this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
390 points (96.0% liked)
Privacy
32120 readers
970 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why does it have to be a company?
Tons of old hardware continues to be useful to its owners just by virtue of being on open and maintainable platforms.
But Apple continues to push harder and harder for planned obsolescence while claiming they support their devices better than the competition.
Apple earns unique hate in this category because of how strenuously they fight against things like right to repair. Failing to support old products isn't the end of the world but intentionally making it so that old products aren't supportable is very bad and the Apple App Store is a major instrument for making sure old Apple devices stop being useful.
apple does 'support' their hw better, it's just that it's a pretty low bar to start with these days. they and their competitors could do better--much better, but zomg! someone has to think of the shareholders. they're far more important than users or the planet.
Apple innovates in new and exciting ways to not support devices. They invent new antirepair technologies and have pioneered locked-in walled-garden app stores that prohibit users from doing what they want or need to keep their devices working.
They don't get to wear the white hat just because they do some shit well. They are the bad guy. And they could change posture pretty much immediately if they were at ALL serious about their devices having long-term support. They control basically their whole tech stack and could make it so their devices can continue to be maintained indefinitely even if they aren't doing it. But control matters more to them than support.
I really don't think anyone should be giving them credit here, not even as a backhanded compliment.
They only support their hw better on phones and tablets. On a computer you'll longer support from Windows or Linux LTS distros. I have a 13 year old laptop still running the latest version of Ubuntu