When you think about it, it amazes me. So many people, including me, would love to have these switches. Like physical switch for the mic, camera and radio. And yet, the companies that are supposed to listen to the customer seem to do exactly the opposite to what the customer wants, like installing all these unremovable crappy apps nobody uses or removeing the headphone jack. Are these people so out of touch with reality?
I don't have stats but I'm incredibly confident that almost no users want hardware switches.
Does your mum want a hardware switch? Does the guy working at Starbucks?
I think it might be the techheads who think that installing Linux and having hardware switches are normal - they're the ones who are out of touch with reality.
Companies are basically dictating what users "want": from social media to personalized ads.
The problem with regular users is: they don't care until it's too late.
Can we blame them? Not really, because life is too diverse to worry about every consumer product.
It's good, however, if there is a bunch of good guys who do the thinking for these users. Still, most users may not care, but eventually consumer advocacy groups will pick this up, and they will educate users.
> The problem with regular users is: they don't care until it's too late.
But it shouldn't be that way, should it? At least it's not what I learned during my marketing lessons. You do market research, listen to your potential customers, discuss the results and proceed based on that.
In the mobile world you have an absurd situation that you remove an important component of the device, you release the device, everybody tells you it was a very stupid decision, you ignore everybody and still rake a ton of cash. Amazing.
The thing is, if these things resulted in increased profit over the medium term, they'd probably have happened already.
So yes there's user-hostile decisions made that put profit over users. Like ad tracking.
But there's other things that I think convince a user to purchase a product, and purchase the next product from the same company (loyalty maintained) that may not be in the user's best interests.
An example is a larger battery. My current theory is a manufacturer could easily have a 2 day battery and it wouldn't make for a terribly unwieldy phone.
But they don't, because customers are going to buy the phone next to it that is sleeker and weighs less.
I think customers are more often than not short sighted when making decisions like this. When they're in the store they think "but this one's so much nicer, and the battery probably lasts enough"
I think purchases are often made emotionally, not rationally, and a phone with 7 extra switches and more weight or thickness just seems clunky and less "high tech"
"I don't have stats but I'm incredibly confident that almost no users want hardware switches."
How "incredibly confident" can you be about this claim without published stats?
I would like hardware switches ala Purism's laptops but I see that Hacker News prioritizes steering discussions away from these switches (such as down-moderating the grandparent post for making a similar claim with no pointer to evidence but leaving your evidenceless post relatively highly moderated). I'm not sure if other people would have thought about having such switches therefore I'm not sure if they would value them or even consider asking vendors to include such switches.
As you say we both provide no evidence, but I suppose my claim aligns better with HN user's anecdotal evidence
It's true I could be wrong, it might be something really unintuitive and for some reason people want hardware switches and I've just literally never heard it until now.
But in my experience 99% don't even know about, let alone care about advanced features. Even simple features you and I take for granted. They want to launch Instagram. That's about it.
Anecdotally, I do see a large number of lay people with tape over their laptop cameras. Enough stories have filtered into the press about RAT malware and whatnot that there is likely to be some endemic insecurity about a camera pointed in your face across a fairly broad section of the populace.
Yet those tinfoil folks who cover the camera do nothing about the microphone. Since ~2009, it’s been impossible to turn on the camera on an Apple laptop/monitor without the light turning on, yet there’s no indication of something using the mic.
> Yet those tinfoil folks who cover the camera do nothing about the microphone.
You say this like it's a "gotcha," but what exactly could somebody with no technical knowledge do about the microphone? If you're trying to say that if there were an equivalent to electrical tape but for the microphone, people wouldn't use it, then I don't even think you honestly believe that.
Also, it's bizarre that in a world that ratting has existed, you'd compare covering the camera on your laptop with a piece of electrical tape to paranoid schizophrenia.
> but what exactly could somebody with no technical knowledge do about the microphone
Take an old pair of wired headphones with mic, cut the cord off, plug in connector. There’s better solutions, but that’s the easiest if you are nervous.
To clarify for the down voters, I didn’t mean to insult, I meant to imply it was an unfounded fear (as most tinfoil conspiracies are). Most folks I’ve talked to who do it, didn’t know about the impossibility of turning on the camera without the light on current gen hardware. When I told them about the very real risk of listening to audio without any similar visual indication they were rightly alarmed. I’m actually calling for the ability to either have a hardware mic cutoff or at minimum a visual indication similar to how the camera does.
Regardless, that average people are cautious about their electronic privacy is something to applaud, not discourage. If you are trying to train people out of fearing their cameras, then you're doing a bit of a disservice.
In particular, your claim is false for phone and tablet cameras. These devices do not have visual indicators of camera operation. Furthermore, the only reason for an industry-wide adoption of laptop camera LEDs was consumer fear of them. If that fear erodes, there is no incentive to maintain the hardware feature and no governmental regulations governing such hardware.
> your claim is false for phone and tablet cameras
Yet nobody seems to care about them (unless forced to care by their employer). The exact same folks I see in work environments with the tape on the Apple laptops are the same folks with nothing on the phones/tablets (and previously mentioned mics, where as at least on iOS you always have a visual indication of that). If you really care about privacy, you learn the different ways to protect yourself. If instead you have a different motive, you instead just grab a piece of tape and call it done.
> I'm incredibly confident that almost no users want hardware switches.
I'm incredibly confident that almost everyone does. They'd explain it as the ability to turn off the microphone or camera without someone else having the ability to turn it back on without asking you, but it amounts to the same thing.
One thing I know nobody is asking for is microphones and cameras that can be turned on without their consent after they've explicitly turned them off.
Actually, she does. She read some news and put some tape over the camera of her notebook. Just as Zuck does - and I imagine there is an enormous gap in technical knowledge between the CEO of FB and my mum. So yes, maybe the demand is higher than the marketing departments are willing to admit. Apple's years-long reluctance to cater for people looking for a phone with two SIM card slots also comes to mind.
