from the regular drivers, so you will be effectively paying for your own data.

Tesla also has a paid acceleration boost option in their app and its more expensive than $1200.

It is a one-time $2000 upgrade on my car. Dunno about others, but the subscription being a "for the life of the vehicle" purchase seems like the lousy part of this deal.

Only available on the Model 3 LR AWD.

And this wasn't a feature when it first came out, but I wonder if Tesla planned it from the beginning, or if it's something they decided to start offering only after people started noticing that the motors and battery on the LR AWD were the same as the Performance and started asking for a software unlock.

Available on Model Y LR as well

Haven't they already done something along those lines where some options are per-owner and transferring the vehicle will remove the option?

If you sell private party, or trade it to a non-Tesla dealership, then all options will follow the vehicle.

If it ever gets back into Tesla's hands, they have the option to remove the features.

There WAS a case where someone bought a used Tesla from a non-Tesla dealership that was sold with FSD and Tesla then removed the FSD, and there was a lot of outrage behind it, but like many cases of outrage, it was based on a misunderstanding. That car was never supposed to have FSD. There was a bug at some point that gave FSD to cars that weren't supposed to have it, and that car was sold before the bug was fixed, removing FSD, but the dealer sold it as having FSD because at the time, it did. Of course, IMO, Tesla should have just gone ahead and granted FSD in order to save face instead of generating a ton of negative PR and creating a massive amount of misconceptions.

No, but it's considered. What you may have heard is car returned and feature being removed when sold to someone else.

> I think all luxury manufacturers will experiment with this unfortunately.

And not so luxury as well, they might start by giving you the features and financing that by playing/showing you the ads and giving the incentive to pay. I imagine in not so distant future even the microwaves for plebs will have ads.

Tesla already provides a faster acceleration software upgrade. Mercedes just copied them.

Tesla's acceleration boost upgrade is a one-time fee though!

Yup, the costs for parts, maintenance and potential repairs for a lot of luxury cars has always been a running joke. Hard to use most of the features if you can't fix the car to run.

I think this might target you in a weird way.

This will affect used car sales, maybe like used video games with activation codes and the like.

My 2 yo car shows 47MPG and its safety features (e.g. adaptive cruise control and the ability to stay in lane) are more addictive than I expected. A 20 yo car strikes me as unrealistic extreme even though I drove my previous one for 10 years myself.

The EQS without this option is still a very desirable car, mind you.

I suspect this is merely an experiment to see if people buy into this stuff (Hint: I believe they won't).

I'm with you. Of course, if I already owned one I would be searching the net up and down on how to crack the feature without paying :)

Seems like something pretty easy to make an aftermarket "fix" for

I could easily afford one, but I would rather buy and own a car than have to rent like this.

So you should be paying for having the option to wear your car? What?

If covered by warranty, yes.

Warranty explicitly forbids racing and putting extra wear, also it doesn’t cover normal wear of parts anyway, warranty won’t change your breaks if you wear them out.

In the US, there's plenty of places with a speed limit of 80: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limits_in_the_United_Sta...

And many more places with 75 - which people effectively treat as 80.

There are also private roads without speed limits.

Speed is a poor metric for safety and speed limits have a history of being set at levels optimal to generate revenue, not optimal for taxpayer convenience or safety.

The speed-unlimited sections of the German autobahn have far fewer accidents per million miles travelled than any US highway, in spite of the fact that many people are routinely doing 150+ mph / 250+ kmh on a daily basis through those stretches.

If you're arguing from an environmental perspective, just remember that even if the entirety of the USA and western europe hit net zero carbon emissions tomorrow, it would still be impossible to avoid 2° C of global warming thanks to India and China alone, to say nothing of the rest of the world.

I forgot which study it comes from, but I read that several dozen Chinese coal-powered industrial cargo ships produce more CO2 than all North American personal automobile emissions combined.

Try spending a few minutes to see the "climate debate" here in canada.

I'm not a climate denier, and we should do more to improve things but what would the impact be if 32 million people cut back?

We already have massive taxes on our gas, and now we have a "carbon charge" on top of this.

if canada's consumption fell to zero would the world notice?

If we really want climate change, we need to stop focusing on small consumer usage and look where the real problem areas.

Convincing people in Saskatoon to buy electric cars, which are powered by coal plants is not going to "save the planet".

Helping remove coal as an energy source globally will.

Removing coal as an energy generation source in the west is a step in the right direction, but without real enforcement mechanisms against China, India, and other hyper-polluters, none of our efforts matter, ultimately. It's a nihilistic view, but unfortunately it's also the reality. Toothless agreements like the PCA, which don't even see China or India setting a firm date on when their "peak carbon" will be (after which their emissions start decreasing) simply aren't going to be enough if we want earth to be a hospitable planet for human life in 2100.

> Automobiles in America should obviously be speed limited to 75mph

Why? There are speed limits greater than that in a few states. The flow of traffic in Southern California is often even faster.

> The flow of traffic in Southern California is often even faster.

Which is exactly the problem GP wants to fix.

I'm more worried about the growing pedestrian deaths since vehicles have no requirement, like in Europe, to be as safe as possible when hitting pedestrians.

> Which is exactly the problem GP wants to fix

pedestrians being struck at speeds in excess of 75 mph while crossing freeways?

No, I'm worried about pedestrians, who aren't found on freeways. So a speed limiter doesn't help that problem.

> Which is exactly the problem GP wants to fix.

But it's a good thing that we should make sure can continue, not a problem that needs to be fixed.

If the speed limit was 25mph it would be even safer. And if cars were abolished all together nobody would ever die from a car accident. But life isn't about maximizing safety.

Yeah, normal people largely do what they ought and rich idiots get to pay and get a pass. What a lovely future.

You could combine those deaths , and double the combined figure, and you'd still be nowhere near the number of annual deaths attributable to medical errors: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...

Reminders of scale aside, I posit that the limit for vehicles needn't be speed or size, but braking distance. If a manufacturer can make a 6600 pound SUV that stops from 75 mph in the same distance that a 3300 pound sports car with track brakes and extra grippy, super-wide tires, brakes from 75, I say more power to them.

Until then, this metric will naturally lead manufacturers to downsize, and for the ones who still produce SUV's anyway, they will need to be as good at stopping as regular cars, which might make them more cost-prohibitive and dissuade their ownership via market pressure.

After all, it's not speed or size that cause automotive fatalities, it's cars being unable to stop in time before impacting other vehicles, pedestrians, or impassible barriers.

Note that I did not actually claim that it was the third leading cause of death, just that it eclipses auto deaths and firearm deaths combined and doubled.

It’s a subject that gets quite hot quite fast, but as tactfully as possible: Looking in from the outside, the restrictions on gun sales in the US are pretty tame compared to a lot of other countries.