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Comment by whereis | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: We're all safer by using devices that can't be repaired/tampered with by end users.

Safer? I could cause a safety issue attempting my own car or bicycle repairs and both of those things are much more repairable than a modern smartphone.

You know what's bad for human "safety"? Gratuitously burning through resources and causing pollution by making phones out of all sorts of rare materials and hucking them out.

Pretty sure OP is not referring to physical safety here, but more cyber security.

Apple's devices offer a lot of cyber security that more modular devices can't guarantee as effectively.

> Pretty sure OP is not referring to physical safety here, but more cyber security.

Arguably that's because device manufacturers aren't made to care about cyber security. Were that to change, their devices would be a lot more safer.

This was the argument used by the auto industry, it was wrong then and still is wrong.

That's not always true. Take the case of a company that determines the cost of fixing a flaw is worse for profits than letting the flaw continue into production. Remington famously allowed a flawed trigger in one of their rifles for decades, even after being made aware of it and its 5 cent fix by the designer of the rifle, before it went on sale.

https://www.guns.com/news/2016/11/18/trove-of-internal-docum...

I don't buy it. Cars are far more dangerous and they've been mandated to be repairable for decades now.

Agreed, but the tide is shifting there, too. It's not a problem getting an off the shelf part for your vehicle. It's the software for that part that's the problem.

We already see phone manufacturers locking 'easily' replaceable parts to the rest of the phone in a way that the phone rejects the replaced part. As our cars gets smarter, look for similar tactics to be applied there.

Yeah, just look at all the people that die every year because they bought a used car that was repaired/tampered with by an end user /s

Since when have the Googles and Apples of the world genuinely cared about "safety" beyond a means to advertise a product?

Like owners of John Deere tractors? The ones who all got DOXXED?

where is the unsafety of using a 10 year old ebook or 20 year old web client (for self-hosted sites)?

Safer how exactly?

Harder to hack with device in hand, e.g. by replacing with compromised components or accessing secure data

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