manikyath

if you have to ask, form factor is irrelevant, you shop for what motherboard is able to hold the things you want to plug into it.

20 hours ago, xnamkcor said:

I think it would be a fun solution to bypass stupid energy efficiency regulation to sell a monitor with no backlight, then, also sell a lamp that emits 2000 lumens of "white" light that consists purely of 3 specific nanometer wavelengths for Red, Green, and Blue.
"We aren't responsible if the customer just happens to combine two of our unrelated products".

nah, HP already got you.. when you plug in some elitedisplays it immediately asks you if you want to turn off "energy certified suck mode", you press once, and poof, no more power limits.

it's not called "suck mode", but it is heavily implied that your display will suck if you leave it enabled.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

Nope, you're not getting it. Apple wants to ensure that only Apple parts that Apple made to go into Apple devices. 

which is exactly the point i'm making.. none of this is related to theft of people's phones, but that wont stop apple from fearmongering that your precious device might be stolen if you are able to feel just a bit of freedom.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Did the recycler test all these parts? No. What if some of those parts contained customer data, or was damaged in being removed and caused customer devices to catch fire?

what if you buy fruit at the store and it happens to have a bug in it?

besides, the only part that *can* contain customer data is the motherboard.. and i'm fine with the concept of locking those down, for that very reason.

also - things catching fire isnt NEARLY as big of a problem as you make it out to be here.. you essentially have the same chance at a fire spontaniously happening with an apple refurbished phone as you have with a third party refurbished one.

because.. surprise surprise.. apple isnt the only company in the world capable of doing quality control. sellers of harvested parts dont *want* to sell a damaged part, because it harms their reputation.

on that note.. louis rossmann has some great examples of apple refubrished macbooks looking like absolute garbage inside.

all of this is also beside the point.. because you appear to be arguing a point i havent made, and you're still missing it.

my frustration with this kind of stuff is that apple insists it's to "protect the user", while all it does is limit consumer choice to be only what options apple blesses them with. there is no industry in existance where allowing third party / user repair is inherently problematic. yes.. there are idiots and shady mechanics who bodge up their car, but to argue that these limited idiots have to mean that you should only ever be allowed to visit a dealer garage for repairs is exceptionally shallow.

and in case it is unclear to you.. i dont consider "for the resource blender" phones getting scavenged for parts by recyclers as "stolen", i see it as recyclers doing the job apple should be doing if they want to advertise their recycling efforts. and any effors that apple is doing to prevent this should NEVER affect the choice an end user gets.

and to clear up some more details..

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

The correct answer here is "Apple must buy back devices, take them apart themselves and reuse parts that are qualified to be reused." Clearly sending the parts to a third party results in diversion and no quality checks, otherwise they would not end up in the supply chain at all.

news flash.. apple doesnt even *make* their own phones. no one does. the supply chain is all "third party" front to back.

it makes no sense for apple to build an "apple recycling corp" if they can just contract "Shenzhen recycling co.ltd." to do the work for them, since they already have the infrastructure and experience to do so. and i assure you that they are doing quite a lot of quality checks, because otherwise they wouldnt be finding working parts in the piles of phones arriving by the literal truckload. "for recycling" phones are essentially a bulk good handled by the gallon.

you seem to be confusing "verifying the quality of harvested parts" with "verifying no parts are getting saved from the blender". they're both a form of QC, but they are a very different form of QC.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

The right thing here would have been for NOBODY to bid on destroying iPhones, only dismantling, testing and refurbishing phones from parts they are permitted to use.

that's the problem.. people want to refurb iphones, but apple doesnt permit them to use parts. that's why "permitting parts" doesnt work.

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

Alas it's cheaper to send things to the landfill than it is to recycle, and many "recycling" is little more than sending an item to Asia to be be burned in their incinerators.

yes. ever looked into just how little apple's "recycling" efforts return? we're in the singular percentage terretory. it should be a crime to ban recyclers from harvesting working parts from your "for the blender" pile, but instead it's apparently a crime for recyclers to actually do the ecologically right thing.

auditing passwords.. that's a new one. in all my 6 years of IT i've never heard a manager say something that stupid. 

also, if you have not changed your password since they implemented that strategy, they're doing something VERY fishy to figure out your password.. and it's probably best to just play along with their silly games so they cant try to blame you when things inevitably go down the pooper.

nice to see valve found a sensible solution to "what to do with returned devices".

the price felt steep at first, but the more math i do to support that feeling, the more i feel like that's actually a pretty nice offer. (fyi: it's pretty much 20% off for the 256G model, rounded to the nearest **9 as valve does.)

1 hour ago, SorryBella said:

Okay i dont know how likely am i to get answered, but i really wonder whats the post-sales support gonna extent up to. If Lumafield is shuttering its doors, what will happen to these machines later on without the cloud platform? Are these things going to become paperweight or is there already local machine app made for it?

that's why the machine itself is a 'subscription'. i presume LTT doesnt 'own' the machine, it's essentially rented from the manufacturer.

they did mention that there's also the option to buy the machine and use local processing... if you have a rendering farm.

my dad owns some super fancy canon camera that's prehistoric by today's standards, and it hasnt missed a beat.

on that note.. pro tier cameras are very sensitive pieces of precision hardware, they're not toys.. treating them as a toy will break them fast, no matter the brand.

5 minutes ago, Kisai said:

That's not small potatoes, that's 18% of the phones sent to be recycled being diverted.

but none of this is relatred to people's phones being stolen.. which is the point i'm trying to make, and you're not getting.

none of this is related to your phone getting stolen. it's about apple's bottom line, and they're spinning it as if it benefits you.. and you've clearly taken the bait.

so.. to reiterate..

my point is that none of this is "protecting the user" against their phone being stolen. it's protecting apple's ability to deem your phone "dead" and have you buy a new phone instead of visiting unauthorized repair shops.

yes.. these repair shops often use parts of questionable origins... why? because apple makes darn sure that they cant get any parts from official sources.

to put an example behind this.. i work for a battery repair shop.. the majority of our work is stuff with a proprietary BMS that has some sort of communication, so we have to replace broken ones with another BMS from that manufacturer..

now, we cant buy those.. so what do we do? we buy 'recycled' batteries by the truckload, dismantle them, dispose of the cells trough a recycler, and test the BMS'es to stock up on working ones.

now.. it *is* theoretically possible these truckloads of batteries contain *some* batteries that would have come off stolen bikes at some point.. but it would make no sense to steal E-bike batteries to sell to a recycler.. we pay so little per battery that a potential thief would have to steal potentially hundreds of batteries each day to make an actual living for themselves. i'm gonna assume that 'for recycling' iphones dont pay that much more.. so by extension the idea that phones would be stolen *from users* *for parts* simply does not make financial sense. the value of these refurbished parts comes form the refurbishing job, not the device they came out of.

also.. i want to say this;

if 18% of the phones destined to end up in a blender is pulled aside for harvesting parts for refurbishment.. i'd see that as a good thing, reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order. if we can reuse, we should not recycle. the only reason why this is "a bad thing" is because apple does not want this to happen, any potentially repaired or refurbished iphone is a potential for one less iphone sale. this is apple's problem, not your problem. you should not defend apple's position in this regard, because apple's position is directly opposed to iphone users' position in this regard. it is unrelated to wether or not you like having an iphone, it is something you should be against no matter the rest of your preferences. you should be pressuring apple to allow more reuse before they can start marketing about how much they recycle.

i'm assuming that T-shirts are already on their way.. but perhaps posters make a nice addition to the store too.

oh - displate collab too?

26 minutes ago, itsabearcannon said:

I'd be totally fine with that. That policy would not prohibit third parties from manufacturing their own compatible headlight replacements, and it would also not prevent me from buying used OEM parts off eBay as long as they weren't from a stolen vehicle.

"tied by serial number" - how did you miss that? this means no third party parts, no self replacements.

27 minutes ago, itsabearcannon said:

What you seem to be assuming is that the company making the car in question would then proceed to blacklist NON-stolen parts.

yes, because tieing by serial number implies that you're only whitelisting the exact part it was made with, it's not even about blacklisting parts, it's a whitelist of "part".

 besides that, until any actual evidence to the contrary is provided, i'll continue assuming that the theft story is to simply hide the fact that apple quite blatantly does not want you to keep your old phone working to the extent they can get away with within the law.

common sense simply dictates that stolen phones make up a neglibly small part of the stream of phones making their way into 'recycling' flows. even if we assume that "10% of people in some given scope have had their phone stolen at some point" actually means that 10% of smartphones gets stolen, that still means that 90% of phones end up discarded by the owner, and i'd like to believe that somewhere in the workflow between said users and "blender for recovering metals" there is at least someone that takes aside the devices that might have parts that can serve a new life before they meet the blender of resource waste.

8 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

but how do u know scans are worse, just curious? 

trigger-happy on pretty much anything they feel is slightly out of line, over-inflating the risk of these <essentially false positives> in the results, etc.

when i started dealing with malwarebytes, it was safe to assume that nothing it would kick out would do harm, but the last time i had to deal with it, it involved combing trough some 500 false positives...

they've gone from 'a good tool to find malicious stuff that isnt necessarily a virus', to a vehicle to advertise it's own premium license by fearmongering about perfectly mundane stuff. it's not that the scans it does are worse, it's that they obfuscate the results behind marketing, essentially rendering the scans useless.

and in this entire pile of suck.. quietly windows defender actually became quite good.

EDIT: think of malwarebytes as going down the path of ccleaner... it's usefulness decreased, so it's marketing BS increased accordingly.

honestly, windows defender.

malwarebytes has gone rather... 'out for your money with bubbly nonsense'. i've felt like quality of the scans went down, and the intrusiveness of their "recommendations" has gone darn close to fearmongering terretory.

Kaspersky.. i mean, there's no reason to suspect they're under any sort of control, but they're russian, which is not the best starting point for a security product in the current climate. not gonna go into that deeper, because that's a highly political problem.

 but past the politics.. i've quite enjoyed the way kaspersky works when i used it.. no-nonsense, straight forward UI,  but that's a few years back now, before their origins became a point of question for the western market.

i've never used ESET, so i cant give an opinion on that matter.

but there's a behind the scenes detail about all of this.. largely the 'database' of threats any somewhat decent antivirus is aware of.. is the same database, no matter which AV you go for. in this regard windows defender is actually a pretty good option, because it's free and very deeply integrated, giving it very early access to block malicious stuff.

only downside to defender is that the UI is dense as heck, and it doesnt deal well with false positives at all.

14 minutes ago, MarkPol88 said:

If so, where are his gills?

On second thought - please do not answer that...

it takes a lot of effort to hide them, that's why he got the beard, and  will be going back to the beard.

i built my own server chassis from scratch just to have as many drive bays as i wanted...

especially in recent times it's near impossible to find cases that actually mount lots of drives in ways that are not just an afterthought.

evidence; linus is actually a fish, orchestrating the rise of the fish people.

18 minutes ago, Lesgoooo said:

I am okay with it being a bit less premium build quality wise, and building laptops is a thing atleast in the enthusiast space.............

"bit less premium" < = > "wet noodle that shatters when you hold it wrong"

and maybe it is in some spaces, but those spaces are not the thin&light space.

there's two problems here...

1: building a laptop is not a thing. the best you can do is buy a laptop, and find a bigger screen with the same connector.

2: an 18 inch thin and light laptop will be flexible even with the most high end chassis manufacturing options... 3D printing is not the best of options.

as listed above.. just buy a 17 inch laptop and call it a day.

that's a lot of money for someone else's e-waste.

3 hours ago, itsabearcannon said:

Uh....you do realize it's a criminal offense to use stolen cash, right? We're talking about stolen phones, too. Like if you use a bill with a serial number that's been marked as stolen, you can be sent to prison for it.

Nobody is saying legitimately sold phones can't be scrapped for parts, just like nobody is saying you can't use legitimately obtained cash to buy whatever you want.

But if the phone is stolen, or the cash is stolen, that should be put to a stop in any way possible.

but let's use an analogy that's more suitable to this topic:

let's say a car brand announces that they tie the headlights to the computer by serial number, to avoid car theft.

would this outrage you, or would you gladly buy a new car when the brand decides to no longer offer you headlight replacements? because that's what apple is doing.

and no, we're not talking about "stolen phones", we're talking about things that severely limit consumer rights, under the premise of "mathematically decreasing the potential value of stolen goods, wether or not that actually affects actual thefts". you're also baselessly assuming "these parts MUST come from stolen phones", when there's no reason to assume this is any significant portion of the market compared to otherwise broken or 'recycled' phones. there's also no reason to assume that before mentioned parts shops in china buy any stolen phones at all, as opposed to buying 'recycled' phones by weight.

blocking the motherboard made a huge impact, from what i can find.. but i havent seen any data suggesting that tieing components together by serial number has had any impact.. while it all but destroyed the consumer's ability to repair their own device if they so desire.

pure sine is always better than approximation.

but that said, are other devices also affected? (do your displays also flake out, etc)

because if it's just the pc, it might be the power supply that's struggling for some reason.

16 hours ago, Motifator said:

Recent consoles beginning with the Xbox One have been media devices to non-smart TVs alternatively.

that's not recent, some of the 8 bit era systems were literally "a home computer to put in the living room", pretty clear by the point some of them even had a keyboard.

besides that, the PS1 was a glorified CD player, the PS2 was a glorified DVD player, and the PS3 was a glorified bluray player.

you're selling a computer, any feature you can shoe-horn into that computer without significantly increasing the BOM cost is a leg up you have compared to your competition. it just so happens that these days smart tv alike functionality is "the" thing to shoehorn into boxes that are sitting next to your TV anyways.

1 minute ago, AbsoluteWoo said:

Disappointing game library? The PS3 has some of the greatest games of all time. The Uncharted series. TLOU. Metal Gear Solid 4. GTA5. God of War. Dark/Demon Souls.  (I could go on forever).

none of which i particularly care about. PS3 was the point where a lot of the more quirky games really just vanished.. crash bandicoot (which was *the* game i bought for PS1 and PS2) gone, all ratchet &clank got was a remake of the PS2 games. yes, it had a lot of "big serious titles", but that's also the only games that it got. i did know a few people who were into PS3, and what was quite obvious at the time was the severe lack of split-screen multiplayer games.. which is quite key when you have to share with a sibling.

i was actually *in the store* for a PS3 when i had to notice that none of the games on she shelf even came close to appealing to me..

also, from the viewpoint at the time where i was deciding between PS3 and wii:

- uncharted "series": only one was released, and at the time 13 year old me wasnt exactly looking for an action RPG.

- the last of us: despite "not being my jam" once again - this released when my wii was already 7 years old.

- metal gear solid.. somehow the third action RPG on this list of 3 games so far.

- to explain to you how 'late' GTA V was to my consideration of what console to buy.. there have been 4 computer purchases between the before mentioned wii, and me buying GTA V on the pc. the only reason this is on your list is because this was available for just about anything they could shoehorn a port onto.. they'd haev stuck it on the 3DS if they could.

- god of war.. we're on 4/5 for action RPG's here, only exception being an action adventure for GTA V...

- dark souls.. 5/6 on the action RPG...

yes.. truly vast and huge selection of games to pick from, if you're into action RPG's at all.

meanwhile, my selection of wii games:

- wii sports, that was included with the thing. i'd say i wish i had an hour tracker to see how much of this we played, but the highscores say it all.. some of the profiles on my wii have rankings so high it breaks UI elements.

- mario kart wii.. because PS3 didnt have crash team racing. yes.. this game being on the right shelf at the right time was the deciding factor.

- wii play was a quick addition for living room fun.

- super mario bros wii because it is obligatory to own a mario bros game for every nintendo platform owned.

- tiger woods PGA tour 08.. because my dad is into golf, he bought it for himself.. but it was actually plenty fun for the whole family.

- i dont exactly recall the occasion for wii fit being added to the library, but it quickly became the most played game, despite being a glorified fitness tracker with some balance minigames.

- a few more things like a sims spinoff, a duck hunting game, and a few more bits and pieces.. but the above are the key ones.

also.. nothing your PS3 cell processor can do beats spending the entire afternoon laughing at PS1 hagrid.

i have to say it's really an "easy content, but actually did some serious effort" type of feel on this one. aside from the tier list i like the quick "history lesson" that this turns out to be.

on that note.. the PS3's rather disappointing game library made me go from PS1 to PS2, to nintendo wii.

the wii is also the last console i've bought, despite returning to the game store SEVERAL more years i always ended coming home with a pc game to play on holiday, rather than a new console.

on that note, i am slightly disappointed that the switch made it to S tier, but the wii didnt. i still own the wii i bought in 2007, and the balance board i bought in 2008. of ALL the gadgets we have piled up in the attic, the only thing that regularly descends from the heavens for family events is the crusty old wii.. because nothing before it, and nothing after it will capture that "quirky party game" vibe like the wii did. yes the games are incredibly simple, but the simplicity is what makes it so "timelessly fun". i can load up wii fit's ski jump minigame, and no matter the audience, everyone will have a blast.

the only huge downside.. is that the "great" wii games are very rare.. with my "top 10" including "achtung wii kurve" - a hacky homebrew port of "achtung die kurve / curve fever", a silly snake-alike flash game, that apparently sorely needed tilt controls to be even more unplayable.

1 hour ago, itsabearcannon said:

Just that stolen devices, when locked, are scrapped for parts. Making those scrapped parts from stolen devices more difficult to resell is a win. Nobody is saying all parts should be unusable when brand new. Nobody is saying if YOU scrap your phone for parts, you shouldn't be able to use those parts to repair a device. Nobody is saying if you make a legitimate sale to a repair shop, THEY shouldn't be able to scrap your phone for parts and reuse them.

stolen phones might be scrapped for parts in the same way that cash may be used to buy drugs.

should we then also ban cash?

4 hours ago, itsabearcannon said:

One in ten smartphone owners in the US has had a smartphone stolen. If Activation Lock is as common as we think it is, thieves can't resell them as working - what else do you think they're doing with those devices? It's a common practice with other valuable things like cars to strip them for parts and sell the parts - why do you think that wouldn't apply to phones?

because selling harvested iphone displays is SIGNIFICANTLY less profitable than the hundreds of parts that can be sold on the second hand car market with little to no oversight or customer expectations. besides, as far as i'm aware the "meta" for profitable car theft these days is still VIN swapping. besides, parting out a stolen car requires an idiot with an impact driver in a back alley, parting out an iphone requires a cleanroom.

also - you're arguing that this is a requirement to reduce phone theft, why isnt your car's door bound to the computer by serial number? do you also lock your bike with a lock on the back wheel *and* a lock on the front wheel? is your TV chained down so that it cant be stolen? should your laptop's parts be tied on serial number to make sure you wont get robbed each time you are in public with a backpack? fact of the matter is that apple is unique with this implementation, and yet we're not living in the theft armageddon you imagine. maybe you live there, but in that case i suggest either moving or advocating for better policing.

on top of that.. this entire debate assumes that the majority of those thefts are at least somewhat organized crime, not some methhead taking something that looks valuable hoping to trade it for a good time not even understanding what "activation lock" even is.

or.. let me spin this argument the other way;

- apple stops binding the display and battery by serial number.

- apple makes replacement parts readily available for a fair price, essentially destroying any market for stolen parts. excluding the motherboard ofcourse, because that's what's locked on a stolen device.

- when you trade in an iphone tied to your apple ID (that way a stolen device cant be traded in) you get a $100 voucher towards a new phone. this both covers the "no motherboards available" catch, and provides apple with a supply of old parts to make available.

just maybe, perhaps a very big part of this apple mentality comes from their desire for old iphones to *not* keep working to the extent permittable by law?

as for addressing "where do these parts come from if not theft?": well.. people who "recycle" their phone because they bought a new one?

as for addressing "what else do they steal the phone for?" well..

- meth heads who have no idea.

- perhaps this factoid i randomly bumped into:

Quote

Forty-four percent of thefts happen because the victim left their phone unattended in public places.

now.. i'm not saying that half of the people at large are idiots.. but statisticly speaking half of the people out there are not as attentative as your average human.

---

let me share you a few examples from the E-bike battery industry, where i've felt quite at home for the past year. there's 3 examples i want to share...

- one brand i see a lot has their battery controllers tied to the bike trough some sort of handshake, this means that the bike wont work with a battery it wasnt paired with. this is BS, but at least affiliated retailers will pair them for you. (independant retailers cant, because they dont get the software)

- another brand we luckily dont see all that much (presumably because of the following story..) has rather troublesome batteries, basicly the moment a drop of mositure gets in the wrong place on the BMS a connector gets fucked, and the BMS is functionally broken... and because the batteries are tied by serial number there is no fix, so the entire bike is now trash.

- a third brand we see A LOT has an actual counter in their batteries (we've been able to reverse engineer the entire thing, so we dont guess, we KNOW.) that counts down the lifespan, essentially programming in an exact 2 year lifespan, at the exact legal minimum they have to provide warranty for. oh - and if you even think of replacing the cells; their latest revision has a feature for that too: the BMS selfdestructs if any of the cells go out of spec. - oh, and this brand's BMS is perfectly capable of counting the actual capacity of the cells, it has 3 things it keeps track of: the current charge level, the remaining total capacity, and how much capacity it should tell the user it has based on it's internal warranty clock.

now.. how is this relevant?

- the first brand claims this is for theft prevention.

- the second brand actually makes the bike say "theft protection" when you slot a different battery in it.

- the third brand claims it's "for customer safety" in their public facing channels.. but even their salespeople cant keep a straight face about that when pushed about the details.

- i know A LOT of e-bike owners, i dont personally know any e-bike owners who have had their e-bike stolen. i do know several people who've had to replace their bike because some brands make it impossible to find replacement batteries. 

or to make a very long post very short: you're advocating for something that impacts the majority of users, because a very small portion of users could have the theft of their phone prevented by this.

now - i totally think locking should be a thing, because this is a MASSIVE hurdle, even if there are ways to gain profit from a locked phone, it just reduces the profitability to the point it's probably below something else on the list of illicit gains. locking should just never get in the way of repairability.