[chii]

It sucks that companies have so successfully trained an entire generation (or more) of people who treat their phone (and computer too) like an appliance.

hardly anyone would be tinkering their phone to make the hardware do more than the default applications.

The same is happening (or is already happened) to cars.

[Dalewyn]

>It sucks that companies have so successfully trained an entire generation (or more) of people who treat their phone (and computer too) like an appliance.

Just like how most of us treat cars and stovetops as appliances?

Look, becoming omnipotent is an admirable pursuit, but time is a finite resource and by fuck most of us simply do not have enough of it. We can choose to become potent in something and most of us are in fact potent at something, but that isn't necessarily going to be electronics or computer programming.

[krisoft]

I'm not sure if it is the companies who "trained" anyone that. I think it is more correct to say that many wants that and companies recognised this desire and are offering what the costumers want.

The companies do this simply because this is the way to grow their market. For every single person who finds enjoyment in twiddling with their tools, there are hundreds who just want the thing to work and get on with other things in their life.

[LeifCarrotson]

Many want those things, but that doesn't imply that offering yet another option for the median customer, imitating the average or market leader, is the optimal strategy either in our current economic/corporate systems or an idealized system with different rules.

Yes, there are economies of scale that come from chasing the middle, and yes, it's probably easier to just mimic an iPhone than to do the creative work to try to invent something better than what worked before. And yes, the tradeoffs, design goals, economic targets, and principles of repairability and customizability that go into, say, an F150 make those pretty popular trucks, but since Ford is still making F150s, and Chevy, and Dodge, and Toyota also have offerings that are direct competitors in that space, that doesn't mean that a hypothetical competitor can maximize their market share by making yet another F150.

Why does everything cluster into the same choices?

[chii]

> Why does everything cluster into the same choices?

i suspect it's the same reason you get a cluster of the same stores/shops in a region.

It's the classic economic dilemma - Hotelling's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law)

[jauntywundrkind]

Consumer want has to be expressible. It's the "faster horses" problem.

The market doesn't know what it wants until the options exist. Until a culture forms.

Almost all companies are competing in one direction only, a race to the bottom. There's sometimes some semi-geeks freedoms offered, but usually those are gilded cages too. We'd have to go back some something like Maemo to see consumers getting something actually empowering, a portable mobile Linux+FreeDesktop offering.