Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "Fairphone thoughts u0026 commentary with Louis Rossmann" video.

  1. You get whatever is going in the right direction because no one else is... basically. xD I don't think people should expect an ideal, perfect, all checkboxes marked solution, simply because the industry wasn't built on those principles, period. We had little chances of getting something like that 20 years ago, now it's basically impossible. Making a smartphone from scratch without hitting any intellectual property from other companies is not just a matter of money - it's outright impossible, period. I know some of the stuff Louis is saying there might sound a bit novel to some, but it goes far deeper, is far more insidious, and just part of the structure as most can imagine. Put simply, the logic of smartphone industrial production, as is for several other categories of industrialized products, is that of mass manufacturing. Making more and more for less and less, in which uniformity pays off. Lots of people laid blame on logic for the way smartphones all look the same today - and partially it is. If you want a pocketable device for which it's entire interface with the user, which is what users care for, is a rectangular screen of fixed proportions, the logical evolution of it would be a glass brick. Can't make the interface any more portable than that - the device IS the interface, period. But it's actually not only that... it's just that since smartphones took over, they are pretty much all the same - several of the tiered pricing schemes are largely artificial, the influence hardware components have on final product prices are close to nil, it's just an artificially calculated "how much people are willing to pay" price. And particularly for smartphones, I can't think of any other product category that had a clearer indication on how that's the case with the ramp up on flagship model prices blowing past the 1000 bucks level. It's not about how much it costs to produce, it's how much categories of costumers are willing to pay for. People will come all around saying how Apple does their own stuff, yadda yadda... you do realize that Apple only "does" their own stuff because they bought the companies that did it for them in the past, right? That iPhones used to have component parts coming from several different companies that do stuff for Android phone companies too, until they bought the competition and consolidated production. That everything from SoC microarchitecture to wi-fi chips, bluetooth, NFC, screens, cameras, and a whole ton of other component parts, the more you peel layers of bs, the more you find out they are very much the same with adjustments that don't really cost more to do, but that justify product categorization. We grew used to thinking that higher res panels, higher megapixel cameras, bigger batteries, more ram, faster SoCs, wireless charging, blahblahblah is what justifies the price difference between a budget phone from a flagship one... because it sounds logical, but if you put down everything on paper, you quickly realize how that doesn't really make much sense - because it mostly applies to limited manufactury. Small numbers, customized batches. Mass manufacturing is an entirely other beast. As for the idea that Apple, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony, etc etc "designs" their own stuff... again, it shouldn't come as a surprise to no one the partiality of those claims. This again, has to do with external image and how many people still don't realize how dependent all of those companies are on stuff that happens in China, particularly in cities like Shenzhen - which to be fair, is something none of those companies will ever admit in public because of the very same reasons of the theme of this video - copyright law. One major reason why Shenzhen was so incredibly successful as a place where tech happens, is not only because of mass manufacturing, production and logistics... it's all about development and design happening closer and closer to where the sausage is made. Innovations and ideas for implementations coming faster and faster because they happen in lockstep with hardware development and production. It's no coincidence all major players have huge subsidiaries there. Does anyone really thinks the general smartphone evolution of recent years would have happened the way it did if there wasn't a very big amount of crosstalk between competing brands? To a point, you could be excused if you thought that way. One company innovates with one thing, the other comes and copies it, makes it better, and so forth. But that's not what is actually happening there, the evolution is too similar, they are in step, synchronized, and just disguised to not seem that way. It happens that way because even design, even software, even OS, even these parts of production that are supposedly happening only in corporate headquarters and whatnot, also gets a whole ton of what they are going to do with their products in the future from the exact same sources in Shenzhen and other international hubs. And it has largely to do with new improvements in hardware components being the source of what is coming next, in the first place. Anyways, back to what Louis was talking about... the thing that happened over the years behind the scenes was consolidation, competition killing, and the usual process of market monopolization. Each component inside a smartphone comes from ultra specialized manufacturers that used to be half a dozen or so, but nowadays are getting closer to one or two companies (such as the TSMC case for chips). So, if you want to propose something that is either more open source, less proprietary, more fixable in general... there will be a whole ton of work balancing things for you to do. It's not only that you have very few options to go to, a whole ton of the latest steps in evolution for several of those components were built on proprietary foundations. This is why companies that adopts a purist standpoint trying to go all in open source, all in non-proprietary, all in openly available, often end up with products with past decade specs, missing a whole ton of stuff that newer devices have, or end up looking a bit like white label Chinese products... because there is no other option there. The latest stuff is either entirely proprietary and owned by a company that was gobbled up by a bigger company like Apple/Google, or has contracts that states production is exclusive to a certain company, or a mix of those. Monopoly practices have been in the script from start. We'd have to go too far back into the history of the product development to get anything resembling open source or at least openly available. If on one side people have been happy with the entire trade war thing against Huawei, on the other hand you can figure out what it also means. Theoretically, from an open source design standpoint, there shouldn't be any reason as to why Huawei couldn't just pick up from AOSP and keep developing it's own everything... but because of a whole bunch of other stuff that is also tied up in all this mess, SoC proprietary tech, ARM contracts, yadda yadda, what effectively happens is that if a nation like the US cuts off ties with a nation like China, in effect what you have is a huge corporation like Huawei having to do all sorts of maneuvers to continue production. Xenophobes rejoice, but if you think about it, even if you hate the CCP or whatever, just think if you were a Chinese citizen. Because of a badly justified trade war, a major tech company in your country lost control of a major line of product that they were doing quite competently, all because access to essencial tech was barred from it one sidedly. And then you start realizing the problems of having a product category production work like that. It sends alarms for the mainstream, alarms that have been blarring for most of the open source community for decades now. Thus, talks about Risc V adoption, questions on how much AOSP is really open source, plus related privacy, security, and also right to repair related stuff. Because from a given lens, it all sums up to consumer control versus corporation control. We've let businesses and corporations take over for so long that it's getting harder and harder to put control back in the hands of consumers. The thousand layer onion of proprietary crap we have to unfold is just too much, and it hits so many levels of the stuff we use today that it has become a daunting task to go against this trend. So, just to conclude, I'd like to thank and congratulate companies like Fairphone, Framework and others trying to do something about it. I don't expect the impossible from them, but just for trying to do something, they already deserve recognition.
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