After years of dodgy HP printers and their very expensive inks, I brought an Epson EcoTank. It cost a lot more but it prints are amazing and the Ink lasts forever. It took 2 years to get through the included ink.
HP brings a broad new meaning to Dodgy. Shotty and shabby. Its wholly unethical how hey manage their affairs, but now to hear they are disabling their own printers, oh my how unfortunate, and I shall decline the gift of any, and inform potential buyers of their ... unwholesomeness. I was going to limit myself to brothers, but I hear they are now on the 'short term profits over everything.' type of CRM. Customer Relation Managment: Screw you.
I have HP Smart tank budget printer and it sometimes drives me mad that it stops printing, you have to restart it and whatnot.
The colors are not great either.
However the tank lasts few years before it dries out and we do print with it quite a lot. For kids, for school, for coloring - usually I set low quality prints. But the printing is cheap.
But when I change the printer, I want hassle free print experience. And a tank based printer.
Please remember to print once a fortnight to prevent the tubes from drying (at least in this hot and humid city). Apparently the head/printer cost ratio is at magnetron/microwave levels.
This problem is what made me ditch inkjets entirely in favor of laser printers. You don't have to remember to do occasional "maintenance prints" with laser printers.
I purchased a HP laser printer instead. I don't print that often and it has been complaining since a few packs of paper ago that the black toner is almost empty but it just keeps printing.
I wonder whether HP will get its comeuppance, for years of jerkiness, when an LLM is involved in most printer purchasing decisions, and that LLM will have been trained on Reddit, HN, etc.
Or will consumer "AI" services offer "integrated placement" for brands, which also has the effect of neutering valid criticism of the brand?
People have to keep buying new HP printers because their old ones keep breaking. Consumers are not rational or well-informed.
In contrast, my Brother HL-5340D printer from 2008 is still working fine to this day.
There have been been zero required firmware updates that could have, as HP said in their release notes, "improved firmware update and cartridge rejection experiences." It doesn't reject cartridges, it still takes the same TN-620 toner replacements made by Brother or a hundred other vendors. I'm unconcerned about security because the only connections are a USB type B 2.0 input that presents a PCL/CUPS compatible driver... and also a DB-25/Centronics printer port, of course, as a printer should have.
I gave Brother like $250 of my limited cash as a sophomore engineering student in college, and a nominal $50 for a remanufactured toner cartridge every 3000 pages (several years) and then haven't bought a replacement printer for home since then. I don't know if I've ever replaced the drum, but I should probably do that - it's old enough to vote and deserves to be freshened up. I suppose I have bought a several of their printers for work and I've recommended Brother lasers to a bunch of family members for who I'm 'the tech guy', so that's some revenue in their direction, but probably less profit than if I'd bought a new HP inkjet and a couple HP cartridges every 2 years.
Also consider that not only have I spent less money on printers than an HP buyer, I've encouraged far less inventory turnover for the vendors: Why would HP/Staples/Wal Mart/wherever normal people buy printers devote sales attention and shelf space to keeping a Brother printer in stock when a 36yo adult within driving distance only needs to buy one such printer in their lifetime, when they can turn over a pallet of disposable inkjets on a weekly basis?
HP's many failures keep them from going bankrupt, not the other way around. This does not mean that their business practices should be imitated.
I know it is not what you meant, but what you wrote becomes funnier if one reads it as saying “the fact that [buyers of HP printers] aren’t bankrupt at this point is beyond me”.
HP is the worse but most printer makers have or will come to the same conclusion sooner or later.
Successful consumer electronic brands right now make money with either simple or "premium" looking but wallgardened products you need to throw money at at every turn. And HPs are available everywhere and will mostly work if you don't mind the running stream of money.
It doesn't take very much effort to look at ink costs when buying a printer, so this is on consumers. It might even be the rational choice for low-income consumers since it's cheaper in the long run than buying a more expensive printer with a 25% APR credit card.
Probably never. The home printer market I imagine isn't anything anyone new wants to risk money in, and if they did, they'd just end up copying much what HP is doing anyway.
Also I doubt anyone is giving some LLM their credit card and all printer brands have bad reputations online. People post when motivated and they're motivated to complain, not praise.
In the meantime, I can still buy a Brother brand printer that seems to not have all the HP issues, or less so.
If someone created and sold a printer that did not care about the ink that was used, the people of the interwebs would go crazy in the forums when the shitty ink they used did not work correctly in the printer.
This is not a defense for DRM'd cartridges, but just an honest look at how people will behave. The support for the company with a open ink policy would be astronomical for the complaints they will receive. Sometimes, people/users are the problem but there's no way to tell that to the customer without you being the dick. "the customer is always right" is such a bullshit fallacy that makes operating a business near impossible.
> If someone created and sold a printer that did not care about the ink that was used, the people of the interwebs would go crazy in the forums when the shitty ink they used did not work correctly in the printer.
There's no need for hypotheticals. Such printers do exist. People on the Internet tend to praise them (see this very thread). I'm sure people have had bad ink experiences, and if I search for it I will find them. But I highly doubt they'd blame the printer or the concept...
> If someone created and sold a printer that did not care about the ink that was used
Why would anyone do that. Sounds like a strawman.
All printers I've seen specify precisely what ink they need. And then you look up which 3rd party inks are compatible, so the printer gets what it want.
It's the 3rd party inks that I'm talking about. Who is verifying they are compatible? The Chinese company selling on Temu? Why would the 1st party verify a 3rd party? Licensing fees?
The point is that companies don't want/need to support 3rd party, and by allowing 3rd party opens their devices up for complaint when 3rd party doesn't work.
Is this an age gap situation? What you're describing as difficult used to be the norm. You could go to the print shop with a cartridge and they'd fill it with whatever they had for a reasonable price. No one had to support third party cartridges (you'd refill the first party cartridges and third party cartridges were designed to be compatible). It was a perfectly acceptable system for everyone except the manufacturers, who weren't happy with consumers that would buy loss leader printers and skip the ink.
I feel like the overlap of people savvy enough to want re-fillable carts and people not understanding what "only fill with high quality ink" means so they jump to blame the company is pretty small.
I see you haven't met the moms of the interwebs just yet. People will see something at the Dollar [Store|General|Tree] and think/expect it will work. People will buy things on Amazon/eBay/Temu/etc and expect it to work.
I think your expectations of what people in the world will do is way too high
> the people of the interwebs would go crazy in the forums when the shitty ink they used did not work correctly in the printer.
They definitely wouldn't, because this is a case of corruption being taken to the extreme. Official ink costs more than printers. If I bought awful bootleg ink three times and the last fake cartridge melted the printer into a smoldering pile of plastic, I could buy another printer and still break even.
For those who don't want to apply firmware updates like this, you might want to use Linux. No printer company is going to work with your distro to automatically install their firmware updates. If your printer works today it's going to work tomorrow.
Yes, years ago. People haven't used it solely to mean permanently broken for a long time, it now also means "temporarily inoperable" or "broken beyond the skill of one particular user to fix it". Much like how "literally" now gets used to mean "figuratively" the use of hyperbole has turned "bricked" into meaning "not actually bricked".
Nothing is permanently broken though. At some point you can start reflashing chips and replacing internal components. Bricked has always meant the device is inoperable and beyond easy repair.
When the flashing process fails and it leaves the flash corrupted, it's often impossible to do any further flashing attempts. Good products have an immutable factory partition to recover, but not all of them do. So I think it's unfair to claim that those devices aren't bricked just because yes, in theory, you can open the device and reflash the chip over SPI or JTAG.
Your parent implied that whether a device is bricked depends on the skillset of the user. So if its subjective, there isn't much point in arguing "when" its bricked, right?
> Much like how "literally" now gets used to mean "figuratively"
It is not used to mean “figuratively”, it is figuratively as an intensifier for other figurative descriptions. If it was meant to mean “figuratively”, then it would be used in senses which the audience would not otherwise understand as figurative and be the thing which told them that the other term used was figurative; that is very much not the case.
I would expect HN to maintain the distinction where "brick" means it won't work at all due to a software malfunction, and can't be restored to a working state via a hard reset button or software update via WiFi/USB.
Its technical meaning to engineers hasn't changed, and HN is a technical site full of engineers.
I don't see how this characterization is wrong as a shorthand. Until HP comes up with an update, these printers don't print. If they never do, then it is literally true. There was a home router manufacturer that issued a firmware update that permanently disabled their product, users had to physically exchange them.
My old inkjet recently gave me so much trouble with dried up expensive cartridges that when a super good HP offer came late at night from my next day delivery online shop for a newer generation laser at a ridiculously low price and I jumped on it.
I instantly regretted after printing 100 pages and discovered the evil move: they deliver the laser printer with "introductory" toners that print 1/2 of the normal toner, and 1/4th of the big capacity. A quick google search revealed that while I got the printer with a nice rebate for 140USD... the toners will cost 280USD for a whole set(1500 pages version), and 480USD for the XL(3000 pages) version which is quite insane.
It's sad because the quality of print of this laser outperforms most I've used in the past(the color printing is fabulous), and the software seems to run really smoothly on it. It prints fast and well, it just happens to have an extremely customer hostile company behind it.
Thankfully apparently there is now a technique to extract chips from your existing toners in order to transfer them to a new set of generic toners... and one can only hope that the "terrajet" chips will soon be RE'ed by someone so we can get normal generics.
For reference, the printer is a LaserJet Pro 3302FDW, that uses 219/219X terrajet toners.
Most printers work great using their basic PCL 5 or 6 drivers. When customers ask printer advice it kina depends on the importance and priority, but usually leasing laser MFPs is the most hassle free option for companies since it reduces the hassle immensly.
Wat's your update strategy today, HN? Main possibilities seem to be 1) The faster, the better I am protected. 2) I wait a few days/weeks. The second mouse gets the cheese.
You can take different approaches on different things. A browser is probably the most exposed piece of software in your system, so maybe be aggressive with updates on that, but a printer is unlikely to be exposed to untrusted inputs so I would question whether there's any point updating it ever unless you have a specific issue you're trying to fix.
This is pretty much my take on it. Once I get a printer installed and working, that's the last time I look at the software for it. I'm also not a heavy printer, so my printer tends to be unplugged more than it's actually turned on.
My publicly facing servers get patched as soon as I'm aware there are updates available. If it borks anything, I just turn to the previous backup (not that this has ever actually happened).
The last time I tried updating an HP printer, it locked up and printed half a ream of jibberish before I pulled the plug on it. Now, I just put printers on a firewalled VLAN and call it a day.
IOT devices (including printers) get firewalled to have no access outside my LAN, and I don't let my PCs run the kind of software that would fetch a firmware update and push it to another device without prompting me. The first line of security should always be not connecting it to the Internet unnecessarily. This is especially important when the list of probable attackers starts (and ends) with the manufacturer.
Absolutely. Rarely do I need a device to have access to the internet. Printers, speakers, sensors, vacuum cleaners, dishwasher. Nothing gets to talk to the outside world.
They are appliances, and if they work they work. Unless something is broken, I leave them alone.
The only exception so far has been the robot lawn mower, that supposedly adapts to weather forecast. But it will be jailed soon, too.
Use parental controls at the router to prevent the printer from accessing anything outside our in-house network. If it acts like a child, treat it like one.
3) I use out of date hardware and software as much as possible, being rigorously paranoid to never expose it to anything risky, and keep it locked down as much as possible. (Which means little Internet use... which is arguably a feature of the process.)
If the manufacturer doesn't support the software anymore (or better yet, is out of business) the odds of malicious updates go way down.
> 0) Don't buy from companies that treat me like a criminal.
So don't buy printers, basically? That's sarcasm, but, non-sarcastically, do you know any printer companies that (make decent printers and) have basic respect for their users?
Brother laser printers are cheap and extremely reliable if you only need to print in black and white. Because they use toner, there's no ink to dry up so they can go months without printing and not clog. The catch is that Brother started putting chips in their toner cartridges a few years ago to keep track of toner usage (they previously used a mechanical gear system). You can still buy and use third-party toner but most third-party toner cartridges use small batteries on their chips and the toner will stop working if the battery runs out (this is the source of all the rumors about various firmware updates stopping third-party toner from working). However, even if you stick to official toner, the cost per page is still fairly low.
If you need to print in color, you can buy an inkjet printer that uses ink tanks instead of cartridges. However, you generally should be printing at least once per week as otherwise you'll need to waste a bunch of ink on head cleaning cycles. The other thing is that all inkjet printers (including ink tanks) clean their heads by spraying ink into a pad called the "waste ink reservoir". After a couple years of use, the pad will become saturated with ink and the printer will refuse to work. Most printers have the pad integrated into the printer, so you have to throw out the printer at this point. Look for a printer with a "maintenance box", which is really the waste ink pad in a user-replaceable plastic cartridge.
I'm still going with Brother. There was a recent claim that they disabled 3rd party toners but there were lots of anecdotal stories of people who had no such trouble with it.
If Brother ever truly loses the plot, my next printer will be the local FedEx store. Life's too short to fight hostile hardware.
I have a Brother multifunction colour inkjet (MFC-J995DW). I generally only printed in B&W on the very rare occasion I printed, so when a colour ran out (usually because one of my children errantly printed some giant colour thing) it was perfectly happy to keep printing black content using the giant, very full black cartridge.
A recent (as in the past two years) update removed that benefit. Now it fully refuses to function in any capacity if a colour cartridge is out. It won't let me print fully-black content, and it won't even let me scan.
HP LaserJet from the period where they still made atomic clocks. Did need to upgrade the memory and added a network card when my computer no longer had a parallel port.
Update OS's regularly for everyday machines / Offline machines you don't want changes to affect. Update Phones regularly. Give work software a 6 month-1 year lead before updating because they will break something (Looking at you Autodesk & Bluebeam).
And never buy an HP Printer which should come before any talks of when to update.
Relatedly, I remember reading that it's unrealistic to build an open-source 2D printer because of how much research and very specific manufacturing that requires. But, what if someone designs an open-source replacement motherboard for some popular commercially available printer model? How much of the "secret sauce" is in the firmware, if any? How easy would that be to replicate independently?
I think it's unrealistic to build a cost-competitive open-source 2D printer. But it's relatively easy to just build your own printer. The parts that have the most R&D tied up in them (and so are unlikely to be replicated from scratch easily) are the inkjet heads and the ink's composition. If you can get those off the shelf then you can easily DIY everything else. There is a large existing industrial market for inkjet heads and ink. Many industrial inkjet heads are very easy to drive and have freely available data sheets. But they cost >$500 to a few $1k each and you probably want 4 for CMYK. I just built a custom printer in a few weeks for an art project with some of these (specifically, one called the Xaar128) driven by an RP2040. The experience definitely gave me a sense of awe and resigned respect for my humble desktop printer.
That's why I'm talking about a replacement motherboard for an existing consumer-grade printer (though not necessarily an inkjet one, I don't get it why people keep buying inkjet printers when they don't intend to print photos). Custom PCBs are very easy and cheap to get manufactured. All the maliciousness of these printers is in the firmware, and replacing the motherboard with an open-source one feels like the easiest way to get rid of that. The other possibility would be to write a custom firmware for the stock motherboard, but I'd imagine that printers these days would have some form of secure boot.
I don't know this for sure(conjecture based on other knowledge), but due to security functions mandated in printers(dot fingerprinting, preventing currency recreation, etc), I would assume other components besides ink cartridges are cryptographically paired. I'd love for this to not be the case though.
If this isn't the case, then it would still be a large effort to both design the control software that controls the intricate mechanical parts, as well as providing drivers.
I think it would be totally doable for a single printer or a family of like printers in the scope of an opensource project with enough motivated contributors, but 2D printers are some of the least sexy pieces of technology out there so the allure would be missing.
I for one love 2D printers. Anything that brings the digital world into our plane, so maybe I should look into this.....
HP has always (after the Compaq merger) had unethical people running the company. I stopped buying their printers after LaserJet4. I did however have one of their DDS4 tape drives that I had paid over $1k for, about 25 years ago. I stupidly updated the firmware shortly after the warranty period was over, and then immediately noticed a new loud pinging sound whenever it loaded or ejected the cartridge. It died within a few days of the upgrade, and I always suspected that HP had deliberately killed it. I bought a refurbished unit from them for another big chunk of money, because I was locked into the media platform.
I took a LaserJet 4050 (introduced 1997, I think ours might have been made in 1999) out of service (active, networked office use) just a couple of years ago. Not because it stopped working, because it still printed like nobody's business, but just because it was surplus to requirements.
I believe this was just about the last generation of LaserJet that was Actually Good.
If one's complex paper-handling and mark-delivery robot is working fine, why change the software inside it?
In other words; software for robots can have bugs just like software for anything else, so why take the risk if the thing's doing what you need it to and the replacement software doesn't solve any problems you have?
can't wait for a smart lawyer realize they can use the millennium digital act to create very profitable class action lawsuits.
"have you or your loved ones been harmed by a firmware, installed on a computer system you own and didn't authorized access to the manufacturer? click the link on the video"
I'm almost at the point where I consider any type of firmware update for anything to be actively hostile and to be avoided if at all possible with the sole exception of patches for specific, significant security bugs.
In 2017, Apple put out a new iPhone, and in the same week, made my 1 year old iPhone unusable on purpose overnight to make me buy a new one.
My S23 Ultra got a software update that removed features and now I can't use YouTube. I can't just not install updates, because it will nag me constantly and leave a permanent notification at all times that I cannot remove.
Sony famously removed OtherOS from existing PS3s.
I'm not sure what the solution is but letting companies destroy their old product so you go buy a new one, whether carelessness or malice is unacceptable.
"I'm almost at the point where I consider any type of firmware update for anything to be actively hostile and to be avoided if at all possible with the sole exception of patches for specific, significant security bugs."
In recent years not one of my printers has been on the net, whether it's a printer on a standalone PC or one on a network.
The same applies to printer utilities. With driver bugs I'll download an updated driver, which these days is often in the form of an executable, and I'll block internet access before running it.
I take the view that printer updates include user-unfriendly afterthoughts that manufacturers have since dreamt up to further line their pockets at our expense. I always assume that manufacturers will slipstream crud and spyware into driver updates.
As for HP, I'd never buy another HP product let alone a HP printer, the last printer I bought would have been around 2005.
Why do people still buy HP printers when it's so widely known that to do so is to buy a 'lemon'—nothing but a pile of trouble?
I think it depends on the brand of printers you buy. I bought a Brother and had trouble getting AirPrint to work. Only to find out after a year that there was an update of the firmware I had not installed, which had been available all along, that fixed the AirPrint issue immediately.
Just last week there was a news story about brother making a firmware update to "improve print quality" which of course meant refusing to print without "authentic" brother ink
From my experience Brother is definitely the best of a bad lot. Also, I've had no problems with 3rd party cartridges.
I agree, whilst HP leads the disreputable pack and second is Canon I've just had major poblems with Epson—cartridges not† being empty and the printer refusing to print, or refusing to print in B&W when a color cartridge is empty. I even had to exchange a printer and upgrade it for a more expensive one because it jammed paper—and even then the replacement had to be exchanged because of a fault (a thin black line running vertically down the page that couldn't be eliminated).
I've now a collection of partly-used and new cartridges from the first printer that I cannot use as they don't fit the replacement model. This whole system of forever changing cartridges from one model to the next is a fucking scam.
Does anyone know of say a source of firmware hacks that can override this crap?
† I now weigh cartilages and mark their weight in grams before using them, I then do the same when 'empty' which doesn't necessarily mean they're actually empty—which I determine by opening them. Doing this is also a sure way of determining the cost of the ink which where I am works out to be over $2,000/litre.
> In 2017, Apple put out a new iPhone, and in the same week, made my 1 year old iPhone unusable on purpose overnight to make me buy a new one.
I often see people claim something along those lines, but it differs from my experience. In early 2017, I bought a refurbished iPhone 7 which has served me well for 7 years. I've never noticed any sudden deterioration in performance.
People suspected it for years but yeah it was eventually found to be true that they were tweaking battery throttling in updates which to the end user materialized as the feeling of the new phone being out and their suddenly slowing down.
My iPhone X battery recently dropped below 90% and even though settings show “peak performance capability” it has started to feel very slow. Lots of stuttering at basic things like typing, showing the keyboard, swiping and so on. It is very very frustrating.
DeepSeek says the “battery can't consistently deliver the voltage the A11 chip needs for bursts of speed. This causes micro-stutters.”
It is frustratingly slow at times. So do I spend $100 to repair an old phone or make the move and get a new one? Either way Apple is probably making money.
Maybe it’s nitpick-y but people didn’t suspect phones were being slowed down due to aging batteries, they thought (and still think) that Apple slowed phones down to force people to upgrade. [0]
> it was eventually found to be true
Again, “it”, but it’s a completely different “it” from the first part of the sentence (because I never saw anyone say the slowdowns were due to the battery prior to Batterygate)
> which to the end user materialized as the feeling of the new phone being out and their suddenly slowing down.
This is fair, users were wrong about the reasons but they absolutely felt like it coincided with a new phone. It’s like when users report years-old bugs right after a new release and blame it on the new release. Correlation != causation.
All that said, Apple should have just come right out and explained what they were doing from the start. They could have, should have, spun it as the good thing it is instead of waiting for it to enviably leak (or be discovered). Doing nothing would have resulted in the same conspiracy theories (“My phone randomly shuts off, Apple is trying to get me to upgrade!”). Apple’s mistake was not being open about it (and it was a big mistake, no doubt).
[0] And yes, we could spend all day debating if new software OS’s that run slower than the original OS constitutes “slowing down older hardware”. It’s a fine line and while people online will say things like “I don’t even want any of the new features” that’s rarely true. They don’t care about X feature but they do want Y feature. Apple could be more selective over what features are included in new OS’s on older phones but that would lead to the same outcry (“Apple is gating features that could run on my phone behind the new hardware just to force me to upgrade”). Apple could probably improve the situation by allowing people to install older OS’s (a sort of LTS setup maybe?) on their phones but there are legitimate security issues with that not to mention the extra overhead to support that. It raises all sorts of questions around downgrading to an older OS (can you use your newer OS backups? What about iCloud services that might have migrated already? Etc?). Not unsolvable problems but not easy ones either.
I think it’s right to call for receipts here. It’s a common refrain that older devices getting updated causes performance to slow to a crawl but exceedingly rare that someone is actually able to demonstrate with data that it was directly tied to an update. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but I treat any claim like that with a good deal of skepticism without anything other than anecdata
Notice that Apple admits it did this, for the date that makes sense for what the user is claiming.
The only debate point is whether they actually did it for the reason of trying to save failing batteries, or whether that was a smokescreen for incentivizing users to buy a new device.
Given the evidence, I think it's wrong to call for receipts here.
Anecdotally, the iPhone in my post did have its battery wear down to the point that it had the "slowdown" thing enabled (can't recall what it was actually called). It was somewhat slower, but I wouldn't call it unusable. Maybe it depends on what people actually do with the phone. Google Maps, web browsing and such didn't seem to be that different.
I then went ahead and disabled that thing and, sure enough, it started randomly crashing when the battery wasn't full. I then went in and changed the battery for the same price as my previous Samsung's battery would have cost (plus the annoying fact of having to schedule the visit). It did get somewhat faster (not sure whether placebo or not) for another 2-3 years until the battery started swelling and I replaced the phone (I need it to be relatively waterproof, since I use it often as a GPS on my motorbike).
I do concede that I did find it weird and user hostile that, once you'd disable the "protection" mode, you wouldn't be able to turn it back on. Just like I find it odd that that specific model couldn't do the "trickle charge overnight" thing. And that my current iphone14 pro can't be told to stop charging at 80%, whereas newer models can.
Even that was handled badly. In my case when I went to authorized shop in central London. The guy did some test and said everything is ok and I didn't quality to change of battery (I tested using coconutBattery.app battery health was below 80% and I still was on warranty). I asked for battery replacement and pay for it out of my pocket and he also said he cannot do it because they are not allowed to change battery if their tooling said everything is ok. Had to buy 3rd party battery and replace myself.
Heh. Here in Australia, after that debacle Apple offered cheap battery replacements to anyone who wanted one for a year. I took my 3yr old iPhone 6S in and had them replace the battery. After I got it back, GPS stopped working. So I took it back in and they replaced the whole phone free of charge with a new (well factory refurbished) phone.
It was annoying coming and going to the Apple Store. But hey - replacing my 3yr old phone with a new refurb for $30? That was a great deal.
For these kind of things (common repairs that are easy (for a specialist with the right tooling) to do), you're often better going to the cheap local phone repair place rather than the official store.
You can replace the battery. You always have been able to. I did a few months later. So I don't know what you're complaining about.
But why do it before you need to? I'd vastly prefer my OS to be able to continue supporting a degraded battery before I get a chance to replace it, rather than just shut down without warning.
It did not go far enough. I discovered during a recent Internet outage that my iPhone 13 Mini will shut off at 9% if I use it as a mobile hotspot for my iPad. I had expected it to go until 0. The remaining battery capacity is at 85%.
I have a completely unusable nexus tablet. It sat with 50% charge for years, I tried to boot it up and it took minutes to do anything. So I flashed it with the latest image available, and it took minutes to do anything.
When I put it up, it was fine.
Compare this to an EeePC, where it happily runs a web browser in Gentoo, snappy. The EeePC is two or three years older, and cost half as much as the nexus.
The flash memory on the Nexus tablet was pretty poor quality. Like many Android devices of the era, eventually you get higher and higher rates of read failures which makes the error correction try again and again to get a good read massively reducing disk performance. It's hardware falling apart.
I've had several Android devices from several manufacturers experience the same issues whether or not they got updates.
Did it, though? There was no reason for it to slow down. I used it plugged in to a beefy supply.
If i said "i put it up in a cabinet because trying to watch youtube on it was becoming a hassle" would that change anything? I put it up for a reason, but i can't remember why. It wasn't because i bought another tablet, because i never have.
So unrelated to updates. The tablet just slowed down enough to be unusable while plugged in.
sure is a coincidence that this mirrors other people's experiences.
i still have the nexus. I can mail it to you and you can then diagnose it and be 100% certain that it wasn't updates. Then you can be correct on the internet.
or, here, i am wrong. It wasn't updates. It was crap "google" hardware and planned obsolescence. Or stray gamma rays.
what i'm being is sarcastic in the face of someone who refuses to step back from my single tablet to everyone else in this thread mentioning the same thing
and like i said, you're welcome to my tablet, i'll mail it to you, then you can be certain you are correct.
You made a post that was entirely about your tablet. But when I respond with a post that's also about your tablet in particular, that makes me unreasonable?
And this idea that I'm super insisting on being right about your tablet... you pulled that out of nowhere. Do you do this any time someone disagrees with you?
But the OP talking about an iPhone? I’m sure some devices get bricked (for real) by updates. The iPhone slowdown wasn’t that (though it still should have been optional and/or well advertised)
the term of art is "Planned Obsolescence" and manufacturers have been designing stuff this way since the 80s, around when credit cards were introduced.
I had one of these phones that would crash under load and the update fixed it. The technical fix was sound. Batteries can't supply full power as they age, and the CPU needs high power when it runs faster. It's an annoying reality of battery powered devices that looks like a conspiracy to boost sales.
Should be coming back in 2027, when the EUs battery regulation goes into effect. While it doesn't iirc require easily swappable batteries (like the Nokia of the olden days, where you just took off the back cover and put a new one in), it's specifically designed to put a stop to the current amount of device waste coming from poor quality batteries.
A "user-serviceable battery," by requirements, is going to be a hard shell plastic sort of thing - which means a decent fraction of the "total battery space" is a protective layer, not active cell components - so some significantly reduced capacity compared to having a "non-replaceable" battery ("slightly more difficult to replace"). You also end up having to devote space to whatever mechanisms keep the rear shell in place, and may have a harder time waterproofing it as a result (which seems to be standard anymore - the number of people I see at the gym using their phones in the hot tub or sauna is boggling).
Batteries, under light use of phones not kept in pockets, last a very long time - 3-5 years isn't unreasonable, and many will last longer. Batteries, under heavy use of a phone kept in a pocket and run hard, will still typically last 1.5-2 years. So in exchange for "slightly more inconvenience less than annually," you get a good bit more capacity and runtime.
Apple, in general, hasn't made their batteries nonsensically hard to replace. They've used the "pull tab sticky" sort of thing for some while, which is far nicer than "glue the whole thing down," and their newer devices are using some sort of electrically released magic (apply 9V to the adhesive, battery pops out).
That's a whole lot of words to just carry water for a bunch of anti-user stuff Apple continues to inflict on their Stockholm Syndrome afflicted customers. The whole water proofing thing is dumb--why is it that every digital watch I've ever owned is simultaneously unbelievably easier to service and also manages to survive being under water way better than any phone I've seen, Apple or otherwise? It's like gasket technology doesn't exist. You could have your shiny metal back and just have it secured with a handful of machine screws. And as far as their batteries not being a pain, they're way harder than a Motorola, for example, and again frankly needlessly so.
It's so weird that we just come to expect to be screwed on these phones, when if it was anything else, especially the sort of devices that are more commercially focused than consumer, you'd demand better.
Samsung’s Galaxy S5 or so was water resistant and had a replaceable battery. I remember a test where it survived a full washing machine program without any issue.
no one asked for water resistance, but literally everyone said "we want replaceable batteries and don't care about phone thinness either", but Apple doesn't care.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of people are very happy with water resistance in exchange for having to do a bit more work to replace a battery (that they don't actually replace).
The number of people using their phones in the hot tub, or in the sauna, astounds me on a regular basis. I can't imagine doing that. But, with modern devices being genuinely "drop them in the pool" grade waterproof, neither does it seem likely to be a problem.
I'll agree on thinness, though. The number of phones in massive, chunky cases says "A lot of people don't care about thin."
> The number of people using their phones in the hot tub, or in the sauna, astounds me on a regular basis. I can't imagine doing that.
and the number of people who desperately look for a way to replace their batteries or upgrade to a new model just because their phone battery degraded is quite saddening.
I've suggested to a range of people that if their only complaint is runtime, and the phone is a few years old, getting someone to replace the battery is far cheaper than a new phone. It's a novel concept, and I'm quite unsure if people just don't know if that's a thing, or if that's the socially accepted excuse to spend a lot of money on a new phone.
Manufacturers put water-sensitive indicators in electronics to flag this during warranty claims. Before water resistant phones, people would desperately google for how to save their phones.
> don't care about phone thinness either
There are rumors the next iPhone with have a thin model. You should also look into the original Motorola Razr. It was the original sexy phone precisely because of how thin it was.
i never needed waterproof phone. i dont throw my devices into water. on contrary i've changed batteries many times when phones had replaceable ones.
there were waterproof phones before this whole BS, so this "argument" disintegrated. seems more like you are happy being held hostage by corporation.
I don't just go throwing my devices into water intentionally, but having waterproof phones has been a lifesaver for me. I've fallen into pools with my phone. I've had phones around a pool I thought we're safe but still got soaked from splashes. I've been caught in pretty massive rainstorms without a waterproof pocket or bag. I've had things spill while cooking. I've had kids with sticky fingers get all kinds of greasy nasties all over my phone and been happy I could just rinse it in the sink.
I’m not defending Apple here because I don’t buy the “water resistance requires non-replaceable batteries story” (there have been plenty of phones that were water resistant and had replaceable batteries + TRS sockets)
However it’s worth noting that in the era you described where phones had replaceable batteries, water damage was also a lot less permanent.
Back then, you would whip the battery out, leave the phone in rice for a day, then it would power up the following day as if nothing had happened.
These days I couldn’t see that working even if you could remove the battery. And when you also factor in how much more essential phones are to our every day lives (they’re our wallet, plane boarding pass, health monitors, location tracking for nervous parents, etc. we don’t even remember important phone numbers like we used to). Regardless of whether you agree with all these use cases, it does result in a scenario where water resistance is a lot more important than it used to be.
I’m assuming you meant “user
replaceable”, because that’s really the key thing to understand here. Almost every phone had those, but most of them switched over half a decade. There was a long period where consumers had tons of options with removable batteries, and the market unequivocally rejected them. It’s always a mistake to assume that people drop hundreds of dollars on worse products based on nebulous claims about marketing, so clearly the average phone buyer thought that they were buying a better product. Why?
Removable batteries were useful in two situations: before a phone could last all day, swapping batteries was handy for people who spent a lot of time away from chargers … but most people don’t need that very often, if at all. The other situation is a few years in, when the battery life is starting to be noticeably worse. For that to be a big deal, it has to happen before you want to buy a new phone for other reasons. This is a valid complaint but you only experience it every few years and can fix it by spending the equivalent of a month of phone service and waiting roughly the amount of time it takes you to get lunch.
Now, what did we gain? Using a sealed battery made phones far more durable – people used to joke about dropping their phone and having the battery fly out! – and especially made it easier to make them dust and waterproof. It also made them cheaper, smaller, lighter, and sturdier.
So basically the average buyer gave up benefits they rarely used in exchange for things they noticed literally every time they picked up the phone. The day the iPhone came out, the entire market re-evaluated what they wanted in a phone and almost everyone decided that they didn’t make 18 hour flights with no charging often enough to give up that solid, luxury feel. Just as Google’s software developers made a crash project to copy the iOS UI, the hardware designers saw the lines around the block at Apple Stores and correctly concluded that nobody minded the drawbacks of a sealed battery.
> This is a valid complaint but you only experience it every few years and can fix it by spending the equivalent of a month of phone service and waiting roughly the amount of time it takes you to get lunch.
I don't spend $90-100 on service. So make that three months. With 1/5 or less of the price going to the actual battery.
> people used to joke about dropping their phone and having the battery fly out!
You can solve that with a screw.
> The day the iPhone came out, the entire market re-evaluated what they wanted in a phone and almost everyone decided that they didn’t make 18 hour flights with no charging often enough to give up that solid, luxury feel.
Things have changed a lot since then. Batteries are huge, chips are efficient, and phones are thinner. These days the loss of half a millimeter of battery, or making the phone half a millimeter thicker, would be just fine in a ton of cases.
> cheaper, smaller, lighter, and sturdier
The sliver of thickness is real, but you can keep the same sturdiness, and what kind of price difference do you have in mind? If the phone costs a dollar more but you save more than fifty dollars on battery replacement that's a pretty good deal.
> the hardware designers saw the lines around the block at Apple Stores and correctly concluded that nobody minded the drawbacks of a sealed battery.
Ugh. People liking a product is not an endorsement of every single aspect of that product!
> I don't spend $90-100 on service. So make that three months. With 1/5 or less of the price going to the actual battery.
The cost of the battery is more than that unless you’re buying no-name fire hazards off of Amazon – and even 20 years ago the batteries cost a similar amount, it’s not like competition was keeping the price down – so you’re looking at something like $50-60 dollars in labor. Not cheap, but clearly not something the average person is changing buying decisions over.
> You can solve that with a screw
We can look at the many, many past devices and learn that it’s not that simple. Those fell out over time due to thermal expansion and contraction, complicated waterproofing, cost more, and added weight and volume – especially when done in a way which was durable and felt solid.
Again, my point isn’t that the sealed case is perfect with no drawbacks of any sort but rather that there was an extended period where people had options on the market, and consistently, overwhelmingly picked the sealed phones. That strongly suggests that people value those everyday benefits more than the cost of replacing a battery. Things like waterproofing are a good example: not having to worry about replacing your phone because of rain or a spill has a peace of mind which most people appreciate because they fear an unexpected $500 loss more than possibly saving $50 on batteries every 2-4 years.
> The batteries I looked at through ifixit are $20. No-name goes below $10.
The cheapest for my phone is $35, and Apple will do it for $90 or third parties for a bit less. If you’re seeing different numbers for your phone, I’m sure that’s true but don’t think it’s fundamentally changing the cost into a number which changes the average phone buyer’s decision. Again, I’m not saying it’s trivial but that people pay hundreds of dollars upfront and usually thousands over the life of the device. There just don’t seem to be that many people who intend to own the same phone for many years and factor the cost of installing a replacement battery into their decision.
> You can be pretty water-resistant while also having a cover normal people can remove.
Yes, nobody has said otherwise. It’s just more expensive and makes a physically larger device if you are making an equivalently durable device because you need to add screws, seals, etc. and make a mechanically more complex case.
Again, my point is simply that the entire phone market had removable batteries but shifted away over roughly a decade and it’s usually a mistake to look at a durable consumer preference and dismiss it as marketing or some kind of conspiracy. Apple is a single vendor so maybe they’re a lost cause but there have been many Android phone makers and their buyers also followed the same trend despite a vocal minority urging otherwise.
I'm not trying to say that more than half of people care, I'm saying that a lot of people care, but it's a situation where "vote with your wallet" would only work if it was a very strong preference, because the competition for good phones is limited and too many features are bundled together. So millions of people have their desire unmet despite the technology being able to meet it with a small size penalty and at negligible dollar cost.
It's not a conspiracy that manufacturers will all make a choice that saves 50 cents if 99.9% of people that care will suck it up for other reasons. But if two phones were offered with everything else equal except battery replacement, half a millimeter, and $1 on price, I'm confident that a very significant fraction of people would pick the replaceable battery option.
I think it's specifically a combination of 2 things for Apple, one of which Apple will absolutely never admit to, but it's something that I've definitely noticed back when I still got Apple devices. I was into jailbreaking at the time and that often meant deliberately not upgrading the main OS, which often made my phone last much longer compared to others of the same model who were running the last version of iOS.
The first is that Apple forbids you from downgrading the iPhone to a lower firmware. They're not the only device maker that does this, but this is mostly unique in the realm of "personal computing devices" - I can downgrade most Android phones to a prior Android version through fastboot if I wanted to and usually the only thing blocking you from installing older Windows versions is a lack of driver support for them (same deal with Linux distros). Even macOS at least in the past used to make sure that if you booted from the Recovery partition, it'd contain the installer for the version of macOS you got with the computer. Apple claims it's in name of security, which is probably true (although I do believe that a company like Apple should just maintain at least the last two major versions of it's software at a bare minimum and let users freely move between every version they've ever released - voided warranty is acceptable for this), but it leads into the next point.
Which is that I suspect Apple deliberately "overspecs" the burden of running basic iOS with newer devices. Basically, the iPhone 4 (yes I'm going back this far) last supported iOS 7.1.2, but if you read reports at the time, the actual most performant version of the phone at the time was iOS 6, not iOS 7, which was mostly characterized as being a slow mess on iPhone 4's that Apple only barely patched up to not be device crippling. I've from personal experience seen this pattern repeated over and over until I just switched to Android (with the main reason for doing so being the fact that Apple killed a bunch of older phone games I was playing by killing 32bit support in iOS).
By doing this, they can essentially force people to move to new devices, simply by making the last supported version borderline unusable for regular use. "Batterygate" was essentially the main consequence of this practice, but it was a symptom coming from Apple's support practices, not the cause. It's just something they boiled the frog with (because after the iphone 4, it stopped being reported, although I can personally attest to all their devices that hit EOL in the years afterwards having the exact same issue.)
Apple may slow down iPhones just because they keep adding features and layers to iOS architecture. Good architecture is removing old code, but most software tenda to be write-only.
It was more to prevent unexpected shutdowns. Which, I'll add, were a problem with Android devices at the time, and the Nexus 5, in particular, had three battery OEMs, one of which would only last a year before being unable to run the device in high demand situations (say, "taking a picture with the flash").
As lithium batteries age, their internal resistance goes up - you can model a battery as a voltage source and a series resistor accurately enough. Over time, that resistance goes up, which means, for a given current, you end up with less voltage "at the output." Most power supplies will compensate by pulling more current to provide the needed power, which will drop the voltage more until you slam into the low voltage protection circuitry that cuts power.
The Nexus 5s are the ones I'm most familiar with, and they absolutely had this problem with one of the battery OEMs (the only way to tell which OEM you had was to pull the battery out, they were labeled on the back). The typical symptom was, "The phone shuts down when you try to take a picture," because camera modules are power hungry, the CPU was spinning hard to keep up with rendering the view from the camera (and possibly doing some pre/post frame capture to find the best frame, I don't recall when that showed up), and the flash pulls a LOT of current, very briefly. So everything would simply shut down when you hit the button to take the picture.
Apple decided to attempt to limit this problem, and they locked out the highest tiers of CPU performance (which are the most power hungry), if the device was having brownout issues. It's a reasonable enough strategy. Where they failed (IMO) was in not alerting the users that it was happening, or that it was a battery health issue. The later iterations of it, where it tracks battery health, and will tell you if your battery is going bad and needs replacement, are what they should have rolled out, and didn't. My guess is that they didn't think it was going to be a major issue for many devices, so it was just a CYA sort of thing that would prevent shutdowns. Unfortunately, that also happened right around the same time that US carriers started dropping the "New phone every 2 years on contract!" thing, and so the iPhones of that era started being used rather substantially longer than the previously-expected 2 years, and, Apple, so drama for clicks.
Had they just gone about telling users, "Hey, it looks like your battery is getting weak, would you like to schedule a replacement? Otherwise, we've limited performance slightly to prevent shutdowns." - I think it would have been fine. And they did settle on that eventually. It just took a few iterations.
I experienced those shutdowns several years before that update was released when I was using an old worn out iPhone 4. Several times it died on me in the middle of an important call at 30-40% battery. I would’ve absolutely preferred it slowing itself down if it would’ve prevented that.
It wouldn’t have hurt to include a setting, but I think turning it on by default for devices under a certain threshold of battery health at least was the right call, both because of non-technical users who don’t understand it and wouldn’t turn it on or those who would leave it off and then attribute the crashes to unrelated things (“they put crashes in my phone to force me to buy a new one!”)
There was no need for anyone to guess what was happening when their phone crashed, and there was no need for any default behavior at all. Every time I let my battery SoC go below a certain percentage -- 5% or 10% -- a message pops up asking if I'd like to switch to low-power mode to extend the remaining charge. I appreciate that. Nobody ever objected to that. No lawsuits were filed, no outrage was farmed on Facebook, no hit pieces were published by Bloomberg. So why in the world didn't Apple do something similar following a crash?
The dialog box practically writes itself. "Sorry! Your iPhone has just recovered from an oopsie-poopsie caused by a tired battery. Please choose an option: <Continue operating normally for as long as possible> <Reduce performance to extend battery life> <Schedule an appointment at your nearest Genius Bar to install a new battery (and check out the new iPhones!)>"
It's utterly inexplicable the way they handled this. Someone should have been fired. But then we say that a lot about Apple around here, and it never seems to happen.
I'm guessing you've not dealt with power electronics and batteries terribly much.
Depending on what limit has been hit, it's quite likely there is no way to log the cause of the error. Low voltage protection circuitry on most batteries doesn't have a status line. It's never supposed to trigger except in exceptional cases, and it just cuts power. All you know is that the power disappeared suddenly, and you've rebooted. Telling the difference between that and assorted other hardware faults, especially if you never designed the hardware to look for it, is really difficult.
You can certainly design a system that will latch the cause of the shutdown in the battery management IC - but you can't really add this in after the fact.
Sometimes things are much simpler than they seem at first. You set a nonvolatile flag at startup time: badShutdown=true. Prior to shutting down normally, you clear the flag. Then, if the flag is ever found to be set at startup time, you can assume that a crash occurred.
Whether the crash was really due to the battery can be inferred from the battery's age. If the battery is relatively new or is otherwise determined to be OK, don't issue this particular warning. If it's within, say, 90% of the expected service life, then the warning makes sense.
In any event, logic similar to the above was employed at some point to determine when to degrade the phone's performance. That is the point where the warning should have been issued. There are no valid excuses for not doing so.
I had a 2016 Intel MacBook Pro with integrated graphics. It was one of the first Apple laptops with a Retina display.
Well. That machine got progressively slower with each major release of macOS. The graphics performance degraded most clearly. If you did the gesture to show the desktop, the animation was noticeably janky - like maybe 20fps or so. Maybe Apple was increasingly using less efficient / more complex compositing or something with each new macOS version and the little Intel integrated graphics chip couldn’t keep up.
I almost forgot how bad it was - but then just before I sold it, I booted into recovery mode to wipe & reinstall the original OS. Turns out the recovery partition was still running whatever version of the OS that the machine shipped with - and holy cow performance was night and day. I’d almost thought I was making it up - but moving windows around was so delightfully snappy again!
I don’t think it was malicious at all on Apple’s side. I think they just didn’t care enough to make sure each new version of macOS didn’t degrade performance. I’m sure their engineers were excited to add visual flourishes using metal - even if older machines struggled to render them.
In retrospect I could have screen recording it or something for proof but I didn’t bother. I was getting rid of the machine anyway. Maybe I should have? But the difference was very real and very obvious.
(And no, I didn’t have any 3rd party software clogging up my machine. The only thing that would routinely peg my cpu was - for no reason - photoanalysisd and the spotlight indexer. Both part of macOS itself.)
Can someone please tell Apple we are overdue for a nostalgia line? I want an iPhone 3GS form factor so bad. I would even accept the 480x360 resolution. There was no more perfect design than the little "worry stone." I have a 13 mini and I think it just wasn't small enough to sell better. You still can't quite one-hand operate the entire screen comfortably.
> I'm almost at the point where I consider any type of firmware update for anything to be actively hostile and to be avoided if at all possible
I reached that point a number of years ago. I've more recently reached the point where I feel the same about software updates generally, not just firmware ones.
A software update all too often means that the main thing you bought the software for is nerfed or removed.
I have archival computers that I maintain specifically for this. I can run nearly every AI/ML software released since 2018, on the operating system it was designed for, with the correct libraries, and drivers. No docker. All on the metal.
I do use venv, but that's so I don't pollute the system with libraries.
I disallow internet access, too. That is, I don't put a gateway or DNS server in, but the LAN works.
I have stopped doing them altogether unless there is a known issue that I am trying to resolve.
I have some "smart" devices like TVs, printers etc that require local area network access - where ever possible/practical they are blocked from exiting the network at the router level.
Even software updates for non critical products are frustrating. I have stopped using some locally installed products (specifically, Evernote), because of it's forced, intrusive upgrade settings. I just want to open the app and quickly read a note, not have to muck around updating (or dismissing the update prompt, what seems like every single time.
I had a sumsung phone that did that. I specifically bought it because it allowed unlocking the bootloader. It auto updated in the middle of the night, removing the ability to unlock the bootloader.
I had a TCL phone that started bootlooping at 3AM after an automatic update. TCL wanted the cost of the phone to repair it.
I can't think of a realistic solution. The government could solve it, if they worked for people rather than rich fuckers. There's no way they'd regulate their donors to improve something for their constituency.
lesson learnt - don't set anything to autoupdate. This includes browsers, OS, applications, phones or hardware.
Update _after_ you investigated the update. Ideally, check that the update didn't cause problems by googling it, perhaps after a few months or even a year or two. If it aint broke, dont fix it.
The consumer should ALWAYS be able to return the product to the exact condition at the time of purchase.
My Samsung had a nice feature for the alarms where you could say, "snooze" and it would hear you, instead of having to find the microscopic button. I have a big screen phone, WHY DO THEY MAKE IT SO SMALL?
Of course they took that feature away with an "update" that provided nothing else useful.
I agree about the microscopic buttons, some buttons on my 13 inch iPad are literally 2mm wide (I measured).
I usually have no issues with things like that but man, they really are trying hard to make it difficult.
But what annoys me more is that they put in so many gestures and features that sometimes it takes me more than 10 tries just to save an image in the browser because it constantly wants to do some text recognition instead. It’s almost like context menus were useful.
I read a story about someone using Spotify for their alarm and sometimes a song would come up that instantly stopped the alarm as the first word in the lyrics triggered the voice recognition.
This hostility towards ownership goes way beyond computers. There has been a decades long effort to exclude people from 'productive' society if they don't consent to being controllable and surveilled.
Well, then only buy stuff where you control the software.
Check LineageOS build support before you buy a phone.
Check Linux distro support before you buy a laptop.
Check postmarketOS support before you throw things away.
There is options, and they work fairly well. It's just that you have to compromise on convenience for it. And convenience is the most monetary exploited weakness in human behaviors.
> convenience is the most monetary exploited weakness in human behaviors.
And there is generally nothing scandalous about it: I pay someone to mown the lawn when I cannot be bothered to do it myself.
The problem is that one side of the deal is being exploitative on other levels. One day the gardener shows up and cuts your phone line, because now you can only use the phone company he likes; then every 10 minutes he tells you that he also does home renovations; one day he digs a trench so that the garden can be square, since he has decided he only works with square gardens; then he starts applying a surcharge if the grass grows too quickly. And so on and so forth. You could use another gardener, but there are only two of them in town and they both pull the same stunts.
Its not always that easy. I specifically bought a Zenfone 9 due to its small size and unlockable bootloader. Guess what - Asus removed the bootloader unlock tool after I purchased the device. Can't trust anyone these days
Are you sure? The amount of Android devices being released with support for bootloader unlocking is shrinking every year, and even if you find a phone you like that supports it, good luck getting your bank's app to run on it after doing it.
Companies like Google and Apple are doing everything they can to force people to use locked down devices they don't control, and PCs are slowly moving in that direction as well.
> In 2017, Apple put out a new iPhone, and in the same week, made my 1 year old iPhone unusable on purpose overnight to make me buy a new one.
How was it made unusable?
> My S23 Ultra got a software update that removed features and now I can't use YouTube. I can't just not install updates, because it will nag me constantly and leave a permanent notification at all times that I cannot remove.
For my home machines, I have a jail lan where nothing can get out. If there's a need, I have a proxy and can let specific things out to specific places.
After setting that up, my quality of life became SO much better.
It's too bad the status quo for tech is basically "everything gets out". I think people should be able to do this easily. Maybe AI can coach "normal" people through this kind of thing.
I almost never do firmware update, even for security reasons. You never know what's in the patch, and your data is already sold left and right anyway. I consider myself fully hacked 10 times, and every social media company knows me better than my wife.
90% of Nintendo firmware updates just read "General system stability improvements to enhance the user's experience." It's kind of hilarious at this point. Must be rock solid by now.
> I'm almost at the point where I consider any type of firmware update for anything to be actively hostile and to be avoided if at all possible with the sole exception of patches for specific, significant security bugs.
I recently bricked my Eufy Baby monitor trying to upgrade the firmware.
We got an additional add on camera and it wouldn't connect to the new camera. So I navigated their really piss poor documentation on upgrading the firmware but ended up bricking the whole thing.
The unofficial firmware that is maintained by some random person out of a basement in Kansas is infinitely more trustworthy than the vendors firmware itself in iot and simple embedded devices. I run some fork of some custom firmware on an older Nighthawk router in my house and the random person in Kansas updates the thing with security and perf and feature patches monthly. Never one issue upgrading them
I am starting to wonder if critical security update has been co-opted to be using the same logic as think of the children. Who wouldn't support that... then it's used for subtly malicious purposes.
My opinion is that someone who is making the deciscion to reduce the features of the next firmware update of things, is putting security as their top priority as ordered, but have no good idea on how to actually secure some features. So they decide to remove the feature altogether. Axes are cheaper than high fine grade operational instruments.
But since the programmers are using resources anyway, why not visit all other departments of the company if they want features modified. Maybe some ideas can generate more money for the company eh?
And there would be no way for an average consumer to test the security updates themselves and if there are, no way to confirm the validity of its assessment (SnoopSnitch).
The motherboard that I bought for my Hackintosh allowed for a thunderbolt port, and worked great with the OS. The motherboard issued a firmware that then removed the functionality of that thunderbolt port. The Hackintosh was pretty much useless at that point, as the external gear I used connected via thunderbolt
Well the whole Apple slowing older device debate has been beaten to death and Apple claims it was a safety net for older devices of which their batteries would be unable to provide enough stable power. Therefore they had to slow the device down to allow to battery to keep up with the device and increase the longevity of the device even if it meant the device was being power managed under particular workloads.
Whilst we can have our opinions of the legitimacy of this, I am inclined to agree with it. There have been many people on the other side of the coin who have claimed their device instability was fixed after these updates.
If they have to update it after they shipped it, that means they shipped it before it was done. I don't get why we all put up with that. And before you say "but what about the complexity?!?" I'll respond with "why do you think you need that?"
I'd pay so much more for simple tools I can buy once and never have to buy another again.
Something can be shipped 100% complete and still gain new features afterwards.
The Airpods Pro 2 recently got hearing aid functionality, that doesn’t mean they were incomplete at launch.
That said I’d agree in most situations, especially video games.
I'm awful tempted to say no. If it's so complex it can't be made secure before shipping it, maybe that's just too much complexity. I could possibly be convinced otherwise, but it would have to be a compelling argument.
EDIT: also a lot of the "security" stuff around consumer devices is just active user hostility. I don't need my office printer to connect directly to my home WiFi, a USB cable is fine. If making a secure WiFi enabled printer isn't something we can do as a species, maybe it's just not a reasonable goal.
Malicious updates and vendor malware are super hot topics now. Out and
out vandalism of private property obviously breaches every flavour of
"computer misuse" law.
There probably hasn't been a massive class-action against companies
like HP because not enough users feel they have redress, or they
believe that they "agreed" to malicious acts of vandalism. I doubt HP
would find any contractual safety to hide behind here.
But the harm I see being done is bigger and more nebulous. It is a
massive harm against security in general, and therefore against the
public and nation.
As you say yourself, it's only sensible to see "updates" as very
probably hostile. I would agree. There is debate in security circles
about whether one should apply updates at all.
Yet, updates are a necessary component of modern security. Forcing
malicious updates on users is therefore a "crime against the fabric of
society" and I'd love to see a government make an example of HP,
Microsoft, or anyone else pushing malicious "updates".
> In 2017, Apple put out a new iPhone, and in the same week, made my 1 year old iPhone unusable on purpose overnight to make me buy a new one.
Uhh, citation please? I had an iPhone 7 working flawlessly here until I decided to replace it last year.
The claim that a company “purposely” made your year old phone useless is beyond hyperbolic without at least a modicum of effort in supporting the claim.
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