Nah, the real way to get a longer lifespan out of it would be to replace the battery (a generic lion costs like $15).
The planned obsolescence is that they deliberately try to prevent battery replacements, and they then disguised the fact that your battery even needed servicing by slowing your CPU without telling you, so that you’d figure your phone was obsolete when really it just needs a new battery.
This reminds me of a news article about electronic voting in 2012. O’Reilly somehow obtained, and then analyzed, the operating code from voting machines used in I think Ohio. They found that in the code which passed totals to the communications system, there was a configurable “Divide by” command.
The ability to program Excel must have saved me thousands of hours in my career. The trouble I had with it was vastly exceeded by the time I save with it, which in turn allowed me to save really large sums of money, as my time was spent finding savings.
Thank you for THAT, Excel!
And I’m not sure what xkcd is on about; a spreadsheet is basically just functional programming, expressing a solution as a series of functions in the cells rather than steps. I’d call it inherently less failure-prone than procedural programming, that’s why functional programming has a huge fan base even in procedural languages like Python.
It serves them right for using spreadsheets.
The scariest part for me as a software dev is that some of my bugs were actually unintentional logic bombs 
Seriously, every dev I’ve ever worked with, when sent back into the code that they bungled, half-jokingly mumbled “job security ha ha”.
I figured only genuinely disgruntled employers sabotaged their client’s codebase, a la Office Space, but the thought that people were intentionally doing it, industry-wide, as a means to make more money is just some jaw-dropping wtf. I guess I’m being a bit Pollyannaish, but I seriously love writing code, and I love writing “thoughtful” code – that is making the code as simple, maintainable, readable, testable, documented etc. as possible, with emphasis on best practices for whatever language, system, sdks, etc. I’m up against.
Naive fool! Why, I could be driving a Porsche right now instead of a '95 Ford Ranger.
(edit)
To clarify, I seldom come close to writing code as “thoughtfully” as I outlined above, but I do take a sense of pride in what I do, like some Depression era craftsman tiling the urinals in the Empire State building.
Yeah, I was gonna say: his crime is that he got caught. This is pretty much the industry model. Obviously some are better at hiding it than others. As for the big tech firms, I guess they got strength in numbers working for them too.
I think almost every programmer has been tempted to do what it is you describe at one time or another.
It’s like they say: code obscurity equals job security.
In construction, we call that “job securtity”
Arguably he was too coy. If you just come out and state that you’ve embedded a logic bomb in the software that will cripple it without continued, paid, intervention from the vendor you’ve just implemented a respectable ‘License Management System’, like Flexera or Reprise or IBM.
He’s a filthy criminal, rather than a guardian of intellectual property and creative monetization pioneer; precisely because he wasn’t bold enough to smile and tell the customer that self-destruct is a feature; also exciting and mandatory.
(Just as an aside, not that I’m bitter or have had to do this recently, I think I’d rather deal with a blackmailing contractor than SAS’ licensing and ‘support’ people. I’d probably even prefer to deal with the SAS that does British special operations rather than statistical software; at least they’d make it quick.)
Interesting. You may enjoy watching this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxFk3FaXR4g
It’s Sandy “Mouse” Clark (who is a legend) presenting her work on just how borked voting is. It’s illuminating. Also horrifying.
A well-crafted Excel spreadsheet is, if not a thing of beauty, then a thing to be appreciated. But I still find it harder to mentally parse than, say, a block of Python code, because of all the leaping about from cell to cell and sheet to sheet as you try to track the function chain backwards.
If you’re faced with one of the far more common badly crafted ones, which dispenses with such frippery as named ranges and hides large chunks of its logic in spaghetti-like VBA code that was initially barfed out by an intern in 2005, it’s a nightmare on stilts.
Not among this software person and colleagues. First, reading and understanding code without the aid of supporting documentation, even one’s own code from a few months back, is a time-sink and potential source of errors that should be avoided if possible. Second, the code can only tell you what the software does; it doesn’t tell you what it’s supposed to do.
How is what that guy did different than subscription software like adobe creative cloud? That also stops working when you stop paying.
That’s called ‘integrity’, and it’s been taking a public nosedive lately, despite its previous respectability.
It’s like driving. Assume that all software you use, like all drivers on the road, are intent on killing or at least maiming you. The universe wants us DEAD. Apps are the Ben-Hur hubcaps of modern life.
I remember when they were making cell phones they were offering free phones for people show them how work matters…
makes you wonder dah
Making a non-replaceable battery with HALF the number of recharge cycles of competitors is the problem. Slowing down your devices, even ones without battery issues after a certain amount of time without informing customers, is not ever the correct solution and still didn’t allow battery lifespans to reach industry average.
most people i know easily notice the difference. it’s pretty obvious. apple runs a thin line with performance overhead on their mobile os.
this.
Oh hell no. Generic LiPo cells have no place in a phone. That’s the reason they occasionally explode. Please use OEM batteries.
