Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by 0zymandiass 2096 days ago
The issue is they're heavily implying it's something specific to PinePhone. I just scrolled through the legal notices on an iPhone, and they all have the exact same wording. Small components, such as the graphics libraries, the kernel, health data, the web browser, etc...

(not to mention they're just plain wrong about the battery/thermal not having hardware-level limits)

3 comments

It doesn't read to me that the author is stating it's specific to pinephone, I read it as them just saying "hey guys, look out for this."

If they use the license wording to help get it across, well, I don't necessarily agree but as they state in the article:

> I'm trying to be a bit inflamatory here, to start the conversation.

If the conversation is

> Software engineering does not put safety first

I'm 100% agreed.

If the conversation is

> The PinePhone has less quality control than Android/iOS

It's patently false

I would parse the article as the second, as it's referring to a specific phone throughout

I read it as the first, with a side of "We need to do this or FL/OSS hardware is going to look bad".

And I concur about the second being patently false. I would guess that it has more overall tbh.

>> The PinePhone has less quality control than Android/iOS

> It's patently false

PinePhone is just HW. Android/iOS is SW. Comparison doesn't make sense. Maybe compare PinePhone to Huawei Honor, or Xiaomi and their HW testing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvRTY6sBPeE

> It's patently false

That's a strawman: author never compared to Android/iOS. What they did spell out,is that some of the code they found is unsafe (e.g. commented-out code to prevent false alerts, that was never being reimplemented in a safer way).

But the article does not mention that other phones might have similar challenges. If the article is about the whole industry then say that, if it is specific to the pinephone say that. Currently it's in that weird middle zone where it sounds like it is specific but all the facts would probably be applicable to many phones.
The actual end product is provided by Apple with no warranties? I find that hard to believe. It makes sense that the OSS libraries they use wouldn't have warranties provided by their developers, but an issue in any of those becomes an Apple issue when it's shipped in their product as long as the issue has an impact on iOS.
I believe so, at least on the software side. For example, the macOS EULA states:

> C. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE APPLE SOFTWARE AND SERVICES ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE”, WITH ALL FAULTS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND

https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOSCatalina.pdf

Sorry, but you're just plain wrong. So please don't spread false sense of security if you don't understand the issues, or the HW. You can read my other comments in this HN comment section for why.