[bserge]

The problem is most customers simply don't care. So they "choose" whatever the manufacturers give them.

One by one, remove the replaceable battery, remove the 3.5mm, remove the microSD card slot (and neuter it software side so it's near useless), some will complain, but the majority will just adapt to it, buying new phones more often, wireless earbuds, more expensive phones with more storage. Just as the companies wanted.

Looking back, the majority will see all the things they lost but by then it's too late (or not, change can happen thanks to movements like RTR).

So, the free market works more like tyranny of the majority in practice.

[disruptthelaw]

The solution to that is for savvy consumers like us to band together and form a non governmental ratings agency that gives a stamp of approval to products that meet a repair standard. Same as “certified free range” or “certified kosher” food. Or if we insist of policy intervention then we should just force companies to have a label specifying if the product is repairable or not. That on its own should be a sufficient intervention to influence buying behavior but maintains free choice for everyone

[dlivingston]

Is removing ports really equivalent to tyranny? Is it damning that modern computers don’t have floppy disk drives anymore, or 56k modems, or VGA ports?

At what point in a technology lifecycle does discontinuing support for that technology stop becoming “tyranny”?

[sudosysgen]

if you're replacing VGA with DVI or 56k modems with ethernet that's one thing. If you're removing the headphone jack and replacing with a proprietary wireless audio API that no one else can access so they're stuck with inferior protocols, that's something else.