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Comment by joecool1029 | Hacker News Reader

When you buy a new car they have the VIN of the car and log any recall repairs done. So not sure how you think the same wouldn't be legal on a phone?

Having a device in their database as NEVER_UNLOCKED takes away any onus from having to look for this in the first place for a large % of users.

Additionally this is kind of important for a company that's had a history of selling devices with hardware defects. It'd be very useful for them to know the RMA rate and whether damage was caused by such a defect or whether it was from a 3rd party software issue.

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Maybe make a phone that cannot be bricked by any software? A phone that can always be reset to a clear state with a factory reset?

I'd argue that it's possible in 2023.

It's pretty common. Apple Silicon devices (at least) have a BootROM feature to pull a signed boot image over USB which can be used to provision the device from a blank flash.

The PinePhone can boot from an SD even if the eMMC install isn't working, so it kinda fits the description. You can either run an OS from the SD or boot an image to fix/reinstall on the eMMC.

Maybe not a great example. The PinePhone relies on software to manage its battery charging parameters. Thermal limits are controlled entirely in software and sent to the PMIC by the kernel, if this isn't done correctly or at all it's not just possible to have a brick, but a flaming brick. Another post on the matter: https://xnux.eu/log/#017

While this is absolutely true, and it should never have been implemented this way, I have been following the topic very closely and have not come across a single report of a flaming PinePhone in over three years. With five-digit numbers of PinePhone's out there in the hands of people who don't know what they are doing, this IMHO thus is fortunately mostly a theoretical issue.

BTW: PINE64 did better on the PinePhone Pro, and (since it's also going to be Rockchip (RK3566) based in all likelihood) is unlikely to replicate the mistake on the PinePhone 2.

>Having a device in their database as NEVER_UNLOCKED takes away any onus from having to look for this in the first place for a large % of users.

Which court case are you citing?

Why would I cite a court case here? I just cited a very common scenario in a better regulated industry. If you have concerns over legality, why don't you cite some law or examples that illustrate why you think this wouldn't be legal?

Collecting that data is about not wasting time looking for issues caused by unlocking and not grouping unlocked device issues in with locked device issues.

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