Rebble is an inspiring repair story, and the way Pebble enabled this second life is a path that every gadget manufacturer should strive to emulate. Pebble created an open (and open-source) environment for developers and enthusiasts. As a direct result, Rebble is saving thousands of gadgets from the bin and building a real community around dogged longevity. Keeping Pebbles running, in the face of much fancier options, knitted the community together.
This should be a legal requirement. If a company wants to end the life of a cloud-connected product, they should be legally obliged to open up the code and tools necessary for third parties to keep the product alive.
Or even better, an “after-sales responsibilities” bill that goes beyond the paltry warranty. Cloud services should be kept operational for a reasonable time, patches should be sent out for a reasonable time, and repairs provided at a reasonable cost.
There are examples of car dealerships asking the value of the car for a DPF repair, and there are examples like HTC refusing to repair any device outside the warranty period, refusing to even give a quote to the customer.
With independents having a harder and harder time keeping up, it’s necessary. However, how is “reasonable time” and “reasonable cost” defined?
Great story. Reading it provoked me into resurrecting my Pebble Time Round. It’s testament to the original design, and the hard work of Rebble, that it’s still a surprisingly functional device.
Pondering its future, I could now replace it with a pretty cheap and similarly functional smartwatch, but even if I did it’s not clear I’d be getting anything extra I actually want. It is noticeable that the health and fitness sensors popular on more recent wrist-worn wearables are missing. These have become important for a lot of other people, but not me, so I’ll stick with it for now. I’m curious to know whether I’ll still find it useful.
flypig,
I was never into smart watches, though the pebble would have been my choice on the basis that it could run about a week between charges. By comparison, the apple watch battery life was measured in hours, not even days, ugh!
https://www.techradar.com/news/wearables/apple-watch-battery-life-how-many-hours-does-it-last-1291435
It makes me wonder if pebble would have remained a viable company if not for apple taking the market away. The article suggests this was a factor…
I think this actually underscores my grudge against giant companies, they enter the market using unlimited resources to kill off smaller competition, leaving us with less choice and less innovation, and even less vertical social mobility. These oligopolies we have today are so far removed from what I’d consider a utopia where creativity and what you can do is more important than how much money you have. I happen to think that many of us could be more creative and innovative than some of these billion dollar company CEOs, they’re holding us back while taking all the profits. It’s sad to see companies that are optimized for profits winning over those trying to stay alive by innovating, alas that’s what we get when wall street is in charge.
Anyways, back on topic, it’s great that pebble’s former developers are opening up the platform for users, that shows a commitment to making the world better. I know better than to get my hopes up, but all the major tech companies could learn a thing or two from pebble’s sense of responsibility to users and the planet. Not only are the leading companies deficient but sometimes they’re downright guilty of planned obsolescence where they intentionally make older devices worse or stop functioning. Google killed off revolv automation products. Apple deliberately made older products slower. Apple also has contracts with phone recyclers stipulating that they cannot reuse components…
The mass-market often has the effect of elevating eye-catching features over practicality and I’d argue Pebble was a victim of this. A flat, low-resolution, e-ink display will always have trouble competing against a high-res super-bright OLED, even if the former runs for a week on a charge and the latter a day. There’s no way Apple could have released any of the Pebble watches; the styling, the features, the hackability are all wrong.
So even though I agree with what you say, I feel there’s more going on here than just small companies being trampled on by large companies. It feels somehow closer to George Akerlof’s Market for Lemons, with an asymmetry between buyer and seller information, except that in this case it’s not led to the collapse of the market (the Apple Watch certainly isn’t a cheap knock-off of a Pebble!), but instead promoted a certain approach (eye-catching, planned-obsolescence, lock-in) over more practical and long-term factors.
Or, maybe, it’s just that people genuinely don’t care about those long-term features, and Pebble misjudged the market?
Worse is better! 🙂 But yeah, we’re not making progress. *Sigh*
Brand and status is the thing people have to fight against. This happens with FOSS projects, and it happens with small companies. No one loves you until your famous. People give more weight to a brand name because it’s a brand name then if the product is any good.
Firefox is fighting this. People feel Chrome/Chromium is better because it comes from a large company, Google, versus a non-profit. Firefox has 10%, or less, marketshare while almost every other browser is a Chrome derivative or Chrome itself. Firefox got lucky MS was producing horrible stuff at the time, and it was the better alternative. (Yes, Opera was around, and I have no idea why they never took off aside from on cellphones for a while.)
Years and years of right-wing policies designed to tip the scales. At one time, there were regulations and policies to level the playing field, but the free market right wingers have done a good job of gutting anything meaningful.
This is more of a problem with economic policies which are designed to be hostile to workers and recreate feudalism, then corporations themselves per say. Corporations are a social construct.
Social mobility is only really a thing because of the labor movement and socialism while the lack of it is more a feature of capitalism. I’ve had this conversation before, and the #1 indicator of success is the socio-economic position of a child’s parents. If the child has more access to resources, the more successful they will be. After that, it’s basically random. The chance of success doesn’t rise above the standard deviation, no matter how much people want to believe hardwork alone is the key to success.
People think it’s “quirky” that I’m so anti-tech, or at least dislike anything I can’t replace the factory OS/firmware with a third-party FOSS option. The hardest thing to get around are cars and all the crap they get stuffed with now.
Forcing companies to release engineering info about products 4 years after they’ve been EoL’d would be a great step to help recyclers and maintainers.
To extend the life of the phone by keeping the run time reasonable when the battery was getting worn out. This is definitely one of those cases where people are being slightly ridiculous. I understand Apple should have stated this and let people toggle it on or off, but it was a reasonable trade off to keep a phone running, which, as you point out, helps the environment.
I’ve carried feature phones, Blackberries, Android, and iOS, and the lack of run time was always a bigger annoyance then the phone being a little slow. I would probably jump to a nice feature phone just for the battery life if I could. I don’t need much, just stuff for communications: email, sms, phone, contact sync, chat apps, wifi, tethering, GPS with directions. Hmmm…. Maybe I am tied to a smartphone more then I thought I was. :\
Flatland_Spider,
Yep.
Well, I look back to my grandparents generation when a lower/middle class person could save up to open their own store to support their families. I still remember many of these mom&pop stores from when I was younger, and though I didn’t make much of it then, it saddens me that they’re gone now that I’ve grown up. My kids are only going to know the big brand stores since those are the ones that capitalism selected to survive. There wasn’t enough room in the economy for big companies to expand as big as they have and not kill off the small ones. 🙁
This has taken away opportunities to create something outside of those companies. The very existence of huge corporations & oligopolies came at the expense of successful small businesses. Take amazon, jeff bezos may not be aiming to kill off opportunities, but in growing his company that’s effectively what he’s doing and I see the results in my line of business every day. Loosing jobs and shutting stores so that amazon can absorb a few more billion out of the local economy. There’s nowhere to grow other than to take business away from small companies.
Well, I feel mozilla has made some mistakes by not listening to the community as much as they should, but I don’t think we need to get into it now. I do worry about the possibility that firefox could loose critical mass and then we’d have one less player in this space. That would be very sad.
+1
This was apple’s cover story to cover their actions, but some people never experienced the alleged problems that apple’s performance reduction was supposed to fix. The slow down caused by apple was the only problem.
Apple’s excuse extremely suspect on it’s own merit. First of all, other phones don’t start crashing due to battery age, in general they just don’t run as long. Apple’s solution to decrease performance based on battery age rather than the available power doesn’t make engineering sense. A fully charged old battery is still able to deliver more power than a weakly charged new battery. If iphones were crashing due to low power, then users would experience crashes even with new batteries. The age of the battery is not was would cause a phone to crash, but rather the power output of said battery. Furthermore, a battery doesn’t die with age so much as how hard a user pushes it. Apple’s solution to decrease performance on old batteries regardless of their actual performance is in itself a bad solution. Just think if our cars did that, it would be infuriating to loose functionality because of a date check. Alas, apple’s gotten away with it’s planned obsolescence mechanism relatively unscathed, so it’s probably going to be normal for apple devices to artificially decrease performance going forward. I’d like to see more data on newer devices, however I checked and geekbench have not posted a follow up.