Samsung owns SmartThings, a smart home platform. They could've come up with a suite of apps for turning your phone into a SmartThings-connected camera, or motion detector, or remote control, or button panel, or a dashboard, etc. Either charge a little for the apps, or trust that sucking people into the SmartThings ecosystem will cause them to buy hubs and other devices.
Users might be more willing to upgrade their phone if they can turn the old one into a baby monitor vs getting scammed on a trade-in or letting it sit in a drawer.
The real problem is the shortsightedness, where the top dogs only care about money coming in the next 3-12 months. Even this is more a reflection of the system that consistently produces companies which operate this way. Which is a reflection of..
They already got that good PR when they made those announcements.
Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.
> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.
Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!
We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.
But in reality capitalists get to choose the products and use advertising to brainwash us into wanting whatever shit they're shoveling.
Capitalism is supposed to optimise production for efficiency. In reality the people holding the principal capital use it to optimise for profit and we're largely impotent to do anything because they'll just lean more on the 'brainwash' aspect of profitability... Maybe go so far as to sway elections, to put in fascists so they can exercise larger handles of control... all to get a favorable tax regime when they've already got more money than they can spend.
Ho-hum.
I think there's a way out, through cooperatives, possibly, but it's a multi-generational path before you can really start to make change.