[acdha]

That’s not the claim which Purism made or which is being repeated in this thread – because there’s obviously limited marketing value in saying “battery health used to be hard to tell on our competitor’s device but it’s been easy for over 6 years”.

[fsflover]

Reread my above comment. The effective result of Apple's action is forcing people to buy next phone.

[acdha]

Yes, that’s the claim Purism is using in their marketing but it’s predicated on the reader not checking the details and realizing that to the extent it was ever true, it was limited to a short period of time in 2017 between when the battery management behavior changed and when the UI warnings were added.

It’s also worth noting that multiple government investigations and lawsuits have failed to turn up any evidence supporting the conspiratorial claims about forced updates.

I know that Purism’s marketing strategy has to be convincing you to buy a product which is inferior on many counts but I think it’s a mistake to do things like this attacking their competitors because the “free is better” framing is fundamentally about trust. If they’re dishonest about something we can easily assess, how much can we trust the claims they’re making about things which are much harder to prove?

[fsflover]

> it was limited to a short period of time in 2017 between when the battery management behavior changed and when the UI warnings were added

You are technically right, but important part you are missing is that the Apple's behavior has only ended after they were sued.

> things which are much harder to prove

Which things? All code is FLOSS btw.

[acdha]

> You are technically right, but important part you are missing is that the Apple's behavior has only ended after they were sued.

You have the order backwards: most of the lawsuits were filed after they’d shipped two rounds of UI indicating when battery health was degrading performance – the lawyers recruiting clients knew that would make it easier to argue that the company was effectively admitting fault.

https://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2018/01/with-tw...

> Which things? All code is FLOSS btw.

Ever wonder why they advertise “less binary blobs”? Any complex device has a long trust chain - you have the OS, of course, which we already know has an older security architecture than iOS or Android, but you also have the firmware for every component, implementation choices for how those components connect, and things like the CPU and it’s microcode. I guarantee you haven’t examined all of those so you’re trusting them to do so, which is what everyone does, and that’s why I mentioned the transitive nature of dishonest marketing. If they’re playing fast and loose in one area that makes it harder to say that they wouldn’t try to cover up something else, overstate the degree of diligence that they’ve applied, etc. If one of their developers is compromised, how do I know the same marketing weasel won’t decide that it’d be bad for their reputation to acknowledge it in the absence of proof that a signing key was leaked? I’d like to say that they wouldn’t but clearly their senior management aren’t placing enough emphasis on honesty.