By buying the device and then breaking the lock-in, one does more harm to the anti-consumer device manufacturer than had they done nothing at all.
Vendors want to have their cake and eat it. They are no longer happy with a one-time sale, they want a continuous revenue stream. I have absolutely no qualms about buying "subsidized" devices and liberating them. I am not going to pay five times the price of a "smart TV" for a commercial display with worse specs when I can buy the consumer version and not connect it to the Internet or root it.
I think this is bad for customers. If every vendor does this, and regulators don't set regulations that balance the interests of companies with the interests of customers, than the only option people have are things like this.
What exactly is the subsidy here?
Is it that they plan to meet a bulk of their profit target after the sale, instead of frontloading the profit. The subsidy can be considered a 1000 dollars on a 200 dollar device if their target price is 1200 dollars.
It is only really subsidized if the device is actually sold below cost of BOM & essential software needed minus bloat. I'm skeptical that they are giving away hardware below cost based on potential profits.
And with Amazon and other online shopping, consumer price sensitivity, and the ability to act on it, pressure is at an all-time high. There's a huge race to the bottom for all sorts of consumer goods.
Let's say total cost of manufacturing and distribution and service for the manufacturer is $50. Given two functionally identical products: if you were a layperson consumer, would you buy the product that costs 80 or would you buy the product that costs 100?
If the manufacturer can extract $20 of ad revenue from you, and you make the cheaper purchase up front, then it's win/win for the consumer (spent less), and the manufacturer (able to offer a lower price option and thus hopefully higher sales).
Well, "win/win" in a sense, I suppose.
I don't see the difference. How would you reduce their influence without harming them?
There is no competition in the space anymore. Not on that. You either get crudded-up devices or a panel that doesn’t have the fundamental AV capabilities required of a living room TV.
Who pays for those ads/tracking/etc... companies that want to sell stuff to the consumer. Congratulations, subsidization just introduced more middlemen which extract more profit from the consumer.
The simpler things can be, the cheaper things can be.
The goal is to do harm to anti-consumer companies. Buying their (subsidized) hardware, and then breaking their lock-in so you and others aren't shown ads or forced to pay useless subscriptions, harms the company.
Only if you can guarantee that the vendor is going to remain in business forever, and provide service and support for the product forever.
Neither of those things happen. Ever.
If the manufacturer subsidizes the hardware purchase, that loss is realized at hardware purchase time.
Years ago, this was true. But today, selling your personal information isn't a loss leader. It's additional profit on top of the profit from the product.
In the meantime they continue to function as "dumb" devices just fine.
Apple's HomeKit allows you to firewall your IoT devices, if you have a Wifi router that supports it.
Since that kind of privacy cuts into the profits of shady IoT companies, they don't support HomeKit.
I'm not interested in trading my privacy for the pithy convenience of moving the dishwasher start button from the machine to my phone.
[1]: Yes, I know. There exists Matter-upgradeable widgets that must be connected to the Internet before becoming usable as Matter devices; send those back. I'm also aware that there's Matter devices that require Internet in order to be useful[2], but every instance I've seen of that is just something that was designed by a moron, imbecile, or idiot; send those back, too. Returns cost these companies money.
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrySwitchBot/comments/1j8ogt8/matte...
For any device that needs to connect to the internet, you want to be able to use dns and ip block lists at the very least.
These changes are on my todo list. Tvs especially need to be quarantined. They scan your network to datamine and try to report your conversations to the tv manufacturer.
The next step is root the tvs and clean off as much junk as possible.
Thread should not have allowed Internet connectivity by default.
> (..) the ability to commission a finished product into a Matter network in the field mandates certification and membership fees, entailing both one-time, recurring, and per-product costs. This is enforced using a public key infrastructure (PKI) and so-called device attestation certificates.
Matter is designed to necessitate phoning into the internet for certification, which allows all manufacturers to just easily add-in phoning into the internet for telemetry. Furthermore, it does not define exactly which functionality must remain if a device is disconnected from the internet for a long time (assuming the user is trying to avoid sending out telemetry, not even bypassing certification).
It’s the commissioners that check for the certification: your phone or an open source implementation.
And the commissioners can, explicitly by the specification, commission other devices while completely offline.
That's a little disingenuous... All Matter-over-WiFi devices inherently have Internet access unless you're blocking it through router policy, and most Matter-over-Thread border routers commercially available today give Thread devices Internet access by default if they want it (to avoid this you need to self-host your own OTBR instance).
The connected home was an idealistic dream that has been made perverse by the Zucks and Elons of the world. It is not accessible for normal people and it might never be - at least, not without the blood sacrifice of your privacy.
The other fun thing about them is because they talk Wi-Fi frequencies, if you break into them they can also be reprogrammed to act like a hotspot, or start commanding _other_ devices.
So if you send a drone up the side of an office building to the executives floor, and can break into one lightbulb wirelessly, you can then make that lightbulb break into all the other lightbulbs, until you reach the secluded inner rooms, and you can make that lightbulb listen for Wi-Fi traffic and can pretend to be a hotspot for the targetted executive's laptop. Like in the movies!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322969640_IoT_Goes_...
I (with heavy LLM help) recently R.E. a golf cart motor controller which had a USB interface for programming, but only a crappy proprietary windows application, and it was super satisfying to see it hum attached to Linux.
What would be even more satisfying to see would be companies that were chill about this kind of work, instead of sending[1] legal threats[2] to people doing the work that they should be doing in the first place.
Hopefully, hopefully this new trend can break the cycle of using software to turn things into subscription services that should never be subscription services. I'm terrified that manufactures will respond with hardware encryption and legal maneuvering, but perhaps by then there will be an even larger and thriving ecosystem of open hardware as the ease of setting it up and integrating it with AI accelerates its adoption.
It's also partially the reason that a high quality smart TV is so cheap nowadays
I used to have a small counter-top dishwasher that relied on proprietary soap cartridges. The dishwasher itself was fairly good and effective, and after hacking the cartridges to allow them to be refilled the overall price was quite acceptable!
My god, this is straight out of a Douglas Adams book.
It's easier to setup and maintain schedules, routines, or more complex functionality.
It's certainly not critical functionality, but it's nice. Same with my laundry machine and dryer sending a push notification when the cycle ends. Unnecessary, but nice.
Complex like wanting to hit the "Good night" button in Apple Home and have it turn the purifier to full blast for white noise, the workflow in TFA that wasn't possible with the app experience?
For an air purifier, I feel like I'd probably want to see outcome-level statistics convincing me it actually matters to lifespan, healthspan, quality of life, something, anything at all, to know and adjust minute-by-minute the exact air quality going through a purifier, or for that matter what the purifier is able to detect even reflects the quality of air elsewhere in a house with a whole lot of air volume not going through that purifier very regularly.
Basically a git repo with instructions that would maybe pull in rea and set all this up.