Apple are the masters of programmed obsolence with usury prices
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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My Fairphone 3 is almost as good as new. Although it was behind competition from the beginning, I hope more recent iterations filled the gaps!
I have not much hope for corporations, but what disappoints me the most is other people. Every-time someone needs to buy a new smartphone around me, they just stop considering Fairphone when they find out their latest model is at 700€ and end up buying a 550€ model from Google or Samsung. Like, people complain they don't want their manufacturer rely on child labor or any dirty sourcing but they actively make that decision on their own to spare a few bucks or not risk the discomfort of having a phone running transitions at 50 FPS instead of 90 ...
We can't fix systemic issues by relying on individuals to make "moral" decisions in a system we are all exploited under.
“Capitalism is when companies piss me off.”
I swear you should have to prove some minimum-level understanding of a term before being allowed to use it.
I read it as profit maximization is a perverse incentive that doesn't achieve what people promoting capitalism claim.
No its when profits are more important than the customers a company claims to serve, under capitalism companies are incentivised to make products that dont last.
Is this ironically funny?
Like… it’s funny people are stupid enough to believe this nonsense.
I'll give you a personal story. I'm not saying anything about apple but this is my personal experience with a tech hardware company I use to be an engineer at in Silicon Valley.
We had a product we sold to other companies. Something not consumer grade at all. Think major data center products. This product we'll call it, Product X, was sold in different levels of speed. So you had the baseline product at speed 1x and another at speed 2x.
Now, due to hardware delays and hardware issues the 1x (which was meant to rollout first) actually got its production schedule pushed back to the point that the hardware testing had been fully verified on the 2x model as well as the 1x. So mass production had not started yet but both models were verified through beta testing and development.
So, it actually ended up being cheaper for manufacturing to only produce all 2x hardware and have me (the software engineer) just reduce the throughput on the same hardware. They would simply just stick a different 1x sticker on the models running the purposely speed limiting software.
The company released 1x the next quarter. Again, with hardware identical to the 2x. And then waited two quarters to release the 2x. Now technically the 1x models could literally be upgraded by a software update. But that would expose this scam. So companies we sold 1x models to that wanted to upgrade would literally throw away the same exact hardware to buy the 2x model.
This is just my personal story. You don't even have to believe it. But, having worked in the industry now for 10 years, this is not uncommon practice. I would not put it past Apple to do what the above post suggests.
It is literally reported in the media that Apple was doing this. These commenters take issue with ascribing the problem specifically to capitalism. They believe that, yes, capitalism causes enshittification. But they may also believe that it is not unique in this, or that even if it is unique in this, it is also unique in encouraging the innovation that brought about smartphones.
It's silly, but it's what they believe.
It’s reported that people believe Apple did things, never with any actual, you know, proof.
The biggest problems either performance with old phones is that folks don’t understand how batteries degrade over time and attribute that to some sort of malice from companies like Apple.
I’m all for complaining about the dangers of unfettered capitalism, but stupid Apple conspiracy theories make yall look silly.
Batterygate: This issue gained significant attention in 2017 when Apple admitted to throttling the performance of older iPhones with degraded batteries, beginning with iOS 10.2.1 and iOS 11.2. This, Apple said, was intended to prevent unexpected shutdowns caused by aging batteries, not to drain the battery itself. The more cynical took it to be a deliberate action to encourage upgrading (and to enhance the perception of upgrading) by crippling their product.
Their original letter is no longer available on Apple’s site so here’s a link to a Reddit post about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/bdv3zk/comment/el126j7/
I had one of those old phones and it was preferable to have slower performance overall as opposed to seemingly random shutdowns. In reality the shutdowns were directly related to when the cpu was drawing more current than the battery could provide often on websites that had tons of client side scripting.
So before the update I’d be browsing the web and my shit would just shut off and after it would run little slower but stay on.
Iirc they ended up improving the battery management software so it would maximize battery life and suggest when it was time to have it replaced.
This is 100% right. Shocked you aren’t being down voted into oblivion for not jumping on the anti Apple circle jerk.
“the more cynical” is a really positive spin on conspiracy theory nut jobs.
Apple only throttled CPU speeds on batteries that were below a certain threshold to avoid them crashing when they couldn’t provide the necessary power from the battery. Replace the battery, which Apple would do for effectively cost, and the CPU throttle goes away.
This was a measure to make phones keep working longer instead of forcing folks to buy a new one. Quite the opposite of the claims here.
Samsung throttled their phones from the start, for the same reason, but would increase CPU speeds to cheat at benchmark tests and lie about the capabilities of their phones. Where are the lame memes regarding them?
Here is a link to back my claims, because I don’t just spout nonsense.
https://www.theregister.com/2013/07/31/samsung_found_cheating_in_benchmark_tests/
Apple claims that now, after initially denying that they throttled phones for years, and then only announcing that they actually were when they add a toggle to turn it off. Also, they settled a lawsuit paying over 100MM dollars, which shows that their actions were anti-consumer.
And sure, Samsung is equally as ass as Apple. That's why I don't use their phones, feel the need to defend their shitty actions, or pretend like they can be trusted when they promise they weren't fucking over their customers.
Here's my link to support what I've said, but I'd highly recommend you look into a situation a bit before starting an argument about it, it's just common courtesy.
Samsung throttled their phones from the start, for the same reason, but would increase CPU speeds to cheat at benchmark tests and lie about the capabilities of their phones. Where are the lame memes regarding them?
Who the hell is talking about Samsung? We all know Samsung enshittifies in different ways to Apple. I know it's easier to pretend that all criticism comes from Samsung fanboys but the reason Apple gets it is 1) because it's the most successful and most prominently greedy phone manufacturer and 2) because of how annoyingly cultish their consumers are.
This was a measure to make phones keep working longer instead of forcing folks to buy a new one.
Source: apple says so (but only once they were pressured for years). No conflict of interest there.
Pretty sure in this case Apple straight up admitted it, that's pretty damning proof
Admitted to intentionally causing batteries to drain faster?
I’m sure you have a link to an official Apple statement that proves the claim.
My memory failed me, it was actually intentionally making your phone slower and less performant in phones of the previous generations: https://support.apple.com/en-us/101575
But the result is the same. Upgrade or we'll make your phone awful to use. In that statement, they are really trying to make it sound like it's a good thing for the user, but up until they started doing that, batteries not "supplying enough peak power" was never an issue, and isn't an issue on any android phone. I had friends with iPhones that were 5 years old that worked perfectly fine before the update, that basically became unusable after the software update.
this is standard for a lot of server products: sell the exact same chassis with the same specs and then feature-gate the hardware to under perform
yes, it’s shit… but also, you’re not buying the physical thing: you’re buying the r&d… it’s either that, or they say suck it buy the expensive one we don’t have another option
that’s very different to what’s being expressed in the original image
It's not though. Only under capitalism would be literally throw away an item and replace it with the exact same item in the same condition. The only reason for this behavior is capitalism and profit incentives. It's a waste of labor and resources and only benefits the profits of capital.
i agree that it’s wasteful; i just think it’s far closer to paying a contractor (complete this work and i’ll pay you $X and i don’t care what tools you use) than it is to buying hardware from a consumer perspective
Ok. You bring up an important point. And I hope I can take a minute to convince you of something.
What you're saying is correct. But it relies on fundamental falacy of the way people try to view economics. When we say "capitalism" we're obviously talking about the entire economic structure; the "rules" for which an economy is organized and the government that enforcess those rules.
The issue with your comparison is that is is not at all comparable to the economic insensitives of massive companies. There is absolutely no valid way to compare a small business or individual hiring a contractor to what I was previously discussing.
I think our economic education suffers in this country because people tend to think of massive economies of scale as just a "bigger" small business. This is not at all comparable. And the waste that this produces is absolutely non trivial.
The "run the country like a business" people have this same flawed logic. They image that any business is just a "coffee shop" but with more employees and customers. But these things are just not comparable. It would be like everyone deciding about how to build an airplane but they assume that the physics are in a frictionless vacuum.
well, i’m from australia so our “this country” is probably different
in general i agree, but economies of scale and things like that apply no matter what - they’re logical conclusions rather than theories
no matter your system you have to allocate resources, and cease to allocate resources to things that aren’t useful
providing a single big product is likely the most efficient thing to (why would they do it otherwise? all other arguments aside big companies are fairly decent at squeezing every $ out of their sales. even if it’s not, i don’t think we have the data to discuss further in that direction), so no matter the system i’d argue this is probably the correct decision
what then follows that? if you’re allocating resources, and there’s only a single $100 item available and you only have $80 to spend on it, you’re SOL: you’d probably prefer there to be an $80 product that’s half as powerful (and in this scenario, the $100 product would likely cost more as well)
either way you’re wasteful - either in discarding performance by artificially limiting the item, or by making smaller products in an inefficient way that makes the whole range more resource intensive to produce
i think there’s no good answer, and as frustrating as it is to know that the big powerful thing is right there, i don’t think it’s as obviously big bad corporate as it seems on the surface
it should also be noted that it’s likely with those products that all the hardware actually doesn’t work - when you produce things like CPUs, some of the cores just fail to pass QA. rather than throwing them out, you can just artificially disable some of the cores and sell it as the smaller products… technically, yes the whole chip for the bigger product is there, but it’s partially faulty (or at least not up to the quality that the company is willing to guarantee)… this also sometimes happens with returns