EsquireCats

foregoneconclusion said:

omar morales said: The the trashcan Mac Pro when unchanged for about that amount of time and Apple never lowered the price. 

Yeah, you can find some individual items here and there in Apple's lineup that work like that, but the lawsuit is focusing on iOS/iPhone. Prior models will either get discontinued or discounted by Apple annually.  

Being fair the mac pro makes a terrible comparison product. It was a low-volume product which contained the latest and most costly parts. These parts didn’t meaningfully change in cost (when they did the device got bumps.)

The xbox however does get scale advantages. it is not utilising the latest technology/fabrication process and also is (probably deliberately) utilising parts which are rapidly declining in production cost, finally the housing is plastic, and it’s priced for consumers.

The hardware itself absolutely costs less than the RRP. Microsoft is undoubtedly bundling all manner of costs against the retail price to justify a sold-at-loss claim. However this is disingenuous hollywood-style accounting, because any business with a net-profit can apply the same cost-sharing logic in the reverse direction to justify that all products are actually profitable. 

Applying app store rules equally and fairly across all developers is not incompatible with testing new/undocumented features with trusted partners. 

Yep let’s definitely remove even more barriers to publishing software on these devices which carry all of our personal information, banking access, private messages/photos/etc. /s

It’s like we don’t already have a preview of this with Cydia on jail-broken iPhones: Malware packaged with all manner of titles, especially free games which lures in naive users and kids.
Also keep in mind that the smartphone platforms are constantly the target from blackhats to intelligence agencies: the idea of opening the gates to 3rd party stores out of Apple’s control is plainly stupid. 

I think the debate should include more input from people who engineer and design devices. Since these people can provide better insight into why certain decisions are made.

Take iFixIt for example - they bemoan "glue", because to them everything that isn't a mechanically based fixation is "glue" - but adhesives are chosen for very good reasons other than cost or to "reduce repairability". The glue in your airpods is part of the acoustic design. It provides dampening, shock resistance and reliability it's why you can drop them and they keep working instead of turning into expensive rattles. It also plays an important role in the water resistance of the interior electronics.

Earlier in the comments was a repairer who spoke of numerous design choices that they felt were for the sake of reducing repairability - but a casual review is able to provide meaningful reasons why such choices were made. It's that cluelessness which is not useful in the debate, it's unqualified posturing from people who look at every change as a personal attack on their livelihood. Even the pentalobe screws have an obvious function beyond aesthetics: because we can't expect manufacturers to live up to warranty claims such as moisture ingress, while making the device trivial to open.

Speaking of debate, it doesn't seem that anyone here is against the idea of device repairability - it seems more that people have legitimate concerns that holistic repair legislation will have some obvious unintended consequences - especially with device security (at a time when this same government is constantly attempting to reduce access to personal encryption.)