Comment by filoleg
2 days ago
> Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash.
They received the backlash, they responded to it by properly addressing the criticism and doing the right thing. It should be praised. Especially since it wasn't some PR-centric damage control, but an actual direct address of the specific points their original approach was criticized for.
Compare Bose's response to that of Sonos (another large techy audio brand). Sonos had an absolutely massive backlash recently (within the past few years iirc) in regards to deprecating software support for their older speakers that I'd read about everywhere (including HN) for months and months.
Afaik, it didn't lead to Sonos doing the right thing in the end (unlike the scenario at hand here), despite the online outrage being way more widespread than in the Bose's case.
Agreed. When someone does something, hears the complaints, and changes, it's charitable to bin them as someone who made a mistake and wants to improve.
Not every company deserves this charity, but the social media default nowadays is to deny that charity to everyone, and to go scorched-earth.
Even if they don't want to improve, and just do it reluctantly, it's best to reward them for doing something good, because otherwise they'll have no incentive to do something good in the future.
And therein lies the fault, they only do "good" because they were made to do it. Rewarding them for "reluctantly" improving won't change their bad behavior. They should improve because it's the decent thing to do. By doing the decent thing, the praise would have been tenfold, which is the best incentive. (I do appreciate your comment because most companies do live in a moral vacuum.)
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There's the whole citizens united ruling stating companies are people, but they're not toddlers. They (the grown adults working there) should not need positive reinforcement to figure out that consumer hostile actions sour said consumers on their product in future purchase decisions. If they want an incentive to be better, start there.
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Sonos gets backlash every few years and they don’t change. It’s almost as if consumers are shit at boycotting companies.
Which does make Boses move even more impressive when you think about how it wouldn’t have affected their business to do nothing.
A few years back Sonos was going to EoL and brick a huge humber of their "legacy" devices and that those devices would prevent new ones from getting updated. After backlash they reversed their decision and all devices remained functional: https://www.businessinsider.com/sonos-device-support-ceo-apo...
However, I wouldn't expect anything from Sonos at this point in time.
And before that it was the “recycle mode” that actually bricked the hardware thus contributing to e-waste: https://www.whathifi.com/news/sonos-explains-why-recycle-mod...
Sonos did revert that decision after mounting public pressure too. However they keep pull these kinds of stunts and then later apologising for it.
My point is: are you actually changing if you keep making the same mistakes and then only saying “sorry” after you get caught?
If Bose shows the same pattern of behaviour the I’d lump them into the same category as Sonos. But thus far they do seem slightly more ethical.
Personally though, I think the whole “smart speaker” industry is crooked. But some are definitely more crooked than others.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/sonos/comments/1q6oi06/new_firmware...
And some people have been advocating for Apple to do something similar with old iPhones and tablets for a decade, and there’s no sign. Their privilege but not great for the world.
Would you elaborate? Because my understanding is that Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices.
Apple don't give people the tools/keys/etc to load new OS (etc) onto a device once it's no longer supported.
So, at best the device can just be used with the latest version of the software Apple allows until it's a security nightmare and better off no longer used.
Instead, if Apple gave people the ability to load something (prob a Linux) onto those old devices, then those old devices could be used usefully for quite a few more years.
> Apple has offered outstanding support for older devices in terms of iOS support for quite old devices
Did they gave instructions on how to unblock bootloaders. released the source code and drivers under an open source license?
Whilst the support might be "outstanding" - the discussion is what happens once devices are no longer supported.
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Yeah, it’s good to see a sensible response to community pressure here. While I take the point that they only conceded after pressure, at least they did concede. I’ve upgraded their brand in my mind from “planned obsolescence e-waste villain” to “cares about PR and will do the right thing while being watched”. I think the only truly trustworthy companies regarding end of support handling in consumer tech are those whose brand is explicitly tied to openness / repairablity ala home assistant, framework laptops, etc…
Sadly those tend to be niche companies already focused on power users, but any other firms should be considered guilty until proven innocent of enshittification (forced bricking, closed source, subscription creep, privacy violations and data brokering).