I've got a Sony Xperia phone from last year. It's got a headphone jack and sdcard slot, waterproof, latest chipset etc. Plus a very close to vanilla Android. Yet they sold so few that Sony are pulling out of the US phone market. It seems to me that folks who say they want those things don't actually want them that much.
Sony hasn't been relevant in the phone industry since the transition to smartphones. Samsung, Huawei, Lenovo and others sell millions of phones with these features, but the flagship models still exclude them.
The early Sony Android phones were available in stores. I remember the first smartphone I got was a Sony, and, compared to a friend's Samsung, it was really lovely, great screen, better feeling build quality. Maybe they never competed on price? I didn't even think about the brand back then, just chose the nicest one in the store.
I definitely do, I have never bought a phone without a headphone jack. I feel like that will end soon though, as the line of phones I'm using seems to be dying, and it's the last of its kind.
Nobody wants a high-end android cameraphone where the camera firmware self-destructs when you unlock the bootloader.
For better or for worse, the android world is reliant on custom roms if you want long-term software support. Wiping the camera firmware is unacceptable given that reality.
Again, the whole custom rom thing is a bandaid patch on a shitty, user-hostile OS model that makes it nearly impossible to perform a vital function of the computing system (updates). The inability to deliver updates effectively is itself a symptom of a product defect here. It would be better if we could require all companies to provide useful first-party support lifecycles for the products they release.
But sony is deliberately gutting the device’s functionality to prevent you from unlocking it and that’s unacceptable even among android devices. If you’re going to do this shitty custom rom model, vendors that decide to kill even the ability to try and use that bandaid are going to suffer poor sales.
I would love a high-end cameraphone, the Xperia lineup was a serious consideration when I bought my last phone. But I could never get over the hump of buying a device that would have less than 2 years of updates by the time I got it, and that would deliberately self-destruct if I attempted to extend it beyond that.
I got an iPhone instead. Much less user-hostile. Forcing me to use a custom rom is already user-hostile, but to then punish me for doing it is unconscionable.
Oddly enough, there’s not nearly as much emphasis on banging the EU’s door down to stop that kind of waste and really honestly intentional/malicious damage, as there is about whatever apple thing people are whining about this week. Oh no the pelican case full of oem phone repair tooling that apple lets you rent (or buy) is too big/heavy… or Sony phones deliberately self-destruct themselves when you unlock the bootloader… somehow the “we can do both!” reply-guys never get around to doing both. Curious.
> I got an iPhone instead. Much less user-hostile.
Umm, that’s backwards. You can’t install your own software or unlock the boot loader. As soon as Apple decides the phone is e-waste, you can’t do anything about it unless there is a jailbreak. It just so happens that Apple offers software updates slightly longer than competitors, but this could easily change, as we have seen on macOS where 6 year old Intel macs no longer receive OS support. That is the pinnacle of user hostile.
No, I find the vendor deliberately self-destructing the firmware to be more user-hostile than having to set up altstore once.
It is something that shouldn’t even be required in the first place, the android support model is incredibly user-hostile at the best of times. So if you punish me for trying to keep my device up to date after your shitty 2 year support window expires then I’m not going to buy it. And I know a few brands have adopted longer lifespans but most android phones sold are not from those brands.
Moreover, I think this is a perfect example of the way the anti-apple crowd has glommed onto all the terminology and appropriated it as solely meaning the things that favor their brand. There’s more to right to repair than component-level replacement for example - oem parts availability and OS support lifespans are key factors in waste generation too.
You don’t get to tell me what I find user-hostile or not, and user-hostility certainly isn’t a phenomenon that is only restricted to brands that whatever group of fanboys like or not. There are many user-hostile aspects of the whole android package and distribution model despite the fact you can sideload or install a rom (maybe, if the vendor doesn’t delete the firmware while you do it).
Even in the narrowest possible sense of “treating the user as an attacker”, I’d feel pretty damn attacked if my phone deleted its camera firmware because it thought I unlocked the bootloader! But that doesn’t count of course, because user-hostility is narrowly defined to only happen on platforms that android people don’t like. It’s all just very tedious, and when I hear endlessly about the battery throttle (that you can turn off!) but not the android phones that delete their own firmware when the user wants to unlock the bootloader it’s hard to view the whole “user-hostility” thing and right-to-repair more generally as being anything other than a bad-faith ploy. There are actually important issues there that get lost in the sea of brand warriorism and financially-interested parties.
When you are playing with language and narrowly defining things to mean only the things that don’t happen on your platform, you aren’t being serious, you’re being a fanboy.
Like if only there were some word for the process of using language to reshape the discourse, by redefining words to include the aspects you want and exclude the ones you don’t. One might argue that without the words to express it, people’s thought processes themselves might be affected.
There should be a word that conveys the problems that induces in a discourse! It’s literally… something!
;)
Again: I consider a phone deleting its firmware when it thinks I’m unlocking the bootloader to be pretty damn user-hostile too! I think if you’re saying that’s the diametric opposite of user-hostile the only reasonable explanation is you’ve got something seriously wrong with either your language or your sense of reason is being drastically affected by your parasocial attachment to the issue. Because that’s literally so far from reason that we are talking terms like “Orwellian”, yeah.
It’s a shame the word is so loaded that it has lost its ability to be (correctly) used in less-loaded situations but there it is.
Maybe that’s more than you meant to imply by objecting to my point about android’s user-hostility, saying that I had it “backwards” and that apple is the “pinnacle” of user hostility instead but yeah, absolutely imploding the firmware to keep the user from unlocking the bootloader is extremely user hostile, there is very little reason to disagree with that statement except some kind of abject processing error or malicious ploy in the discussion.
Of course in this scenario it’s probably people echoing carefully focus-grouped strategies from google. “Right to repair” cleverly avoids talking about other e-waste issues like phones with self-destructing bootloaders and pathetic OS support lifecycles etc. Google focus-grouped that every bit as much as their RCS and so on (which they care so deeply about that they still haven’t implemented it themselves in google voice even 15 year on!). They know what resonates with you guys, and there is a kernel of truth to it - right to repair is an admirable goal, and who could oppose reducing e-waste? Which is why it’s selected as a marketing strategy!
But that doesn’t make it not Orwellian either. At this stage of the game, if you disagree that self-destructing firmware isn’t user-hostile and that it’s actually the opposite and apple is really the pinnacle of user-hostility… it’s working, it’s successfully reshaped your language processing, and your thought processes have followed. They successfully redefined user hostile to mean “only apple” for you.
Ok. I paid more than that. What you're saying is I want x y and z, and also to be this cheap. But they're obviously catering for a niche market so you have to compromise and can't then just comment with "why can't they..." They would bring those features to cheaper phones if people were buying expensive phones for those features. You don't think it's worth the extra, so they don't think it's worth the effort.
I'm happy to pay a bit more, I use my phone all the time. I would like a folding phone but I don't consider those ready yet, but I'm not posting that all phones should be folding for $200 because they can do it in that model for 1800
