When Apple vocally switched sides to support California’s “right to repair” law, I knew there had to be a catch. Cory Doctorow explains the catch eloquently.
Apple uses VIN locking or parts pairing which is a process also used by car makers, printer manufacturers & Medtronic ventilators that requires a secret code from the manufacturer to enable replacement parts to be recognized. Bypassing it violates the DMCA which as a federal law beats state laws.
Checkmate!
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently
Tim Cook laid it out for his investors as to why the company will always be against users repairing gheir devices. When people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. It's that's simple.
Making cringe inducing skits about how much they care about the environment while doing everything they can to make iPhones disposable is thr kind of corporate duplicity that’d make oil companies blush
@carnage4life This is kind of the nature of the beast. CEOs have a fiduciary duty to generate endless profit growth
Exactly.
More people need to understand this and what consequences it has for them.
People buy products from and invest money in companies which are led by one top priority "generate maximum profit". True for most companies.
Through the investor lens this is good for people, earns them a share of the profits.
Through the lens of the consumer it's bad for people, because " generate maximum profit" delivers all sorts of bad for the consumer: worst tolerable service for highest tolerable price, maximum externalisation of societal/ecological costs/damage.
The conclusion from this could be: choose doing business with companies that do NOT have "maximize profit" as their top priority.
There are such companies, but they're not "joint-stock" type companies.
The #cooperative would be one type of company where the incentives are different.
People need to realize that by buying from and investing in profit driven companies, they're basically giving the orders to do all theses things they hate as customers/consumers.
If you want different, you have to invest/consume differently.
@iLikeAltitude @shilkytouch @carnage4life Ultimately they will have to cave in to pressure to make profit their utmost priority, as is the way of the "free" market. The answer is to regulate companies into not being people, not being profit first, not being these fucking monsters.