This doesn’t make sense. The most locked down mainstream option on the market – the iPhone – is also the one with the longest market life, with iPhones holding their market value far longer than alternatives. So there seems to be a negative correlation between being locked down and e-waste.

I know you have “let’s reprogram old phones” in mind, but approximately nobody does this even when it’s an option. If you don’t like phones being locked down, then argue that on its own merits; e-waste is not a good argument.

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notrealyme123 a day ago | parent | next [-]

7 years lifetime is nothing. All iPhones have to rotate in that timeframe. That's incredible amounts of waste.

Every shitty iPhone could still be a MP3 player, home control or something else. But no, its Garbage because your only way to install is by going online and hoping that your critical apps are still in a useful version in the app store.

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dvdkon a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd say that's a spurious correlation, if it exists at all. Just look at all the Android phone makers who don't allow bootloader unlocks and those who do. Personally I'd say Google Pixel or Sony Xperia phones last longer than Huawei ones, though I wouldn't dare say reprogrammability has anything to do with it.

Besides, when the options on the market range from "impossible" to "damn hard to reprogram", can you blame the market for not taking advantage of that? I'm certain a law that would allow waste recycling companies to unlock any phone, even without password or receipt, would lead to phones or phone motherboards being reused in a variety of lower-volume products.

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codedokode 21 hours ago | parent [-]

I wanted to add a correction, I think that the user should be able to give up this right if it helps prevent theft for example. Today, if forums can be trusted, many Android phones protected with Google Account (FRP - Factory Reset Protection) can be unlocked in different ways, sometimes as easy as opening a keyboard (or invoking a voice input), going to settings and disabling the protection, or deleting a partition with FRP data. And for other phones there are no publicly available information, but there is software that you can rent. So (if the information on the forums is true) it seems that Google's anti-theft protection was made just for a bullet point in marketing materials and not for really preventing theft.

	▲	dvdkon 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not too keen on anti-theft systems, because they effectively brick otherwise usable devices when they are thrown out. I think e-waste recyclers should have some way of bypassing this protection and then reselling the device.

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Fire-Dragon-DoL a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One of my desktop pcs is like 15 years old. It faced a ram upgrade and 2 gpus died over time, the processor still holds. The windows 11 upgrade killed it though, but I'll move it to linux and that should be ok.

	▲	queenkjuul a day ago \| parent [-]
		My home NAS/web server is using all its original core components from 2012.

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a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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fsflover 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The most locked down mainstream option on the market – the iPhone – is also the one with the longest market life

Compare that to GNU/Linux phones (Librem 5 and Pinephone), which will be supported forever, since they run mainline Linux.