This type of 'update' is one reason I tend to stay away from so-called 'smart' devices.
If part of the product I've paid for is software, and the company can update it without customer consent at any time, then I can't rely on the product's features. Period.
I experienced this myself on the PS4 version of Terraria. I bought a hard-copy of the game. I mastered the controls, and loved them. Terraria was updated one day, and the controls were all changed, completely. Total rip-off. I liked the game I bought, but it was replaced without my consent.
My feeling is that this behavior should be illegal for purchased products.
I agree. Perhaps the U.S.'s legal framework reasonably allows this kind of behavior, but IMHO it's a sign that the framework needs legislative correction.
The first time I encountered this was when Sony advertised Linux-compatibility for the PS3, which I bought expressly for that purpose. I was shocked when a judge upheld Sony's post-sale removal of that capability.
Government should mandate the ability to downgrade the software to versions that were previously available on said hardware.
I’ve had so many issues with Apple devices losing compatibility with obscure features on apps after updating iOS, I wish I could go back occasionally to accomplish some task, and then upgrade again when finished.
The flexibility is valuable.
For example, on the newest iPad Pro, iMovie is unusable after iOS 15, completely jittery and unable to handle smooth user experiences for some reason.
TV updates are another thing. They change things with abandon and you can't revoke the updates.
Sometimes they break stuff and then you have to pray and wait until they hopefully fix them at their leisure.
IMO, it should be illegal to issue unrevokable updates so you can't get a product to have identical features as it did at the time of purchase. You should always be able to wipe it back to stock. Same with phones.
And the people who might crow about "security" - my device, my rules. I can block it on the network if I want.
That's exactly why I personally try to stay away from as many of these things/devices as I can reasonably do.
TV: just don't buy an actual TV. Buy a monitor and hook it up to a Linux box with something like Kodi. You can hook up your cable box if you have that or stream from Netflix and such. Sure, even Netflix makes it hard as you can't get 5.1 surround but I'll take that and 2.0 -> 5.1 upmix over buying a Smart TV any day!
Games: Kerbal Space program sounds fun. Lots of mentions on HN. Apparently after some company bought them up changes of this sort have been made. So I decided against getting it even though I would probably very much enjoy playing it. Don't buy games like that. Buy games like Factorio or some GoG stuff (the ones that actually do work on your current Windows OS if that's what you use ... ;)) and do not buy into the GoG Galaxy thing. Get the installers. Otherwise that's like falling for Steam or Xbox Live or whatever the "Windows Live" BS is called nowadays.
Tablets and Phones: Use them for what they're good for: Making phone calls and browsing the web on the go.
Apps are a curse, I avoid installing them as much as possible. Some exceptions prove the rule, like a free GPS tracker app for hiking created by a single guy. UI looks like it's out of the 90s but works for my use case. Found it because the other app I used started requiring a login even for the free part of the app. I refuse to bow to such things.
> TV: just don't buy an actual TV. Buy a monitor and hook it up to a Linux box with something like Kodi. You can hook up your cable box if you have that or stream from Netflix and such. Sure, even Netflix makes it hard as you can't get 5.1 surround but I'll take that and 2.0 -> 5.1 upmix over buying a Smart TV any day!
I've looked into this, but this option is really not great, either:
- Large Monitors are unavailable or (if you use business monitors) a lot more expensive and usually don't have latest panel tech.
- You'll loose surround sound and also 4K on most platforms
- The integration is usually worse (you'll have to start more devices, if you're lucky CEC decides to work)
- Good luck with HDR
I personally settled for a SmartTV behind a PiHole-equivalent, but an Apple TV or an Android TV combined with an offline smart TV are good contenders, too. Unfortunately, there's really no silver bullet right now.
I have bad news for you. Even if the TV is not connected to your WiFi, it could still get into the network over other devices connected via HDMI with HEC [0].
Although it could be a general concern, it unlikely to affect me.
Since all the HDMI connections are via a (slightly older, non-connected) AV receiver, its almost impossible for this to affect my setup. But it's indeed a sleazy move by those setting the HDMI standards.
- Large Monitors are unavailable or (if you use business monitors) a lot more expensive and usually don't have latest panel tech.
Agree, monitors in regular TV sizes are way more expensive than the largest 'cheap' monitors. But I'd rather make a decision between paying $300 CAD for a 32" monitor that is 'large enough' but not huge or a ~43" monitor that is way larger, has 4k etc. and costs ~$1200 CAD etc. or a $500 50" 4k "generic Smart TV" in "dumb mode" than to use it as an actual Smart TV.
- You'll loose surround sound and also 4K on most platforms
There you go, no expensive 4k monitor needed if you can't get it anyway. Surround sound I'll give you but see your sibling if you are so inclined to go the potentially unlawful but ethically probably totally OK route.
- The integration is usually worse (you'll have to start more devices, if you're lucky CEC decides to work)
To be fair it's been a while that I've had cable and had to deal with that and that was in low-def times (so I had a cable card in the mythtv server). I don't fancy setups w/ IR switching cable channels and such but to be honest, I think it's worth it to at least try if you have to keep actual cable for some reason. Nowadays other viable options than having cable do exist if you ask me.
- Good luck with HDR
I probably just don't know what I am missing and as long as it stays that way it's like staying on 720p and a monitor most people would think is way too small but actually totally adequate than to complain that my huge 4k one looks bad with that source material ;)
offline smart TV are good contenders, too
Totally agree, if you're looking for a cheap huge "monitor" that can definitely be a good option as long as you stay away from the actual "features" and are fine with the other limitations.
Personally I'm on a 32" regular HD IPS panel monitor. Given the size of the living room and how far away the sofa is, this is totally adequate (I upgraded from my >>>10 year old 4:3 "I don't even remember the size of it" monitor when it finally broke!). Surround sound depends on the source. If it's Netflix the upmix is "good enough" for most of what the kids wanna watch and then there's other material too where proper AC3 is available. Most of the times I can't really have the bass turned up anyway so as not to wake the kids :P
We paid 2000 EUR for a 55" HD (1K) Sony in 2010, and would happily go down a bit in size as it's now mounted over a piano that frankly sees a lot more use than the TV. I'm completely ok with paying 1000-1500 EUR to get a 40"-50" 4K set that we don't have to constantly give the side-eye once the current one gives up the ghost. We rarely watch anything, so it might be more of a question of whether this one will outlive 720p/1080p freeview or not.
After a good nights sleep I think I want to revise this (can't edit).
I think it's prudent not to even buy a Smart TV and use it in "dumb mode". If we do this, we are not voting with our wallet. I'm not sure how likely we would be to have a large enough effect numbers wise but one can try. If we don't try, we've already lost.
You're still voting with your wallet to the effect of the TV not being able to serve the ads that it otherwise would.
But anyway, ever since content consumption became prominent on mobile smart devices (smartphones, tablets), this battle is already lost - the TVs are merely playing catch-up with the rest of the industry.
I'm a software engineer because I love technology.
Your opinion is fine don't get me wrong but my 4k 55" OLED tv is really really impressive.
It's a marvelous picture.
My DSLR images look brilliant on it, games do as well, HDR is surprising ly nice as well.
We watch most tv shows still on a 10 year old 720p beamer due to image size. 110" is still more immersive than 55". But I do expect being able to buy 110" 4k in a few years either through a more affordable 4k projector or by microled panels.
I can't follow your 4k = full of propaganda Point. Not sure what you mean by it.
I'm into fractal videos (e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ), and resolution makes a huge difference there. I got a 4K TV largely for this reason, and seriously considering 8K for the next one.
> Netflix makes it hard as you can't get 5.1 surround
Then get it from *ahem* elsewhere, you've paid for access to that content in that quality, if they can't provide that… Maybe if enough do that they'll fix the problem, so they can start tracking your use of the content again when you return to consuming it their way.
> TV: just don't buy an actual TV. Buy a monitor and hook it up to a Linux box with something like Kodi.
I simply bought a non-smart TV. I just made sure it had a number of HDMI ports. I plug my various media sources into the HDMI ports.
A "smart" TV must be the most un-smart TV possible - you're stuck with whatever's there. The "smart" part (say, a Pi or a Chromecast or both) must be detached from the display device (the TV), not a part of it.
"smart" TVs remind me of back when I bought a webcam with integrated Skype, for my old parents. It did make it easy for them to skype with their grandchildren, using the TV. But of course Skype, or MS at the time, plugged the pull on the version of Skype used by the webcam and then it became a brick. Never again.
That may be changing, but when I bought my 49" non-smart TV a few years back it was quite a bit cheaper than the same-size smart TVs. It wasn't that long ago, but a quick check at the same shop shows only "smart" (read: stupid) TVs. Unfortunately. As the price for the non-smart TV I bought was lower than the equivalent "smart" version I believe we'll be paying for a feature we don't need.
> Games: Kerbal Space program sounds fun. Lots of mentions on HN. Apparently after some company bought them up changes of this sort have been made.
The changes to Kerbal are in Kerbal Space Program 2, not the original KSP. I highly recommend KSP, go ahead and get it. KSP 2 will have better graphics and add some new capabilities to the game, but honestly you could play KSP for years (I have) and not get tired of the graphics or what the game offers. To me KSP 2 seems like a competing game, not a replacement.
Nope, not mixed up. Redshell apparently was added in KSP 1.4 by Take Two. After an uproar in the community it was removed again but personally this is something that's just too big of a thing to dismiss. Not changing my mind.
Thank you. I had not head of Redshell, and I thought that you were referring to features being removed. I'll now be very wary to see if spyware like this is installed again.
My Vizio TV updated itself a month ago, and I only noticed because changed the default behaviour of which input to open on when it turns on, which was really irritating.
After finding the menu entry to fix it, that in particular was no longer an issue.
However, around the same time, my PC input began to blank out for a second at a time at random intervals which was very irritating. On a lark I performed a factory reset and didn't set up my wifi credentials, and it hasnt misbehaved since.
I'm saying there should be a law where the govt punishes the company.
If the law needs me as an individual consumer to procure my own team of lawyers to go up against a multinational every time I buy a new TV, then that law might as well not exist.
The damages would probably only qualify for small–claims court. These cases don’t take much time to present or judge, and the evidence you need is quite straight forward. Consulting with a lawyer on the matter, if you wanted that extra assurance, wouldn’t cost much.
I consider my time for a day off work, travel to court, preparation, irritation, etc more than the value of the TV, and they probably wouldn't pay me damages for those things.
The point is that I shouldn't have to do that as an individual for every purchase.
We need a blanket rule that they can't remotely modify purchased items in a way that cannot be rolled-back by the consumer to the functionality at the time of purchase.
I'm in Australia. Although we're covered by what I consider to be pretty good consumer guarantees, you can still only demand a refund in the case of a "major problem" with the product.
I don't think simply being unhappy with it connecting outside would qualify, although IMO it should.
It depends on the retailer, but probably you won’t be able to return it for a refund. You should attempt it though, or at least be able to present the retailer’s return policy as evidence in small–claims court.
This is why punitive damages exist. Because you can sometimes get a lawyer to work on your case with no cash. So they can collect a large percentage of those punitive damages.
Looks like this was partly successful against Sony but it took six years in court and people didn't get the whole price back when they removed Linux support from the PS3:
Those damages were assigned with the assumption that most people didn't buy a PS3 to run Linux on it. If you opted out of the class action I have no doubt you would have gotten a full refund.
>As a software engineer can you imagine supporting every version of your software you ever released? Sounds like a nighmare.
This would teach us developers to do better.
Like don't push random updates that break shit. If your product is not filled with security issues you should be able to backport a fix for that giant secuiry bug you found, you can ignore the crashes. Anyway this big companies can afford to pay you to backport some fixes . It is not like some volunteer is forced to backport fixes in his free time.
> As a software engineer can you imagine supporting every version of your software you ever released? Sounds like a nighmare.
Perhaps we (developers) need to get better at this. We care so much about pushing features and being agile and all, but when it comes to supporting old releases: "umm, no. It's a nightmare".
I wouldn’t expect support for old versions, just the ability to download and install knowing that a downgrade by definition removes some fixes (and possibly restores something of interest).
IIRC the Linux support was there solely so that Sony could circumvent tariffs in the EU.
Gaming consoles had higher tariffs than "general purpose computers", so Sony added the ability to boot into Linux and argued - successfully - that it was a general purpose computing device and thus in the lower tariff category.
I bought a couple Hue bulbs a while back and a (somewhat) recent update to the Hue app removed the ability to control them via by watch. Completely pointless feature removal. Part of the selling point is that level of control, and yet they just removed an entire feature I frequently used. That's simply straight up removing something that I've paid for, which I don't view as any different from theft.
This is precisely the reason why prior to linux support/removal, exploits weren't targeted. Once linux support was removed, linux hackers started releasing exploit after exploit on the target hardware and software, and it only took a couple months after they removed the linux support.
Upon which we found out that not supporting Linux on the PS3 slim from the get go "because they wanted to focus on games and it was too much effort" was a lie - turns out there was almost nothing extra that needed to be done for it to work on that model too, once the hacks were in place.
(Cue next rant about class-action settlements. To make me whole, Sony would have needed to give me a full refund (with interest) or restore Linux compatibility.)
I still haven't gotten my check from the iPhone 6 battery scandal. I still have the phone. It is forever stuck on the wall now. They have no incentive to hurry up I guess.
IANAL, but I've heard that if you let the court know about situations like this, they'll often provide the necessary motivation to the responsible parties.
I suspect that in terms of actual value lost and never properly compensated, this kind of thing is second-largest source of property theft in our economy, right after all the unpaid wages.
Just serves to remind that whenever we talk of governments protecting property rights, it's always worth clarifying whose rights they are actually protecting, and who is SOL.
This pattern is pervasive. I also dislike needing an app and an internet connection for the most basic functionality with some purchased device. At some point, we need to own the things we buy and that line keeps getting pushed back further and further.
Anec-data: I purchased a cooking device for my parents in December and it has a single button to turn it off. The only way to use it is with an app which requires a login to the company's service. The device even has local bluetooth capabilities. You may be wondering, "What is this device supposed to do?" and the obvious answer is: "It's supposed to boil water." The real answer seems to be, "it collects usage data about customers boiling water."
I'm assuming you are talking about a sous vide device.
This is one of the few (unrooted) smart devices I actually appreciate. You can easily configure it for a specific task (steak? chicken? brussels?), get push notifications when it's done and even turn off it's warm setting remotely if needed.
And given that most of the thing is immersed in boiling hot water, it makes sense to not put controls on the device itself.
i'm glad my anova has both manual and bluetooth controls, because after the first couple of uses i simply default to manual for everything. personally i tihnk modern cellphones are remarkably clunky devices for anything other than reading books and gps. they aren't even very ergonomic as phones, they're annoying for web browsing compared to laptops, and they are definitely not satisfying to use as controls for physical devices.
The app doesn't need the cloud for bluetooth usage or basic wifi usage (though "out of your house" usage likely uses their relay service). You would no longer get "recipe of the week" stuff, but that is a small loss.
The real danger is that eventually the app goes away due to not being maintained. Hopefully they release the API spec before then, but my specific device has already been reverse engineered at least.
It should be legally mandated to release either the firmware source, or at least the API and applicable keys, before discontinuing support for a device.
I'm reminded of the Wemo netcams my parents owned, which updated to remove a previous ability connect directly to the video stream in favor of pay-only cloud software, and the proceeded to cease support for that, leaving my parents with two completely useless bricks.
Yeah, that is the danger I tried to allude to in my second paragraph.
I hope we do see phone/OS/store ecosystems that focus on longterm stability of features and UI. Keep devices repairable by end users, supply parts for the whole of the phone's lifespan.
Fair phone is trying to do this for phone hardware, and Framework is doing similar for laptops. We still need OS and store ecosystems.
Yup, "smart" devices will require an accompanying phone of a similar age with the app already installed in case it was removed from the App/Play store -- if you want to keep using it much after 5 years.
Mine cost a quarter of the app-based devices I've seen and the one difference is that I have to take a glance at a little table. I don't mind that.
And whether a device has controls doesn't matter with regards to hot water contact. It has to be properly sealed either way and capacitive buttons work fine for this (not worse than the low-quality buttons they'd use otherwise). The main feature you get with Bluetooth is another point of failure thanks to connection problems, at least that's my average experience with BT.
I recently got an Anova -- with touch controls, and it works great both with and without the app. The top is a big bigger to handle the screen and touch controls.
Making an immersion circulator app-only is likely a BOM-reducing measure, which is fine (given that active time is probably at most a few minutes like twice a day). And you can get smaller form factors too with app-only control (e.g. Ember Mug).
It’s not fine. I still use electrical appliances that are 10-50 years old. I’m pretty sure these “smart” devices apps won’t work in a decade (if that).
My Anova touchscreen frequently fails to work in service, I think because of the humidity, which seems like something reasonably foreseeable by the designers...
I like it, but now leave it pre-set to 135°F lest I set it elsewhere and then lose the ability to adjust it, so I think they dropped the ball on the design.
I guess I can see a push notification for a very slow cooking process, but most of the time if you use a smart device in a kitchen frequently, you're going to get things like uncooked chicken juices on it. Not ideal for a personal phone.
This is true for things that are connected to the network anyway. It is not true for unconnected devices controlled by Bluetooth. The gratuitous app login is straightforwardly malign.
Speaking from personal experience, I am far more comfortable with a web interface than a BT interface. If I were hired to write code for an IoT kitchen thing I'd probably implement a web thing, rather than a BT thing. That would not be malicious on my part, just laziness (if you're being unkind), or pragmatism (if you're being kind).
I have a similar device and was recommended the newer and upgraded version from someone I know. Given time pressure and other priorities at the time, I took the recommendation without much further investigation.
> I also dislike needing an app and an internet connection for the most basic functionality with some purchased device.
Yeah, my watch supports setting (and syncing) the time and timezones using bluetooth. But before you can do that, you must agree to the maker's ridiculous privacy policy which includes consenting to sending them all kinds of data that has fuck all to do with setting the time on a watch. Immediately uninstalled. So that feature is dead weight to me unless/until someone reverse engineers the watch.
This is true for most consumer tech (whether software or hardware) nowadays. The primary objective is to get "engagement" out of it. Any useful work the product might be doing is the bare minimum needed to convince the user to "engage" with the product.
It’s not that i dont agree but the Terraria example is a bit unfair. First this is issue of the platform. On other platforms you can choose version of the game.
And second Terraria is example of probably one of the most supported games. The update you are talking about brings massive amount of content and updates completely for free 9 years!!! after release. Most companies would milk the product with third sequel and dozens DLCs by that time.
I'm not trying to pick on Terraria, but I think it's a great example for the reasons you are bringing up.
Even with the 'value add' of the update, I no longer play the game. Why? Because I invested in learning and mastering the game as it was when I bought it. The forced update removed all value for me, and I'm the one who made the decision to buy it.
If the product is changed significantly after purchase without my consent, then I feel I should be able to revisit my decision to purchase it. Otherwise, it's a sort of bait-and-switch scheme.
I think it's how it's always been with software. It's ephemeral.
When the devs have to keep up with the system updates etc. there is expectation that they keep working on software. I am sure they would love to just push something that would work forever.
So much software that i bought stopped working. Even when you have "lifetime" license - eventually world moves on and you are without hardware to run the software.
I am not saying it's right but i am also not sure how it can be solved.
I would absolutely love to be able to push out software that just "works forever". And this is basically impossible on mobile by design these days.
Hardware evolution isn't a big deal, actually, so long as you can emulate the old on the new. For example, all the old DOS games can still be made to work thanks to DOSBox and PCem. In principle, the same applies to software, except that it evolves too fast for such emulation layers to keep up.
Not sure if you are intending to, but that only further illustrates how broken (in the favor of corporations) the current legal environment is.
You are right in that there probably is a gotcha, you agreed clause in the text that is displayed after I have purchased the item. I also think the idea that is legally binding a farce.
Imagine how popular buying things would be if people actually had to read those agreements.
>Imagine how popular buying things would be if people actually had to read those agreements.
If you ever wondered why your elders are such sticks in the mud on this sort of thing, that is exactly why. Put a contract in front of most people and off they run for the hills.
This is why the click through EULA was the best thing to ever happen to the legal profession.
It has to be displayed before you buy the item, and it is. If you don't read the contracts you sign you only have yourself to blame. You also wouldn't go to a car dealership, skip the contract, sign it and expect good things to happen.
Does it even matter if we read these contracts? No one's going to negotiate terms with the billion dollar company and only lawyers will have a full understanding of the implications of what's written in these things anyway. This last fact alone should be enough to invalidate any consent.
I mean, we're actually talking about "buying" games here. That's how insidious these things are. The few people who read this fine print will know that we're not really "buying" anything, we're being offered extremely limited licenses to the content. Can you blame consumers who fall prey to corporate deception? Marketing leads them to believe they're "buying" stuff. It's not really their fault when they become victims of corporate bullshit like remote content deletion. Nobody should have to consult lawyers before consuming.
Let's summarize all company contracts in an easy to understand manner:
1. We can do whatever we want.
2. You can do nothing we don't want.
3. We own everything.
4. We guarantee nothing.
5. You have no rights.
That does it. That's literally what all these little contracts boil down to. Every single time I read one it's just the above 5 points over and over in mind numbing legal language.
No. Absolutely nothing will change. Declining is not a valid negotiation tactic when you're dealing with literal billion dollar companies. Are you seriously suggesting some company like Amazon is gonna change their terms if we decline them? They couldn't care less about us. Maybe if you're a rich corporation using their services. Sometimes not even then if the horror stories I've read here on HN are to be believed.
Where I live many of these contracts are actually in violation of consumer protection law. I've had actual lawyers tell me I can safely ignore many clauses because they are clearly abusive and judges would strike them down in court. Particularly unacceptable are those that make me give up my rights. Appatently that's a thing in the US, you can just sign away rights such as reverse engineering or even the ability to take companies to court by "agreeing" not to exercise them.
If more people did things differently in this fashion the world would be a very different place. Too bad this doesn't happen and the users who actually decline make up less than 0.01%, probably below any error margin.
People just don't care until they personally get a kick in their face. We all know that and companies bet on it.
> brings massive amount of content and updates completely for free 9 years!!!
Which can be a bad thing. The Minecraft I played first and the Minecraft I played recently are two different games, and I don't like how overpacked with stuff the new version is.
Most game expansions - paid or not - follow the philosophy of "more of the same", rather than stopping somewhere between that and "less is more". Depending on the game, that can make it tedious.
Yup. I started playing Minecraft on Xbox 360 which my kids and I loved. We still love the game, but it's so different now, it's not the same game at all other than voxels and biome themes and some of the original music. We have a ship of Theseus situation. It's no longer the same game. I'd love to be able to pick a version to play like you can on PC.
> I tend to stay away from so-called 'smart' devices
I tried several alternatives in terms of smart TV (Apple TV, Google/Android TV, Fire TV), and I could not find any platform that let me use all of the apps that I needed without resorting to casting from my phone. And in some cases there was a long process to follow in order to get the device to do what I needed[1], which involved activating developer mode, sideloading apps etc.
In the end, I bought a wireless keyboard/touchpad combo and built a HTPC, reusing old components that I removed from my gaming PC after upgrading it over the years. I installed Ubuntu on it and never looked back.
[1] For example not having the home screen being made of mostly ads, or having a simple web browser installed on the device
Genuinely curious, did you feel anything was missing from Apple TV besides a web browser? I feel it’s perfect for our uses but I always like to know if I’m missing something. Personally I don’t like web browsing on TV but AirPlay fills that gap when it’s needed.
I have to say that Apple TV sucked less than the alternatives but it's also the most inflexible in the sense that it's harder to "jailbreak", so for example if Apple decides that the home page will now be filled with ads rather than icons, I won't be able to do anything about it whereas in Google TV and Fire TV you can sideload an unofficial launcher if you want. Compare this with my current solution where I can just change OS or desktop environment if I feel like it.
Another aspect is the fact that smart TV apps are sometimes not as good as their desktop counterparts. For example the YouTube app on most smart TV platforms does not support viewing show notes or comments. So every time the person in the video says "link in the notes below"... you are missing out on that link. Another example: I like watching martial arts, both the UFC web app and the FloGrappling web app have additional features that are not found in their smart-tv-app counterparts.
Another big one for me, is the fact that in a desktop environment I have better multitasking and I can use browser tabs. For example if I find a Youtube channel I'm interested in, and I see a couple videos that I would like to watch, I just open them in a new tab. On a smart TV you would have to add them to watch later, then go to your library and find them, it's just not as immediate.
Another point is gaming, I am recycling old computer parts that I removed from my gaming PC when doing upgrades, these are relatively old parts but still pretty good, so you can run triple-A desktop games with pretty decent quality, whereas the type of games available for download on smart TVs are mostly just ports of mobile games. I also installed RetroPie which is quite fun!
Then there is hardware upgradeability. Recently I was thinking to add a faster CPU, and then the CPU that is now in the HTPC will go into my NAS since the one I have in the NAS is quite slow. You can't do any of that with a smart TV dongle, all the parts are soldered to the main board :-)
One more thing I like is that it's easier to watch content using alternative clients, for example I watch YouTube videos using the FreeTube app, on Smart TV platforms you might be able to find some alternative clients but the choice is more limited.
EDIT - rephrased some parts as they were not clear
So basically what you’re saying is that you want your “smart” TV experience to be just like a desktop PC experience.
That’s fair, if that’s what you want and if that works for you.
For most users however that would make the TV impossible to use with a regular, simple remote and thus be a major downgrade in user experience.
Basically what it seems like (to me at least) is that people who buy “smart” devices don’t want them to be smart in terms of having advanced capabilities. Rather they want the devices to be smart enough to do the right things in a simplified UI, allowing the user to get the same things done, but with less effort.
Basically smart devices are smart to allow the user to be lazy, dumb or both ;)
> So basically what you’re saying is that you want your “smart” TV experience to be just like a desktop PC experience.
Yeah another way to say it is that I want my smart devices to be general computing devices. For example I've build my own NAS instead of getting something like a Synology or a WD NAS, I'm in the process of building a router/firewall using OPNsense etc.
I spend more in the short term but less in the long term due to the ability to reuse old parts etc.
> Basically smart devices are smart to allow the user to be lazy, dumb or both ;)
I tried to do the same thing, but the 4K+HDR streaming story is fully broken/DRM'd to hell on PC. You simply cannot stream 4K+HDR in most (all?) services on a modern PC (my HTPC is also a gaming PC... so Nvidia graphics in my case).
I went with Apple TV + Plex (along with D+/NFLX/Peacock/HBO Max/Hulu/AppleTV/Prime/Cable... but I still can't find everything I want)
I think the main problem is HDR right? Because I don't think that 4K per se would be an issue? To be fair my TV is not 4K so I haven't tried 4K streaming... Even on my gaming PC I don't have 4K because I preferred to spend on a higher refresh rate 1440p rather than a 4K panel so I really don't have a direct experience.
The problem is that providers will refuse to serve you that content in most cases. Some will let you have content if you use their windows store app on a sufficiently modern PC to support the CPU assisted DRM, at least until there's an exploit for that and then they'll discontinue sending that content to your system and you need to buy a new one.
It's fairly inconvenient to have to use your phone as the remote, especially when you want to do something on your phone (or watch something else) while the kids watch netflix.
We have disney+, and my TV apparently thinks we're not subscribed. My phone does, though, and I can cast from that. Yes, we can watch Encanto again, but it's very jarring when the normal interactions with the TV don't work.
>It's fairly inconvenient to have to use your phone as the remote, especially when you want to do something on your phone (or watch something else) while the kids watch netflix.
But when you cast from an application with integrated chromecast support (as e.g. Netflix) then the phone is free to use as you wish while the kids are watching. I do this all the time. I start the cast, then use my normal TV remote to pause, for volume control etc. You don't need the actual app for most things and you can use the phone/tablet for other things (I have to find translations for my wife, for example, while watching).
Let's put it another way: having to cast from the phone to the TV is like using a normal screw that requires a screwdriver. A TV where you don't need the phone is like one of those tool-less thumbscrews[1]. They are convenient because in order to use one tool (the screw) you don't have to reach for another tool (the screwdriver).
I've been able to stream Netflix, Disney+, and Prime to my TV via chromecast, and it's a weird mix. The main detriment is that for all the apps, when streaming from my phone, people watching the TV can't use the TV+Remote to do things like pick a different episode, or pick a different show -- so this makes it already a crap alternative unless I want to be involved in all the future viewing decisions.
One nice thing about the phone apps is that you can search for a different thing to watch _while_ currently watching something. Fast-forward/rewind also tends to be a little more intuitive with adraggable progress bar, except small-scale rewinds (1-2 minutes) of a movie is _harder_ because a few pixels is difficult to select cleanly.
I will say though that Prime is _freaking fantastic_ when streamed from my phone, better even than using the native TV interface. The Prime phone app lets you navigate _by scene_ in a show (e.g. Bosch) which my tv app won't let me do. I wish Netflix and D+ would/could copy that, specifically. I wish it didn't have spoilers in scene descriptions, but being able to say, "Hey go back to the start of the council of Elrond" is really nice, rather than having to use +/- 30 second increments.
Not OP, but speaking for myself, one of the biggest annoyances is that both Google and Apple actively resist the actual standard that's already there and widely supported by playback devices (Miracast), and instead push for their own proprietary walled garden solutions (Chromecast, AirPlay).
Google in particular is the worst offender here because they actually had Miracast in Android all the way up to Nexus 4 - and then deliberately removed it! Other vendors of Android devices generally reinstate it in their distros, although I do wonder how long that is going to last (probably right until Google makes not supporting it a condition of getting Google Play certified).
Casting from a phone is a terrible experience. I want to sit down on the couch, mash some remote buttons and watch something. I don't want to find a phone to cast from. Whose phone would we use? Mine, my wifes, my relatives who are over? What if they want to change the program? Now they are figuring out all the casting business? No, pick up the remote and use it like normal.
I see. Pre-Covid I used to have my phone with me more often, with the whole WFH situation I don't really see a reason to use it since I have other devices in my home that give me a better experience (larger screen, physical keyboard, good speakers etc).
I treat my phone like I do Google. Every day I try to be a bit less dependent on it. I usually don't know where my phone is, physically, and only use it for banking and car navigation. I use WhatsApp through the web interface. I dream of a world without smartphones.
yeah I am like you, I even tried a PinePhone because I hate the current mobile OSes so much. (Unfortunately PinePhone is not 100% ready to be a daily driver though). Then COVID came, I haven't commuted for 2 years now and I stopped caring about phones. I carry my phone only in the weekend and only if I'm out, not if I'm e.g. bbq-ing at home.
LG uses WebOS which is not among the ones I tried. In some of the other systems the ads generally cover the upper half of the home screen, then you have the app icons below that.
Yeah, I completely agree. Vehicle manufacturers can't just come and change out the steering wheel and dashboard in your vehicle, for example. Why can software vendors change out the total functionality of a piece of software you paid for? Especially irreversibly, in the case of DRM-laden platforms like game consoles, iOS, etc. where you cannot undo an update once it's installed, or cannot refuse an update if you want to actually use the software. Recently an iOS app I use almost daily pushed an update that removes a feature I relied on. The dev has never fixed the issue and has made other minor changes since, subtly indicating their change is intentional and permanent, so I'm just screwed forever and lost a core piece of functionality I depended on. Great. This is fine.
> Yeah, I completely agree. Vehicle manufacturers can't just come and change out the steering wheel and dashboard in your vehicle, for example.
Actually, they can. There was a huge airbag recall a few years ago, affecting maybe half a dozen automobile manufacturers because they all bought their airbags from the same supplier. In at least one case, the dash had to be modified in order to fit a replacement airbag because drop-in replacements could not be procured quickly without disrupting new car production. It would not surprise me if some of the cases also required modifying or replacing the steering wheel.
How is this relevant? The owner has to physically bring the vehicle into the dealer. The dealer can't change or replace anything while it is in my garage or driving down the street. There are physical barriers that require the owners consent beyond checking a box.
You are correct, the vehicle manufacturer cannot come and take the dash away. However, under literal threat of metal shrapnel exploding in one's face [1], I would argue that the consumer is coerced with great bodily harm to present his vehicle for service.
It's a tangent, but it's incredible to me that people used to ship video games and other software on physical media and it worked fine. Now you can drop a big turd on the steam store initially and it's just business as usual. Cynicism aside, I really do admire the dev and QA teams that pulled this off. It's such a different world now.
It cuts both ways, games would take half decades to get done or only cover a thousandth of the ground current games cover. Imagine what Minecraft would be, shipped on physical media.
We also wouldn't get games like Goat Simulator who basically set a low expectation bar in exchange for low cost, best effort game play. I'm kind of ok with more "garbage" if we also get more weird/low budget games that wouldn't exist otherwise.
...which is still true today. It's common that large titles take 4+ years in development if they're not built on an existing game's engine and actually release in a finished state. Activision was able to release a new CoD every year because they cycled through 3 studios of which each had 3 years time for a game that's mostly a mod of the previous one with slight improvements to the underlying tech.
And even then it's now almost expected that it'll take another 3+ months to get in a state that the game was meant to be released in.
> only cover a thousandth of the ground current games cover
That may be true if you go back to the Atari era, but even ~30 years old RPGs can still hold up well in terms of content. It's great that now we don't always need publishers to create & ship games and can release updates online, but that's no excuse to sell incomplete products.
There was a time in the gaming market were quickly developed, cheap, often not-so-good games on physical media were a thing: 8-bit home computer era. So it's possible to imagine that coming back in more modern times, in a timeline were internet wasn't the obvious alternative.
Take a look at the games from that era and the games you get right now. Sure, more has changed than just being able to update things, but the ability to fix issues later and continually update games has lead to much much better games with way more content. And you can always chose to wait a year for everything to settle.
I don't find this to be much of an issue because rarely is this ever a shock or surprise to the semi educated consumer. The game comes out and you see 100 people complain on reddit that it's buggy, so you just don't buy it until its resolved. Steam also has a pretty no fuss refund system for the cases you didn't see anything beforehand.
What seems to happen is people want the game as soon as possible but also complain when it isn't perfect on release but overall they enjoy playing it sooner more than they are bothered by its lack of polish.
Going to depend on what you like. But my favorite modern games have been Rimworld, Skyrim (still part of the internet era), and Planet Zoo. I love how all of these games provide hundreds of hours of possible gameplay without getting stale.
And if you have VR, Pavlov has been the most fun I have ever had gaming. It looks like a CSGO clone on the surface but it becomes the most absurd/surreal experience ever with custom maps. It's almost like playing laser tag in one of those optical illusion room of mirrors type attractions.
My feeling is that this is a temporary thing that leverages previous generations propensity for compliance and happily being controlled and screwed over constantly.
I have been appalled at the way people bend over and open their wallet since I was a preteen. Nordic and all the other rent seeking shits count on people blindly using their product they way they are told to. I'm surprised Nordic isn't suing their customers yet.
The problem with 'smart' devices I think is something akin to a conflict of interest.
On the one hand you're purchasing hardware, which you expect to own and control.
On the other, there is software that runs on a subscription model which 'coincidentally' restricts the functionality of the hardware, because they want to stop people from bypassing the sub.
The hardware effectively becomes useless if the subscription service becomes unavailable or is taken down (e.g. if the company is acquired and the new company doesn't want to support that stuff any more). It might still function mechanically, but it now has a broken appendage through no fault of your own.
I just don't think I could justify a purchase like that nos unless I could square that circle. I'm not going to pay 2k for a Peloton bike that holds itself hostage unless I pay another 40 a month.
That's a different debate IMO. Not so long ago we had external storage that only worked with Sony products. We now have headphones that only work with Apple phones.
Exclusivity always existed at weird levels, here the issue would be more about having the option to freeze/protect a product's software state to get out of the update treadmill.
> If part of the product I've paid for is software, and the company can update it without customer consent at any time, then I can't rely on the product's features. Period.
That's about any electric car manufactured after 2020.
I've never owned an electric car, but that doesn't surprise me. I'm curious whether you are just stating the fact, or suggesting that the practice is commonplace, therefore justified.
Even if it is software, I don't want automatically updating. The problem introduced by automatically updating is higher than the problem they fixed in my experience.
For example, windows updating. There was an updating when professor gave the talk in class. Windows updating popped out. There is no way for professor to stop the updating. He missed the chance and windows already went into blue updating screen. So, We had a break, and professor went to his office to find another computer.
Another problem is that automatically updating almost always runs silently. When I played online game and the game went laggy, I always tabbed out to see what happened with resource monitor. It is easy to find out there is whatever updating using CPU or bandwidth.
I feel updating just like legally raping my device. Oh. It is OUR device.
One option is to never buy hardware where you haven't installed the OS/software yourself and therefore have control over updates. This is kind of limiting though since lots of hardware doesn't support installing your own OS and Linux/BSD/etc don't support various hardware.
I similar avoid purchasing devices that I can’t have full ownership of.
I’ve often thought about starting a hardware company that provides all the source code, schematics, bill of materials with the sale of a product. This is a dream and a desire I have for the things that I do buy.
For example, I have several digital cinema film cameras that I do not plan to upgrade or sell. Unfortunately they are showing their age and have some fixable faults. I have spent the last two years to reverse engineering these cameras to identify the fault. If only I had a schematic.
I don’t expect the industry or politics to change any time soon. If only a hardware company could change the status quo by enabling their customers to be enabled to have full ownership and access.
> I’ve often thought about starting a hardware company that provides all the source code, schematics, bill of materials with the sale of a product. This is a dream and a desire I have for the things that I do buy.
Hardware in the old Soviet states came with all the blueprints and engineering schematics to fabricate replacement parts in the field.
Tablets can bounce around on a treadmill if you really get going, and 10" is not 32". And you think customers are going to wall-mount a TV in the garage where a lot of treadmills live, rather than just buy a built-in screen? I mean, yeah, that's exactly what I did, but not everyone (not but a few?) are even that handy.
And on top of everything else, customers thought that they could watch whatever they wanted on their attached 32" LCD screen. Why fuck with wall-mounting a TV or a bouncy tablet when they sell a treadmill with the screen built-in?
I don't think that's plausible considering the users knew they were "hacking" the machine to view this content.
> But Howard, and many other NordicTrack owners, weren’t drawn to the hardware by iFit’s videos. They were drawn in by how easy the fitness machines were to hack.
> To get into his X32i, all Howard needed to do was tap the touchscreen 10 times, wait seven seconds, then tap 10 more times. Doing so unlocked the machine—letting Howard into the underlying Android operating system.
Personally, I would never purchase a device with a screen that intentionally locked me out like this.
even if not for the content/software lock.. modularity is almost always better. screen technology is constantly improving. maybe i want to upgrade later without throwing the whole treadmill out?
It’s called military surplus Velcro. You get a second rubber case for the tablet that you apply Velcro to the back of then apply the other side to the treadmill in an area where it makes full contact. I have seen videos of people in Velcro suits jump and stick to walls so I’m sure it would work with a tablet.
Wrong question: wtf TV sized screen attached to whatever fitness gizmo when smaller screen and a whichever size you want wall/pedestal mounted TV will be likey cheaper and usable outside your jogging hours.
That is not always practical. Also, why purchase a tablet or install a wall mounted screen, when there is a perfectly good screen right in front of you.
I bought a sleep number bed, and now after like 2 years, suddenly one of the bedsides has decided to completely deflate around 5am every night, waking me up and forcing me to open up my phone and tell it to reinflate. I haven't contacted the company yet (out of laziness I guess), but I mean... it's a bed. A thing I lay on. Definitely turned me off to smart products, at least ones that worked perfectly fine as dumb devices.
For those of us are were of age when the internet and (later) big-data became a thing, we can only applaud the work of so many smart people. We see engineering plus entrepreneurship at its best. The varied inversion, however, of who has the majority control of an object or service post-purchase has lately gone to the provider not customer. Folks, that's a problem. We've seen this,
- here
- John Deer self-fix stories
- Apple store stories (and Android/Google variations)
- Several flavors of techs at places like best buy quivering in their boots at an Apple fix. Techs keep blabbering on about Apple repair policy and what they cannot do. I finally had to tell the guy: Start telling me what you can do, or I'll talk to somebody else. All I asked for was if they have a screw driver to take the bottom plate off, which I later got off Amazon.
- General issues of privacy
We gotta get back to customer satisfaction. Eventually --- not as quick as we might prefer --- customers will realize they have the stronger position and use it. Indeed, if I plunk down money for an object, my assessment counts. I do not accept some paper pusher a large-corp-America gainsaying that.
There are reasons behind updates and auto-updates. Bugs, features, users which did not consistently update and were left with insecure or buggy software. Then again, updates are also a mess.
I think this is a problem which should have a mostly technical solution: If most software was updated as today and users could rollback at will, most problems would be solved. That's a better way than making updates illegal.
Companies could unbundle security patches from UX updates if they wanted to. For the software I use regularly, I pretty much always want security updates and never want UI/UX changes.
Of course the incentives are totally out of whack, since bundling the updates is cheaper and many UX "improvements" exist to make the company more money, at the expense of the user.
Once users are conditioned or forced to auto-update why wouldn't a profit maximizing company make changes to increase its bottom line, regardless of how it helps or hurts users?
In a lot of software I worked with, unbundling core and UI would've been an immense amount of effort. You basically have the option to either maintain two GUIs side-by-side - including integrating new concepts (think, for example, supporting OTP and creating the workflow) and updating both for datastructure changes - or you never update your UX at all. At worst, you end up in a situation where your two GUIs support a distinct set of features.
You can correctly accuse companies of a lot of things, but decoupling the UX really is a very hard problem.
PCs too. I’ve lost hours to OSX updates that bricked my dev setup (making me reinstall / compile libraries, disabling my second monitor, etc.). First thing I do is turn off auto update and wait for releases to bake for a while and until I have enough time to deal with any breakages.
I bought Elite Dangerous, played it loads, really enjoyed it. One day, they said 'we're no longer supporting MacOS'. Fine, I thought... except it turns out even their single player mode needs to be online to work, and they were disabling that as well.
No refunds, no apologies, just a game I'd paid 50 dollars for suddenly didn't work any more. Ultimately, still value for money given how many hours I'd ploughed into it before they broke it, but yeah, I think twice now about that kind of purchase.
But if you do that how could the poor company possibly make any money? How could it collect and monetize your private information? How could it advertise to you? How could it own you and sell access to you to other companies who want to reach you?
i agree, if you buy something, you buy it for how it is, now sometimes we may want to update for our benefit but other times maybe not, maybe updating would cause more harm than help. therefore we should have to consent to updates, i 100% agree with this and it’s not even that much code to add a “is it cool if we update?” alert.
> This type of 'update' is one reason I tend to stay away from so-called 'smart' devices.
That is why I call those devices 'dumb' devices (reminds me of a SciFi book where the AI helpers are called "artifically stupids"). Smart devices are local, no auto-updates, working with no issue in the event of an outage.
I have many smart devices, all that would stop working in the event of an internet outage, would be the voice interface.
> That is why I call [smart] devices 'dumb' devices
"Dumb devices" is already an actual term, already used to refer to non-smart devices, so you are confusing anyone that has not learnt your custom vocabulary.
This is why I disable updates for every piece of software that I use. People criticize this often, but it puts me in control. I can then review updates when I feel like it, and update as I see fit.
Linux and LineageOS are godsends in this regard too. I even like to maintain, update my things from time to time, but not always, and definitely not when Mr. Windows thinks it's the best thing to do right before my gaming time. Last time the stupid thing made me miss the time by half an hour, when all of my friends were waiting for me. I'm still salty about that.
I don't think the updates on this treadmill could be disabled. You have to connect it to the internet to use the screen and if it's connected it's getting updated.
Dear god don’t get me started on mobile terraria. They completely ruined the gameplay. Common sense would tell any product team to at least provide the option to switch back to the old interface (they didn’t add or take away anything that would disallow this) but NO. I started playing it because it was fun, simple and easy to learn/play, now the controls have been completely ruined for mobile.
I just bought Terraria a couple days ago to see what it was all about. After 20 minutes of futzing about with it on my iPad, I deleted it because it was so terrible to control. Now to learn that the developers only recently released an update to a 9 year old game that broke once working controls. Wild!
You're not buying new games if you're enjoying nine-year-old games.
Did you know that before The Phantom Menace, then-20-year-old Star Wars would compete with new movies at rental shops? I personally believe that this is why Star Wars was "updated": it was too resilient to being replaced. The rental place didn't need to buy so many new copies of new movies when they could keep making money on old Star Wars. So the studios needed a way to make Star Wars less appealing.
Of all the theories I have heard on why Star Wars was ruined (I agree) this is the first I’ve heard of this one :) . Politics aside, money does often seem to be the biggest motivator for creation and destruction of things. It is inherently not progressive to have one thing that is built perfectly and never needs to be altered or repaired. Progression often seems to be more of a quest for change for its own sake rather than improvement. Something isn’t profitable if it has no planned obsolescence.
> if part of the product I've paid for is software, and the company can update it without customer consent at any time, then I can't rely on the product's features. Period.
I don't necessarily see where "customer consent" really enters the picture. Even if installing updates were optional, at some point you almost certainly want to install the updates, as it will contain bug fixes and enhancements in other areas of the product.
This is much more a question of relying on "off-label" feature / bugs in a product, which will always be an issue. The problem here is that the advertised experience was "you can only use our content" and that should have been enough to scare off potential buyers from considering it as an option.
The method to get into "God Mode" is the same, except now it prompts you for a code. Someone has figured out how to calculate it and actually created a website to generate codes for you.
>long responseCode = new Random((long) Integer.parseInt(iFitCode)).nextInt(999999);
It's not a perfect workaround, as it resets on the next boot, but I've seen that people are installing apps such as Taskbar which float overtop the iFit app and start on boot, allowing you to still launch your apps like Netflix etc even without God Mode enabled.
It's only a matter of time before Nordic decides to block this method as well. We should also be looking into how to block updates to these devices.
Normally you can block any device's update if you figure out the server for the update content/update check, and block it out from your router and/or DNS.
The remedy to that is that the thing will stop working after a while - like how Intel x86 CPUs turn off after 30 mins without their precious spy co-processor[0], or how Diablo 2 Resurrected discontinues working after 30 days of being offline[1]. Of course another remedy is that you're free to buy a similar thing from another manufacturer, that's not completely dropped the ball on the issue. That is, until all of the manufacturers drop the ball, like how the situation is with x86 CPUs and Intel ME / AMD ST.
The true remedy would be well thought out, well enforced legislation. But yeah, I'm not holding my breath either.
If we organize as a society, which in part means educating along with fixing the voting systems in most places to be fair and balanced (like by drowning out industrial complex lobby money by giving every eligible voter a $100/year voucher to contribute to the politician of their choice they feel best matches their interests), then we make laws to prevent such abusive-exploitive behaviour by companies.
The remedy for that is to encrypt the communication
The remedy for that is to MITM the server connection
The remedy for that is HSTS...
It's a cat a mouse game, the better solution for society (imo) is to have specific rights enshrined by law to allow for a qualified 3rd parties to access a system's internals.
The one advantage of playing the cat-and-mouse game is that the longer it goes on, the more complexity ends up being in the firmware (TLS, HPKP, etc as you already listed), which increases the likelihood of a bug that can be exploited to take over it.
In that vein, it might be worth noting that this thing is just a treadmill. There's this whole fancy computer attached probably via just a handful of very simple wires to the actual treadmill part that anyone cares about. If they get too obnoxious about the computer, you can just open the treadmill, yank the computer out, and replace it with something from China that costs $20
Of course, that'll then get attacked via the legal system for violating DRM.. ugh
"Luckily" in the US, the carrier oligopoly here won't sell you a cheap IoT plan for cell connectivity, and the "lifetime" plans sold to manufacturers are probably at least $50-100 in volume.
Maybe not on optional treadmills, but that's already here for CPAP machines that insurance pays for - they log data to an SD card in case you don't have reception, but it also has an LTE modem to upload it so the insurance company can check up on you and make sure you're using that machine, or else charge you more money for it.
> It's only a matter of time before Nordic decides to block this method as well.
Maaaybe.
The public statement from them sounds like it was legal whining about liability issues, and if that's actually true (which, well) then if it has to be sufficiently intentional on your part that may be sufficient for them to leave well alone.
Certainly worth preparing for that not being the case though.
IANAL, but are there any actual cases where someone or a class successfully sued a company for using their product off-label in such a way? This kind of stuff seems to me like how schools no longer permit students to go out for lunch, citing liability that they almost assuredly never had in the first place.
I can at least see the argument that tapping the screen a couple times in a certain pattern might not be sufficient, but having to generate a code is. I think it's a ridiculous argument, but I wouldn't be even remotely shocked that some octogenarian judge who doesn't own a cell phone is convinced by it.
Right, and legal departments kind of exist to avoid that sort of ridiculous argument fucking over their employers.
I don't endorse the argument -logically- at all, but if it's "legal being (justifiably) paranoid" then while as I said preparing for that not being it is still worthwhile, the extent to which they'll chase down workarounds may have limits nonetheless.
This is great, thanks for posting this site. I am one of those who bought this awesome treadmill for several reasons, including to watch netflix and plex. It's been frustrating not being able to easily do this... I have just been listening to podcasts from my phone.
DHCP advertise an http proxy to it with a PAC file and block non-proxy communications. It should do the right thing eventually, at which point you can catalogue the usual traffic exchanges and then block anything not in them and/or just the software update URLs (which requires inspection over time, as there may be many).
Surely one can just block the update service via something like a pihole? I do this for my Vizio TV. They're notorious, as as most smart TVs now, for calling home and everywhere else.
Jeeze, I will stick with my modular solution: an ipad on a music stand. This is compatible not only with any commodity treadmill, but also bike trainers, ellipticals, and making vroomvroom noises on the motorcycle when it's too icy to actually ride. I could also swap out the ipad for a laptop, non-ipad tablet, or a collection of cute succulents should I desire it.
snark aside, I'm a bicycle guy and I really like that we have an ecosystem of bluetooth trainers and apps that all work pretty well with each other. Simulating hilly courses is actually really useful and has made me a better rider, so it's not like I'm advocating being a total luddite. While I prefer to ride outdoors in the sun, my area in Iowa is extremely flat and the only difficulty comes from the wind, and I find the new toys are a lot more fun than a dumb trainer with a sufferfest DVD. I don't really know much about the treadmill scene but I hope you guys have access to similar stuff.
But really, my understanding is that these fancier treadmills map incline/speed/whatever data to the video file to make it “more realistic”. I think there may even be a sort of MMO/live ghost feature?
Personally I think I’d rather just have music I like and work out at a pace that’s comfortable for me, but to each their own I suppose.
I'm a zwift user and I really like it. You can designate a course and it will adjust the resistance to match the elevation changes. There is live or ghost racing (with simulated drafting, which is cool) and other neat things, but the routes and structured training is what I'm there for.
My tacx trainer was only $300 or so when I bought it, which was comparable to non-bluetooth trainers. That said, I already owned a fancy roadbike to use with it, which is not a negligible cost.
Yes, but a cheap treadmill + $3 vs a $4000 treadmill? Kind of a hard sell. Like I’m going to have to go pick up the power splitter myself? I don’t have time for that
> I will stick with my modular solution: an ipad on a music stand.
My smart rower consists of a C2 Model D sitting in front of an old-school panasonic plasma TV in a spare/theater room. Both components are over 10 years old by now and neither show the slightest signs of giving up the ghost. That TV doesn't even know how to talk to the internet, and I lost the USB cable for the PM4, so everything is effectively off-grid.
Funny, I use iPad on a music stand, too. With my bike trainier (Hammer H3). BTW, you can get the Sufferfest content on the newer Wahoo Systm app. I don't mind paying the $15/month for it for a the three to four winter months spent training inside. (They also have newer content, too, than the old DVDs.)
If you're into running on a treadmill, this looks like a very sweet setup. It has a huge touch screen that's just in the right spot, you can easily reach it while running, and it has gimmicks like automatic adjustment of inclination.
It's not cheap, but it looks like really nice hardware. I totally understand why some people would want something like that, especially if you can install generic Android apps on it!
It's funny you mentioned the sun. I enjoyed the sun a little too much when I was younger. So one feature I enjoy in exercise bikes these days is the radiation protection.
The accessory part is also pretty neat though. I use a low end exercise bike that came with a snap-on plastic tablet holder. It works pretty well but it got me thinking about hacking the thing. I was finally able to mount a scanner radio, a ham radio, exercise bands, and my phone along with the tablet. Then my kids decided to take it off my hands for a while...I think Dad looked a little too motivated.
In this particular case, some of the runs from iFit instructors are actually quite good, and it cool that it adjusts the speed and incline to match the instruction. Probably not worth the extra $$$$ but it is pretty cool. But now I also want to be able to watch regular videos. I usually walk outdoors for an hour a day to get my 10,000 steps in, and the Chicago winter makes that tough, so I'm thinking an hour of walking on the treadmill while i catch up on my favorite shows might be a good substitute.
If you want a really nice version of this, companies like Heckler Design, Manfrotto, Triad Orbit, and König & Meyer make excellent stands with tons of adapters for lights, cameras, mics, speakers, phones, ipads...
My current WFH setup includes a Manfrotto 244N magic arm attached with a RAM mount to a Rokform RAM ball that very securely attaches to my Rokform iPhone case. It's clamped to my desk with a Manfrotto 035 SuperClamp. The RAM adapter is P/N RAP-B-366U and the double swivel on the RAM side is a RAP-B-201U . The Rokform part is "Universal Ball Adapter Phone Mount" SKU: 337101
RAM also makes a great iPad "X-Grip" holder, along with tons of different mounts for different situations, especially vehicles and things like exercise bikes (e.g. look for stuff like a "RAM® Double U-Bolt Ball Base for 1" - 1.25" Rails" or indeed their actual handlebar mounts). These are sturdy, pro-level mounts, not the cheap disposable junk from no-name brands on Amazon.
For my Zwift stationary bike setup that I use my old road bike on, I just use a $15 Niteize Handleband to attach my phone plus a Vornado 783DC made-in-USA DC brushless fan to keep the sweat levels low.
Another couple brands worth checking out would be Joby's stuff (I have an old GorillaPod DSLR that holds my webcam these days) and "The Joy Factory" who make pro-level iPad clamps / stands.
>My current WFH setup includes a Manfrotto 244N magic arm attached with a RAM mount to a Rokform RAM ball that very securely attaches to my Rokform iPhone case. It's clamped to my desk with a Manfrotto 035 SuperClamp. The RAM adapter is P/N RAP-B-366U and the double swivel on the RAM side is a RAP-B-201U . The Rokform part is "Universal Ball Adapter Phone Mount" SKU: 337101
No offense, but that sounds insanely complicated for putting an iPad on a stand in front of a threadmill. If it was me I wouldn't even want to know what a RAM adaptor is, I would just want to buy a tripod with a clamp for an iPad.
Give it a go with just your phone too before shelling out for a tablet. When I go to the gym I sometimes just lay my phone on top of the machine by the controls (about music stand level) and at that distance from my eyes the diagonal is plenty large enough
Same. I have a couple of used treadmills that I repaired for dirt cheap and a crappy TV mounted to the wall. Treadmill cupholders make great remote holders.
"NordicTrack says it supports right-to-repair rules. However, because of its equipment’s moving parts, the spokesperson says, it believes that restricting access to its operating system is important for safety. "
The real reason they don't want people using other apps or watching third party videos is because anyone doing that is not spending money on iFit. Or, at least, not as much as they could be. NordicTrack likely discounted these treadmills to squeeze out competitors with the intention of making their money back by locking customers into iFit.
If a few users hack their treadmills, that's not going to hurt NordicTrack's bottom line. If most users are doing it because it's as easy as tapping the screen 10 times, then there's a problem. So, NordicTrack has made it harder to gain admin access. Not impossible. Just harder. More people will go back to spending money on iFit, the determined few will roll up their sleeves, and the business model will be restored.
The problem is that this business model is a bait and switch. When people pay for a treadmill they don't expect to be locked into further monthly payments to unlock its features. It's inherently dishonest, and the victim, aside from users, is the competitor who produces an honest product that's paid for entirely up front and is, hence, more expensive and less competitive.
I really wonder about the payoff in the continual cat and mouse game here. At some point, you are going to be paying a sizeable sum to your devs to try a lock out a relatively small amount of technically capable people who will circumvent the system rather than pay a subscription fee. I agree making a little harder once probably convinced a few people to pay up...but after that it has to be diminishing returns and eventually negative returns. I wonder what the tradeoff would be if they marketed their system was one that as open and you could do so many things with it. Like, imagine if the commercials showed how you could use your treadmill but also connect to any app you wanted, like Netflix. To me, that would be a big draw.
On top of that, iFit is not very good. Continuously adjusting incline stopped being interesting about 2 months in. The only thing I liked was that it recorded a running total of distance and elevation, which was good for motivation. I walk outside more than I use the treadmill nowadays, and I use my Apple Watch for motivating statistics. I will probably just sell my treadmill or just give it away.
Do they not want to enable access to god mode because you can tinker with the treadmill parameters and do unsafe things or because they think Netflix will somehow break the treadmill?
If it's the former, then they should keep god mode for treadmill service operations inaccessible but also allow loading apps like Netflix and Hulu. I'd wager that streaming apps are what most of the people using god mode want.
My solution to this problem would be legislation that allows customers, if they wish to, to return devices for a full refund if the company that manufactures the device makes a change that removes functionality that the customer valued. This doesn't prevent the company from making the change, it simply makes sure that they incur a cost for doing so, and it makes whole any customer affected by the change.
For example suppose the UI of a treadmill has a "Last 5 workout programs used" section on the front page of the UI to allow the user to select with one tap a recent program. An update replace that with a "recents..." button which takes you to a new screen that shows the last 10 programs used.
Is no longer providing one tap access to the most recent 5 programs removal of functionality? Or is the feature just that it has a way to recall recent programs so as long as there still is a way to do that, even if more convoluted, it does not count as a feature removal?
How about functionality that was not in the device when it was purchased but was added by an update? If the law does apply to that, then in effect the manufacturer will be locked into only ever adding functionality. After a few updates the UI is probably going to be a total mess.
If the law only applies to features present at purchase, then manufactures will just ship bare bones devices that only implement what is necessary to make the claims on the box and in their advertisements not false. Then the first update will add a ton of stuff to make it more than bare bones.
After a few updates the UI is probably going to be a total mess
After a few messes the UI teams will figure out that you have to advertise and implement features in a way that doesn't interfere with user's habit. E.g. has a start screen where you may pin "last 5 workout programs", "recents...", any menu item, and a button to access other functions at top right.
Wow this is by far the best solution to this pervasive problem I've seen, no irony. This way, you don't need legislators go into technical and domain specific detail. Producers are incentivized to provide optional updates or "downgrades" if necessary, and if they shut their cloud services off and brick the device, people have a right to return it. Additionally, it can't be abused by customers if the company acts well.
However, we still need to tackle the subscription issue, I.e. That manufacturers can hide behind "you didn't renew the subscription for this printer/treadmill so now we brick it". Any ideas?
This basically means that everything that has software updates can be returned forever.
Like most of things in life, the answer is very rarely a new myopic and ill-conceived law added to the thick stack of existing incomprehensible legislation.
This basically means that everything that has software updates can be returned forever.
It doesn't. It means that functionality cannot be changed in a degrading way, but upgrading and non-conflicting security updates are still allowed.
For a customer, money upfront and money over time is the same (adjusting for the interest rate). They don't need just a dead brick, whatever it costs in production. When your saas stops having a feature, you stop paying. This is no different, except that I'd vote for a law which amortized the upfront cost to the real usage time. E.g. I bought a treadmill with 2-year warranty for $4000 and it stopped doing a claimed feature after a year (iow, became broken from my perspective). I either receive a service which returns the feature, or get $2000 back + 20% fine for inconvenience.
Not the first time a company has pushed an update that removes important features.
To my knowledge the first high-profile instance of this was when Sony updated the PS3 to remove Linux support, which resulted in a successful class-action in the US. [0]
Consumers who don't want products to have features disappear. The main thing class action suites accomplish is punishing the offender so that potential offenders in the future think twice.
> I have stacks of class action letters and in almost every case I get exactly zero...
I was pleasantly surprised when I got around $250 CAD from a Lenovo class action suit. I bought one of their consumer laptops that had a piece of crapware on it. It was big news when it happened. Otherwise, I normally get maybe $20 for the class actions that I sign up for.
> Otherwise, I normally get maybe $20 for the class actions that I sign up for.
Your area requires lawyers to solicit class members to sign up for class actions? Lucky! Around here you'll just be grouped into the class action without asking for consent. If you're lucky they'll mail you a notice about the suit on a postcard and let you "opt out" by locating a non-editable PDF of a form buried somewhere on their site, printing it & filling it in by hand, and sending it to their headquarters by certified mail at your own expense. (If you're less lucky you get to write up your own free-form opt-out letter and hope it meets their standards.) If you don't do this then you lose the ability to sue as an individual, or to refrain from being (ab)used to bully the defendant (and enrich the lawyers) in the event that you don't agree with the basis for the suit.
My pet feature removal case is when they pushed an update for a GTA that removed a good bunch of the original songs from the radio. The articles I found are for GTA IV but I'm certain that the issue was with an earlier version at first.
I feel like that was actually a fairly legitimate removal by Sony. Sony was selling the consoles at a loss in order to make money on the games. People were taking advantage by buying cheap Linux computers, never allowing Sony to recoup money from the initial sale. I don't have much sympathy for the people abusing the system in this particular case. Probably an unpopular opinion around here.
>I don't have much sympathy for the people abusing the system
I disagree with the premise that it's unethical to use a product I purchase and own from a for-profit company for a use that turned out not to be profitable for it. Note that it wasn't much of a hack; Sony sold consoles with the option to install another operating system from its menu [0].
Since the move was so unprofitable to it, Sony should not have offered the option to users in the first place. But since it happened, executives at Sony then just decided that it made business sense for Sony to disable the option in a firmware update.
I just don't understand the framing where it's as if Sony did a favor for its customers who then "took advantage," when Sony just miscalculated a business policy to serve its own self-interest.
They could not do that from the start, but they did, because they planned larger sales. Whether it turns out to be more profitable is their risk, not users. The important change is that people can't have an expectation (a risk) anymore which would turn out to be false a month after. Inability is a much, much lesser issue than a broken expectation.
"OtherOS" was added to evade game console tariffs by claiming the PS3 as a computer, a similar tactic to the one used to attempt to classify the PS2 as a "digital processing unit" to avoid EU import duty.
Sony's removal of OtherOS wasn't just deceptive and an abuse of customers' trust, it was conspiracy to commit customs and tax fraud.
Also, while I bought my PS3 to learn parallel programming, I found that it wasn't that great for it. The CBE was really unintuitive, there was only framebuffer access to the GPU-RSX chipset, and with just 256MB RAM, $600 would have been better put towards a dual core CPU and any discrete GPU if you wanted a functional Linux computer.
Classically the feature was taken away to make you safer :)
> The block on privilege mode was automatically installed because we believe it enhances security and safety while using fitness equipment that has multiple moving parts,
This is related to why I bought a concept2 erg recently. Hurt my achilles and needed to switch to a low impact exercise, which I prefer to be able to do at home rather than going somewhere else (so swimming is out).
Looked at Peloton, but it's about twice as much as an erg up front, has running costs each month, and what seemed to be many more points of failure (which includes the electronics). The Concept2[0] is a tank that should last me a very long time. Space is an issue (I had to shove my dining table to the side), but the workout is amazing and I have a lot of faith in the machine to last. Plus it has a pretty straightforward bluetooth connection if I want to get data out and multiple USB and ethernet ports on the very simple monitor it came with.
I own a concept 2. I have 4.6 million meters on it. I watch programming videos in Spanish while I workout(To learn Spanish). This is my "Smart Workout Machine".
Mainly I am using LinkedIn Learning right now, it's what my company is paying for right now. Learning platforms like that let you search by language and closed captioning sometimes, then LinkedIn let's me share that to my "activity feed" and "certifications".
I have a concept2 rower as well. I didn't buy it for the SDK[0], but I love that they keep the tech minimal and provide tools for third party developers. It's a company I'm glad to support.
Concept2 machines are bomb proof. These things are designed for intensive use in gym settings which far outweighs the use I put in a single individual. I've put in countless meters on mine over the years and it's still practically good as new.
I normally ride a bike on a smart trainer during the winter (when not riding outside), but am planning to buy a Concept2 Erg before next winter. It should be great for core and back strength, something cycling -- especially indoor cycling -- benefits greatly from but just doesn't do.
It's amazing to me just how (relatively) cheap the Concept2 is. Solid, well made, and reliable.
Concept 2 is indeed the cheaper and better option for an erg. Aside from being very sturdy machines at reasonable prices compared to your nordictracs and pelotons, old models are supported essentially forever with spare parts and detailed installation/fix instructions. I dont know of any rowers who don't swear by them.
I picked up a model A for just this reason. $120 on craigslist for a 35 year old machine. It is super solid, but will need to replace a few minor parts soon. And from what I can tell they are all available for purchase from concept2, which is awesome.
Following Wirecutter's suggestion, I got a ProForm 505 treadmill. Like Wirecutter said, it's cheap, a bit janky, but does the job adequately for a "non-pro" like me.
When unpacking it and setting it up, there were multiple notices everywhere: On the packaging, as a separate note in the packaging, in the manual, on the treadmill itself. Those notes all said that the treadmill is "locked" and you need "online activation" to unlock it.
I was getting very nervous, since I thought I bought something that does not need online activation.
However I think it was also Wirecutter that mentioned that you can just press the iFit button for longer than 15 seconds--or was it 30 seconds?--and it's "unlocked". I did that once and it worked ever since, never needed to do anything online, or connect it via Bluetooth, WiFi or anything else.
Reminds me of the Rigol DS1054Z 50 MHz oscilloscope, that you can trivially 'hack' into the more expensive DS1074Z 75 MHz or DS11074Z 100 MHz scope. Rigol hasn't disabled this hack, even though they can easily do it. They likely loose money if they do so, since customers move to other scopes.
Also, some Tesla updates make the experience worse instead of better (V11 update is terrible, inconsistent UI and much more menu diving). I should have disabled auto-updates, and read the forums before doing the update next time.
This is the first I've heard of it - but is this perhaps a straightforward avenue for conventional price discrimination? Businesses that want the 100 MHz may well just pay for it because they don't want the hassle the hack might lead to. And the people who'd use the hack probably wouldn't have paid for the more expensive one anyway. So Rigol might be extracting maximum value thanks to the hack, rather than despite it.
Your aside reminds me of the PSP hacking days. Whenever there was an update, you'd have to hold it and check forums to see if it patched your root exploit.
The system for key validation to enable the various features on that scope [1] is actually, if I recall correctly, a well designed system using sound, strong cryptography except they used short enough keys that you can easily brute force it. That's what they keygen programs for it do.
It is almost inconceivable that they would know enough to use good cryptography but not know that they needed long keys, so a lot of people believe they intended for it to be easy to hack.
One theory I've heard that makes sense is that this is for price discrimination. Your hobbyist user, buying a scope to figure out what is going wrong when they try to talk to their humidity sensor with their Arduino, is not going to pay an extra couple hundred dollars to get the protocol decoding add-on. Paying $400 for the basic scope is already near their limit. So let them have all the features--it makes the Rigol scope more attractive to those users without really costing Rigol anything.
So why not just include all the features without requiring keys to enable them?
Because people using the scope for business will pay more for them. That's because if they use a keygen program to enable them and use the scope to design or test some product, and later something goes wrong with that product and someone gets hurt and they find themselves being sued, they don't want to have to deal with how a plaintiff's attorney would try to spin that in front of jury.
Sure, it would probably not be hard for the defense to respond and explain that the scope behaves exactly the same regardless of whether the key was purchased from Rigol or came from a third party keygen program, so you might think no harm would be done by plaintiff bringing this up.
However, civil trials have time limits on how much total time each side gets to present their case and to rebut the other side's case. If defense has to take time to educate the jury on the whole Rigol key system and how keygen programs are safe, that's time they don't have for other things.
I've seen that kind of thing happen. I was a witness for a plaintiff in a suit. Early on, defense was able to find something totally minor but that looked bad if you didn't know the details of state tax and corporations bureaucracy [2]. It took them 2 minutes to use that to make us look dishonest. It took much longer the next day to explain all the details to counter that. For the rest of the trial, we were short on time and had to drop some things.
Later, when I was on the stand defense asked some questions about a particular piece of software the plaintiffs developed. They asked detailed technical questions and I answered them. Then they said "play the video of tzs's deposition from <date several months earlier>". On that video I was asked the same questions I had just been asked in court, and answered that I had not worked on that software and didn't know the answers. Defense then said "no further questions" and walked away.
I expected our lawyers to then ask about this, so we could explain why I apparently was either lying my ass off in the deposition or lying my ass off a few moments ago, but they didn't. They later told me they were short on time, and decided that having the jury think I was a liar was less of a problem than dropping the other stuff they would have to drop to deal with that.
So why the apparent discrepancy between my deposition and my later in court testimony? The deposition was 100% correct. I had not worked and that software and didn't have any deep technical knowledge of how it worked.
Later however, I was designated as the person on our side who would be answering all technical questions about our software. This would cover all our software that might come up in the case, not just what I had worked on. So I spent a considerable amount of time after that deposition studying the source for such software, and by the time of the trial I was able to answer deep technical questions concerning it. (Which defendant was fully aware of, by the way, since between my first deposition and the trial, there was a deposition where I appeared in the role of expert on all our software).
[1] Besides doubling the bandwidth, there are keys for expanding the amount of memory, adding advanced trigger options, adding protocol decoding for various useful protocols like I2C and RS-232, and I think some other features that I'm forgetting.
[2] Briefly, when you paid your taxes you got a receipt from the state revenue department. You were supposed to file a copy of that receipt with the state corporations office. Someone failed to do that. If one then queried the corporations office we were listed as having not paid our taxes.
If Nordic is being honest that the issue is safety- preventing users from diddling with their software and accidentally making it unsafe, then they can simply install a browser so the users can view what they wish online.
From Nordic's POV, this is a safety issue, it affects the safety of their bottom line. Adding a browser would also compromise safety, again not the safety of the user but the safety of their bottom line.
But the first person interviewed was already a subscriber. They bought the hardware. They were paying for the content. He was making a pretty healthy contribution to their bottom line. Now that customer is alienated to the point of being interviewed for an article. I'm guessing they wouldn't recommend it to a friend or family. Taking away stuff from paying customers seems like a path towards not having recurring customers.
If it was just about the money, they should have e.g. have pop-up ads cover the screen only for non-subscribers, such that people aren't inclined to buy the device, not subscribe to the ifit content, and watch youtube instructors or whatever.
No they aren't being honest. Almost anything can be used in an unsafe manner if the desire to do so is there. Fundamentally you have a belt whipping around on two rollers at speeds upwards of 10 mph. It's an unsafe, if used improperly, machine to begin with.
The safety argument isn't so much an argument as it is a trigger word to elicit a response in people.
Frustratingly, the safety argument may win out. But it also reflects a poor design. What the people in the article seem to want is to be able to use an Android tablet as an Android tablet, they aren't dicking around with the safety-related parts. So the sensible (but often not done) thing to do would be to offer three modes. A "gym mode" suitable for most public equipment (just get into iFit or whatever it is), a "home mode" which permits installation and use of other apps (like Netflix), and an actual privileged mode that can get into the safety-related settings. 99.9% of people at home will be content with just that home mode level, and never care about anything beyond it.
Unfortunately for them, the response it elicits from me (and likely an increasing number of others) is the classic Franklin quote. The more companies try to squeeze their users, the more the users are likely to wake up to their BS.
It's entirely possible. The iFit app which runs on my treadmill is an embedded web browser. From "God Mode" there is an iFit Admin app which reports information such as the embedded chromium version being used for iFit.
I actually walked down to the basement to test this - even when closing the iFit app while in God Mode, the physical controls on the treadmill including speed, incline, the stop button and the magnetic safety key, continue to work as designed. If you close the app then you can't see your current speed, but you can still stop the machine.
That being said, I haven't dug into how the iFit app sends commands or retrieve data from the treadmill's controller. It seems possible that a "rogue" app could somehow interfere with this communication or send its own set of commands to throw you off the machine, but feels very unlikely. Plus, the tablet on my treadmill is running Android 7. I'd be much more afraid of remote exploits on the embedded browser on this ancient OS than someone with physical access loading a malicious app.
C1750 treadmill, was able to drop into android launcher, install f store, dropbear. After being able to ssh into the treadmill I found the mediatek soc they use has an exploit app to get a root shell. Further decompiling of the ifit app apk shows it’s written in c#/mono, sending bytes to a usb device for treadmill control. I ran out of patience trying to intercept writes with strace and just went back to running.
They can still make updates for safety obtain consent from the device owner before being installed. I should be able to opt out of measures for my own safety.
The iFit app is actually an embed a web browser. If you open the iFit Admin app, it reports a chromium version. I haven't dug into it too much, but definitely an embedded browser.
It should be illegal to remove features from a hardware product with a software 'update' without offering all pre-existing customers to return the hardware if they affirm the removed (or newly pay-gated) feature was a factor in making their purchase.
Customers currently have zero recourse, because they are paying for the hardware, but the software allows the hardware functionality to be changed or removed at whim without any financial risk to the company. Credit card chargebacks may work sometimes, but only if the purchase was recent: 'smart' hardware vendors often ruin their products more than 90 days after purchase.
Does that still apply if the "feature" is not one advertised by the manufacturer? They're framing it as safety issue and jail broken devices and leaked content keys get updated all the time to close those loopholes.
> NordicTrack says it supports right-to-repair rules.
I don't get why companies think this kind of blanket statements are useful, when they're immediately made null by their actions.
> However, because of its equipment’s moving parts, the spokesperson says, it believes that restricting access to its operating system is important for safety.
This is such obvious BS, when the real kicker is that after you already shelled $4k, they really really want you to rack out that sweet sweet monthly subscription money and don't want any competitors on a screen that, it turns out, they can control.
Greedy manufacturers wanting to get into that monthly recurring revenue model.
This. It is weird to read basic administrator mode referred to as something beyond mere man's understanding, but it does feed into this narrative that an average human should not try mess with the magic box.
Have you considered returning it and buying a different one? There are plenty of treadmills out there without this user hostile nonsense that would make better use of your purchase money.
As a total aside, I bought a treadmill last year and turned it into a walking desk as part of my WFH setup. I wasn't sure how much I would use it, but holy cow I love it!
That used to be me until I discovered how many smart devices have the ability to be flashed with open source firmware like Tasmota or ESPHome. Best of both worlds!
That it was advertised anywhere in documentation as possible is what makes it a hostile move by the manufacturer.
Had this been just some kind of open secret “hack” then buyers really should expect this.
Remember: when you buy a gadget with a screen and associated “services” like video subscriptions you aren’t just buying a lump of tech. Your price is set after careful weighing of how much customers will consume the subscription services. If the add on service is provided by a third party it’s even worse: your products’ ability to deliver something other than their service is probably a breach of contract.
My guess: the treadmill makers didn’t mind people watching Netflix on their gadget. Their partners on content though has given them deals on the premise that everyone who didn’t buy a subscription should have a feeling that they wasted $4k on an empty screen. So when they hear a number of users are watching Netflix, they get angry. Treadmill makers must block the god mode.
The sad thing here is obviously that the idea of making a good open product without strings attached or subscriptions seems like an impossibility these days.
When I read these articles, where people buy 4000$ treadmills only to watch netflix using an unsupported feature, I wonder why they don't buy a 1000$ treadmill without any display, a 50$ tablet stand, and an iPad or Android tablet (that they probably already have). You'd get exactly what you want, for a cheaper price..
No, it's because, this is BS, just like expensive $5k - $10k bikes. These are "new golf" areas for mid-age men with excessive wealth to play with. Unfortunately that drives the market prices up, and hostile plays like this one for everyone.
Maybe it's BS to you, but there's always people who want something nicer. And if they can afford it, why not? If a 5k bike is what gets you to start exercising, it's probably even worth it.
On the box, it mentioned "one-year iFit membership included (then says wifi and registration required for ifit)"
I didn't want to use iFit, I just wanted to use the treadmill.
However -
You can't use the treadmill without connecting it to wifi, except for "manual mode". ZERO workouts. This involves dark patterns for setting up your treadmill and avoiding a wifi connection. then you can select manual mode - which can ONLY set the speed or incline manually.
Oh yeah, this treadmill has an embedded camera and microphone.
The description is a dark pattern, the UI is a dark pattern. pro-form has a horrible reputation from my direct experience.
so I use it in manual mode. I don't use the 10.1" touchscreen except to start it moving.
I suggest folks who want a treadmill just go to somewhere like Dick's and look at the treadmills and buy one after checking out the UI in person.
Not that NordicTrack cares about purchases from l'il ol' me in the larger scheme of things, this is precisely why we didn't buy a NordicTrack treadmill despite being tickled with our NordicTrack rowing machine: that screen is there for NordicTrack's benefit, not yours. Sure, I'm a software engineer as well as owning a soldering iron and knowing how to use it. But if I've got to unsolder/resolder wires or cut traces on my brand-new machine to get the functionality I thought I paid for, I bought the wrong machine. If I have to use a software hack that is one update away from not working anymore, I have purchased the wrong machine. I'll let others rant about not being able to use the hardware that one paid for, I'm just not going to pay for the HW in the first place. (And, honestly, how many of us on HN need another screen around the house?)
It's disappointing, too, because we're quite satisfied with our NT rowing machine, which was purchased right before the "big screen" models, and we would otherwise recommend it. But now you can't buy the one with the cheap LCD display like we have and just bring your own screen, you have to get proprietary screen models now. So I don't recommend their rowing machines anymore, either.
After much research, we bought a treadmill from Horizon fitness[0]. We've been nothing but happy with it, which is their top-of-the-line 7.8. It has BT for music to play over the built-in speakers, and it works fine with Zwift and even the iFit subscription that NordicTrack pushes (it just won't auto-control the treadmill speed/incline, which is a-okay by me). BT streams your data to Zwift, et. al., including speed/incline/HR. It has a built-in stand for your tablet, though anyone on HN ought to be able to rig some cheap 27" 4k monitor in there somehow (we use a wall-mount for the rowing machine that swivels for general purpose use). The spouse and I have used it with Zwift, iFit, and Apple Fitness+, though Zwift is the only one that cares about data from the BT stream. As running goes I used to be fast, but now I'm just old and still faster than most, and it does everything I need for dark, rainy PNW days. I use it for tempo and intervals on occasion as well, and the one-button presets for interval/recovery are nice so when I'm gasping for breath I just need to be able to push the recovery button.
Anyway, no association whatsoever with Horizon, just a very satisfied customer.
Wow, sounds like a huge missed opportunity! If so many people were willing to pay a premium price for a device primarily because of how easy it was to customize, then perhaps it should be marketed that way in the first place.
Hardware vendor lock-in subscriptions may seem to the corporate world like a big win on paper, but how many customers are they losing who are willing to pay for a very premium product that they get full control over? (looking at you peloton)
This is why I don't buy specialty hardware devices anymore. I jumped off the smart device treadmill with the fitbit.
The only thing in my house that gets access to the internet are my computers and phone. Nothing else. If I turn it on and it complains about no internet - it gets returned as defective.
I have a car charger (Juice Box) that have a smart app to control it. Nope not for me. Last thing I want is a hacked device fucking with my car's charging.
I really hate how we are moving more and more towards "managed experiences" in products. Used to, you would buy a product and use it how you see fit. But these days it seems that's not what the company wants you to do. You buy the product and enjoy a "managed" experience from the company.
We see it everywhere with printers, coffee makers, phones, laptops, treadmills and even cars now. Everyone knows why this is being done, simply making money on a $99 coffeemaker is not good enough anymore, we have to make that $99 plus we have to make money in perpetuity because the customer now has to subscribe to our "managed experience".
Now I understand this on some level with cheaper stuff like printers, that printer doesn't cost $20, it costs that because the company assumes you will buy the pods from them. But with a treadmill that goes for thousands it's a completely different ball game.
Were going to get to the point where one day you will hop in your car and start driving into the countryside. At a certain point your car will just shut off because "Ford has decided that this route in unsafe for your vehicle, for the best experience, please drive back to the city, on your way back, consider enabling cup holders for an improved coffee drinking experience".
The glimmer of hope on the horizon are companies like Framework and Pinephone. These companies realize that consumers are not happy with this shit and market themselves as the antithesis of these practices. I really hope these types of companies take off in the future.
My take is not nearly as strong as the fsf's. I'm fine not being provided with source code, and not being able to distribute the original code itself.
Basically - I don't expect to have companies hand me code they wrote to run the device (I happen to like it, so I tend to support companies that do), but I don't believe that's a reasonable (or particularly useful) practice when so many functions depend on external web services.
I do expect to have them legally prevented from blocking me from writing my own code to run or repair the device.
Your take is much stronger than that of the FSF. The FSF advocates for people to choose free software, and for governments to not force people to use non-free software. You say that non-free software (i.e., software for which you don't have the key) should be illegal. The FSF has never advocated for such an extreme viewpoint.
> You say that non-free software (i.e., software for which you don't have the key) should be illegal.
I don't think I'm saying that.
I'm saying that hardware sold to me should be usable by me without company approval. I should be able to unlock any bootloader/bios/flash that the vendor does as a part of normal repair or operation. Basically - if it has RAM, I should be able to write to it. If it has ROM the company flashes from outside the device - I should be able to flash it from outside the device.
In many cases you could simplify this to - I should have root access on any computing hardware that supports software with the concept of root access (and it's a surprisingly large amount these days)
I don't mind the company not sharing tooling or documentation. I certainly am not asking for non-binary source code. I think you should be able to sell software as a service just fine (I don't own that hardware, you do) - but I'm opposed to a company being able to intentionally sell a product that contains a cryptographic software lock that prevents the owner from later taking advantage of that hardware.
basically - I'm much softer on the requirements, but I'd prefer they be enforced.
Yeah, it's fine for a corporate device or a child's device to have some safety rails in place. But it's bullshit that an iOS device I purchased won't run any application or customization or OS version that I want.
How do you give the owner a key without enabling an evil maid attack? a physical usb device unique to the phone that will unlock it to run whatever when it's plugged in? something deep in settings that requires you do a dance and enter the konami code?
For my treadmill: Who cares? If my maid is evil and reporgrams my treadmill to randomly throw me off, there's a dozen more effective and hard to detect ways she could set traps in my house, like setting up common household cleaning products to mix and fill the house with chlorine gas.
Evil Maid attacks are real, but you don't need perfect security for your household appliances.
A device-specific "owner password" would be fine. Physical access is not proof of ownership, so there is no need to open the device up to trivial "evil maid"-style attacks. Of course some owners will lose their passwords, so some provision would need to be made to ensure that owner-access is not permanently lost.
There is a new technology that I learnt of recently. It’s called paper. It can be used to create instruction booklets or, by adding glue, it can become a sticker. We could print those keys on it.
Want to unlock your car with the keyfob? Want to use the heated seats? Subscriptions. Anyways, please drink a verification can. Consider also reading "Unauthorized Bread".
"Sorry, these cupholders do not work with this brand of soda. Your GPS screen is now showing the nearest store where you can purchase a brand of soda that will work in your cupholders. You'll be enjoying delicious X Brand Soda in just 17 minutes!"
I bought a replacement $400 Canon printer recently. Same model, price is at least double what it was several years ago. The reason to buy the more expensive model is because there are readily available cheap third-party cartridges. A lot of the new cheaper models don't have that.
What I've read people write online is to ditch inkjets altogether and go with laser printer or use megatank printers. Don't know how better they are though.
In reality printers are such small potatoes unless you are printing like hundreds of pages a year. I got mine from an online listing for free, and I spend maybe $30 on ink once a year. It mostly exists to print shipping labels. I'd just get a printer for as cheap as possible and not worry too much about what kind it is if you are going to only use it sparingly.
Printer head cleaning can burn through quite a bit of ink if the printer hasn’t been used in a while. And sometimes my parents go long stretches without using the printer.
The real question is, do you (or your family members) really need a home printer at all? I just go to a print shop when I need to print something out a few times a year.
We print a lot of Amazon return forms, church newsletter crap, and live in a rural area. Although frankly, I would do anything to not add another item to my errand list when I'm in town.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember reading something about skippable ad on tv ( skippable if you do something adveriser wants -- like McD ad and its only skippable if you yell 'i m lovin' it').
Maybe companies don't want to get sued and end up in the American justice system clown world. Personal responsibility seems to go right out of the window when people smell money...
A construction worker moving to cloud security and in a single sabbatical year already scrutinizing by himself the firmware and closed OS of a treadmill.
makes me happy. Hope a lot of people can leave behind those low paid high effort jobs thanks to this 2 shitty years
I'm utterly disappointed I didn't see any footage of DOOM running on it. If those hackers didn't spend so much time trying to be healthy, they could focus their time on an actual worthy task! /s
Does anyone know the domains they use to connect/update? I’ve got one of these (different brand) but still unlocked by the 10 taps method. I’ve still never connected mine to WiFi but I like to dim the screen. I could setup DNS blocks and then connect to WiFi to verify it works for a more long term solution for folks (well, that intersection of those that run a pinhole and on a treadmill).
I didn’t connect it to WiFi (even after unlocking) primarily because I worry about it being another data collection tool (WiFi, bt) and it has a camera/mic on it.
A good reason why I don't like to buy smart devices.
That said, I think that if we want right-to-repair/tinker I think we also have to make reasonable concessions as well. E.g. No liability for the manufacturer due to running older or non OEM versions of software/firmware. No expectation of ongoing support or updates on those older branches. Of course liability should still exist for issues that were not caused by this alternate software even if you're running it.
Is there any theory as to what NordicTrack hopes to gain out of preventing customers from using the screen as they see fit? NordicTrack already has the customers' money, so why would they really care?
Are they trying to do some kind of advertising on the screen? Are just going through run of the mill security updates and there's bad communication between the customers and NordicTrack not understanding each other because of a layer of dumb bureaucracy between marketing/developers?
NordicTrack is owned by iFit which sells a workout subscription service.
The screen is "intended" only for iFit content so they've locked users out of other uses.
Probably because they want to be the middle man for these services they provide or are going to. After all just like Apple they feel entitled to these cuts. The people who buy these gadgets are people with too much money or techbros that go out of their way to justify the control apple has over the platform or 30% apple takes.
Business wise it makes sense. And of course if everything is not locked down then you can always scare people with hackers.
This is obviously wrong and should be blocked via laws, but just in case you're here and haven't heard of pi-hole (https://pi-hole.net/) taking internet-of-shit devices and blocking all the ways they try to access the net is kinda fun.
Honestly, it is getting to the point where your best bet is to buy a cheaper device with minimal features, then mount a screen onto it and hook it up to a Linux box to play what you want.
Cheaper and actually gives you what you want. Might force the vendor to allow for more customization, given a lot of people stop buying their premium range.
>> and finding workarounds that allow them to bypass the update and watch whatever they want while they work out.
Like buying a TV and mounting it on the wall in front of the treadmill? Do these people not have access to 2x4s? Why does your TV screen need to be integrated into your exercise equipment?
The "right-to-repair" sentiment is totally understandable, as the article says. However, on the other hand, imagine some user modified the underlying Android, which caused the treadmill to run unstoppably, which end up injuring him. He then sues the company for millions of dollars. If I were the owner of the company, I would rather losing some customers than sleeping on a ticking bomb. Their move is also understandable.
I think an ideal solution could be the manufacturer officially supports accessing the "privilege mode" with some sort of "release of liability". Customer must agree to this the first time they access, forfeiting warranty and ability to sue. Much like when people decide to unlock phone bootloader and root.
And to make all manufacturers willing to provide privilege mode to their products, I think either 1) the court makes clear statement of supporting this legally, or 2) having a supreme court precedence established for this, is required, otherwise some manufacturers would still fear the potential legal risk.
What happens if, when you're upgrading your new right-to-repair laptop, you leave some wires sticking out of the battery and fry yourself, and then sue the laptop maker?
Indeed, what happens when you fry yourself repairing the ur-right-to-repair device, the light fixture with a removable lightbulb?
You can invent any scenario for any machine or device that the user can repair, but it should be fairly straightforward to add language that says "if you modify the device's behavior in such a way that it harms you, that's not our fault."
If you don't have root on a software-controlled device, it isn't really yours. Unfortunately, I think we've lost a lot of ground in that fight when it comes to consumer devices.
To the HN community at large: how do we start clawing it back?
> “The block on privilege mode was automatically installed because we believe it enhances security and safety while using fitness equipment that has multiple moving parts,” says a spokesperson for NordicTrack
No. If you run on a good treadmill you can immediately feel the difference. Motor smoothness, the weight of the machine, the give and bounce of the platform, all of it adds up to a nicer running experience.
That said, I still hate treadmills and prefer to run outside, but there’s a huge difference between a cheap one and a good one.
I have setup firefox to drop all cookies when closing and whitelisted a few websites I still need to bear cookies.
Upon using the above link, I ended up on a paywall. I hit F12 and check the creation date of all the cookies and confirm they had all been created the 19th (today, and incidentally had just woken up and turned on the computer). I refresh the website, still paywall.
I delete all cookies manually for that page, hit refresh and can read the whole article. I don't understand how this is possible.
I don't understand this obsession with electronic exercise devices. The peloton, that stupid thing that mounts to the wall, treadmills etc.
Outside is so much better than all of those. I will 100% run in single digit temperatures with snow on the ground before I touch a treadmill. If I have to be inside it's weight lifting.
- When my kids were younger, I was always nearby during a workout.
- I can comfortably work out regardless of the season, weather, or time of day.
- I can easily take a bathroom break mid-workout.
- I can do much longer workouts without getting bored, because I can watch movies or play video games during the workout. (E.g., using an exercise bike + my own computer.) This works around motivational / persistence issues I used to have.
- I can end a workout on short notice. Contrast to a long-distance run or bikeride, where I may be far from home when something comes up.
You can go outside and workout just fine, you're just choosing not to. Everything about doing exercise on machines is worse for you. It's better than nothing.
I don't understand this obsession with electronic exercise devices.
Then you need to make an effort, because it's really not hard to understand if one has even just a bit of life experience as an adult. But it sounds like an excuse to brag about the harsh weather one runs in, and those damned kids and their video games or something. Here, I'll one-up you: I regularly ran in snow and sub-zero (Fahrenheit, bitches) temperatures when I lived in Indiana. I now live in the much milder Pacific Northwest, and I own a treadmill. 'cuz you know what? Sometimes outside isn't better than any of those, and I just need to get some miles in.
I don't need to do anything bud. I think they're a stupid waste of money. I have no problem without them. They're a marketing scam, have fun wasting money for a worse exercise experience.
Is there a reason it upsets you that I don't like them? I have no problem making time because exercise is a priority for me. For you, it's an after thought that you need to cram into your terrible lifestyle and that's the entire problem.
>But it sounds like an excuse to brag about the harsh weather one runs in, and those damned kids and their video games or something. Here, I'll one-up you: I regularly ran in snow and sub-zero (Fahrenheit, bitches) temperatures when I lived in Indiana.
It took one little remark about your overpriced lame electronic exercise equipment to get you all worked up. Thanks for the laugh, and letting me know how insecure you are about it.
Kids, safety, convenience, positive encouragement, all these things help. Not everyone is as privileged as you where you can easily just go outside and leave your home without a care in the world.
A non-ableist one, apparently. A transplant patient who is on anti-rejection meds, where they need to protect themselves from a pandemic-level infection that their body refuses to build antibodies for despite numerous vaccination attempts. A person suffering from agoraphobia, where the fear of being outside and even observed is a psychological road block to doing literally anything. Two of many possible reasons for things like this to be a huge help.
Do they need an electronic workout device? Nah, but if you're legitimately helping someone to achieve motivation or be safer in taking care of themselves, then the product has value.
If it's an option for the exercise you want and your health and safety, sure. It's not always an option and there are some exercises (like rowing) that are't practical to do every day unless you live on or near a body of water, and even then. If the lake freezes over, good luck rowing!
> I will 100% run in single digit temperatures with snow on the ground before I touch a treadmill.
Awesome good on you and more power to you. BUT Treadmill, Spinning bike and Rowing is for a different demographic. And You are not part of that demographic.Gabeesh?
The most obvious thing is having a good environment. If you are doing serious HIITs, you either need to be at a track or on a training device, unless you feel like playing in traffic. Fitness equipment is not the goal, fitness is, and equipment is a good way to get there.
I don't disagree with you... in fact my Nordic ProForm treadmill includes a built in tablet mount that floats above the control panel. I used it with my iPad up until I found out this "God Mode" of side loading apps existed.
But some of these exercise machines actually come with an impressive 32inch HD screen and loud speakers built-in which you can hear over the running noise. If you stop paying hundreds of dollars per year for an iFit subscription, the only thing this giant display does is show you the time and distance on a white background.
And perhaps you'd say, "don't buy a machine with a built-in screen", I'd say the article points out people actually decided to purchase these models _specifically_ because help articles and other resources showed how to get into the Android interface. Sideloading apps was practically sold as a feature.
Finding a workaround is fine but tangential at best, but that doesn't mean we should ignore or stay silent regarding company philsophies/choices/actions we find repulsive.
They didn't advertise the product as being a exercise machine with a full Android tablet attached. I don't find their actions repulsive, just standard-issue corporate CYA stuff.
It sucks for those that discovered the loophole, but all good things must come to an end sometime.
Except unlike rsync vs. dropbox, using an ipad laid on top of the treadmill to watch netflix is probably a lot more intuitive than whatever garbage laggy smart-tv tier gui nordictrack saddles on their users.
I have an ebook reader mount I attach to the rafters. If I want to watch TV I set my laptop on some storage containers far back from the treadmill and put in my airpods. In both cases I'm looking straight ahead.
Looking down at the NordicTrack screen doesn't seem ergonomic or comfortable. I don't get this article.
Edit: From 2 points to 0. And probably going to go negative LOL.
I don't think the article was about ergonomics or comfort, or about how to watch TV or read a book while on the treadmill. It was about buying a product that does certain things, and then having the company that made it change its functionality without your consent. The question is, should you or should you not have control of the products you buy?
Those interviewed in the article seemed to imply reading a book or watching TV was a grand pleasure. I'm disagreeing with that sentiment. I've found even a slight curve of my neck creates a lot of discomfort especially when running or walking.
> Those interviewed in the article seemed to imply reading a book or watching TV was a grand pleasure. I'm disagreeing with that sentiment.
Right, but that's not really the point of the article. It's not positing a debate over whether or not people exist who would be uncomfortable curving their neck while running or walking. The article doesn't really care about that debate. It's asking whether or not people should have control of the products they buy.
Imagine there's an article about a blender that stops working without manufacturer-approved ingredients, and someone says, "well I hate all of the recipes that people are making that aren't approved and I think they taste gross, so I don't understand what this article is about." In that scenario, we understand that the blender article is about consumer rights, not recipe tips, and whether or not someone personally likes what people are doing with their products isn't really important to that conversation.
The treadmill article is about consumer rights, not ergonomics.
You're both right. It's outrageous that companies are allowed to get away with nerfing products you've already paid for by pulling new restrictions and limitations out of thin air... and it's also bad form to look down at an LCD panel on a treadmill while using it. 100% guarantee of a painful side stitch, at least for me.
If part of the product I've paid for is software, and the company can update it without customer consent at any time, then I can't rely on the product's features. Period.
I experienced this myself on the PS4 version of Terraria. I bought a hard-copy of the game. I mastered the controls, and loved them. Terraria was updated one day, and the controls were all changed, completely. Total rip-off. I liked the game I bought, but it was replaced without my consent.
My feeling is that this behavior should be illegal for purchased products.