I mean that could be true only if you don’t account for the obvious reality that the lockdown of hackability, serviceability, access to parts is deliberate.
Personal preferences matter little in a duopoly industry. Sure, you could argue that other aspects are more important than serviceability, but it’d be insane to argue that people want less serviceability. So in short, we were better off in this aspect before. 100%.
> the obvious reality that the lockdown of hackability, serviceability, access to parts is deliberate.
I mean yes, it literally is, the law requires that smartphones incorporate a killswitch capable of resisting a device format/reload of the OS. This was seen as a consumer benefit in 2014, and did succeed in bringing muggings and phone theft down by as much as 80%.
This is what the sibling means about tradeoffs: people at the time wanted the tradeoff of fewer muggings. The killswitch was seen as a benefit, and largely Apple is in fact just responding to the legislative requirements pushed upon them.
And if you have to have a killswitch that can resist a OS reformat… there has to be some component pairing mechanism that works underneath the OS layer, naturally. That is the sensible way to implement it, otherwise you'd just swap in a new motherboard and hey, phone's working again. Or strip the phone for parts.
The idea of parts being anti-theft/strip-resistant is pretty much inherently in contradiction to right-to-repair. And again, I think people probably understand that... but never forget that theft-resistance was a legislative initiative pushed over the objections of Apple and other phone vendors at the time, having some unforeseen consequences. People actually did want this, people lobbied for this, as much as modern readers may not believe it.
From the point of view of the consumer, serviceability is negatively unalloyed. That is, it can always be removed without an associated (positive) tradeoff for the consumer.
Personal preferences matter little in a duopoly industry. Sure, you could argue that other aspects are more important than serviceability, but it’d be insane to argue that people want less serviceability. So in short, we were better off in this aspect before. 100%.