There’s new webcam, theres also an “empty” extension thing where you can put 2 nvme SSDs in place of the GPU.

Search engines been going relatively fine for decades now. But the crawlers from AI companies basically DDOS hosts in comparison, sending so many requests in such a short interval. Crawling dynamic links as well that are expensive to render compared to a static page, ignoring the robots.txt entirely, or even using it discover unlinked pages.

Servers have finite resources, especially self hosted sites, while AI companies have disproportinately more at their disposal, easily grinding other systems to a halt by overwhelming them with requests.

I know right! It’s all done to further Antarctica’s hegemony! Just look how huge it seems!

/uj If you want no distortions, get a globe.

“It’s [the Mercator projection] the world’s longest misinformation and disinformation campaign, and it just simply has to stop.”

No matter how we cut it though, all 2D projections will have some kind of distortion. They opted to preserve area, while the Mercator preserves angles. Arguably it is less important today to preserve angles, as we have automatic navigation systems. There are some alternatives that also preserve the area: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/The-Equal-Earth-compared-to-similar-equal-area-pseudocylindrical-projections.png

The technical aspect could be a systemic SDLC problem if the software wasn’t tested on a broad enough range of users. As for what’s broad enough, that’s another issue to debate.

Money is a powerful motivator to do really crappy things, and Apple has done exactly that for decades now. Others are following suit in the lucrative accessory market.

But this is the smoking gun, pointed at the consumer.

Dongles are an admission that the phones they come with don’t work in the way the company knows its consumers need them to.

Almost as insidious as how the inkjet printer manufacturers vendor lock and upcharge for ink. Profitable? Indeed. Despicable and anti-consumer? Very much so.

They lose no customers by including it. They lose some by omitting it.

So it boils down to being too expensive to include? Hardly!

You evaluate prior decisions with posterior data. But you fail to take into account the counterfactuals. How do you know how much the FP4 would have sold with a jack?

Claiming that an increase in sales validates the goodness of the decision is not causal.

It is the same logic that would tell you that playing russian roulette is worthwile in case you win and get some reward. That’s backwards rationalization, fitting a narrative.

If market research universally showed that people don’t care about a jack then why do some phones still have it? Are these manufacturers going against the grain? Surely they wouldn’t leave money on the table if it worked like that.

The justification of “they do what sells units” is backwards. It would imply that no product would ever flop. But products regularly do. There is no telling in advance how it will perform, and saying otherwise is falling prey to the problem of induction, whether past observarions justify predictions.

The FP4 could have broke sales records for a multitude of reasons. How can you say which factor caused it when there is only one scenario that played out? We don’t have alternative universes to compare, where they released one with a jack, or another with some other altered specs.

Are we forgetting that companies also have their own bias to make the decisions that increase overall profits? They lost buyers (me included) by this change, but they made up the difference by selling higher margin accessories. Companies will only cater to users if it aligns with turning a bigger profit. If adding an anti-feature is better for the bottom line, then that’s how it goes. Enshittification doesn’t happen accidentally, but by pushing the boundaries of what the users tolerate.

I made the mistake of believing that Fairphone is an enthusiast company, like the Framework of phones maybe. There is some overlap, sure, with the repair-ability aspect and available parts and schematics, but that’s about it.

Other than that, FP wants to be a mainstream brand, the eco-friendly Samsung or Apple; the power users can get shafted with their audio jacks for all they care. While Framework has actual hardware modularity and release updated HW modules so you don’t buy the whole device again for an upgrade.

Looking at FP’s financial statements, I get the impression they aren’t doing too hot lately, so I get it if they need bigger margins to continue operating. Just don’t be a fucking hypocrite and lie about the reason of the jack removal ffs.

I think I had this all wrong. Fairphone isn’t / doesn’t want to be an enthusiast DIY brand at all (like framework for laptops) but a mainstream brand that’s eco-friendlier* and non-exploitative.

So of course they will not care much about niche features like other ROMs or audio jacks. The privacy focused, tech-savvy or feature focused buyers are not their target.

*IC and PCB related footprint is still roughly 80% of the FP4 and FP has little to no control on those processes, according to an independent study.

Are you a murican? Cuz you really sound like USA is your whole world.

That’s a definite advantage of the Fairphone.

I guess, I will find out how mine fares when the need arises. Hasn’t happened in 4.5 years yet.

Very strange how mine can somehow fit a 7000mAh battery, dual SIM + SD card slot and a regular jack. Hmm…

All I needed to know was when they released their BT earbuds just when the jack port got removed to figure out where their priorities are.

In GN’s video the law firm mentioned there are 3-4 cases already and they are probably getting combined or go to the same judge. (IANAL; IDK the specifics)