You must log in or # to comment.
Also, many of the technologies that comprise the iphone were developed in universities
For profit universities. In the states at least. Where students go into lifetime debt and their work is profited from. Occasionally they get a prize and pat on the head.
Then they spend their lives working for companies that make massive profits off their ideas. If they’re very very lucky, some people might learn their names and what they did before they die, but that almost never happens.
It’s worse. Public universities that by definition are not for profit. And then all the other things you mentioned.
I find it hard to believe that a university of any kind in America is not motivated monetarily
This is based on a widespread misconception that non-profit organizations are not also pursuing money. They don’t get to take home the profits but they still want to maximize revenue and minimize costs to grow and sustain themselves. So while they don’t behave exactly the same as privately owned orgs, there is a lot of overlap.
Well, it’s always “humans made this”.
I think it’s trivial to argue that without capitalism we would not have iPhones, they are the product of the desire to please a market to make a lot of money.
If the driver was "I want to buld something useful for my fellow humans that wouldn’t likely trrend toward an elitist redundant unsustainable device built on the exploitation of cheap labor.
If not for capitalism, we’d be missing out on internet ads, online dating and for-profit healthcare!
The conversation was clearly more developed here so I resubmitted it :|
Coming back to your point, I’m not being obtuse, a smartphone is not as life changing (for the better) when it comes down to your daily life.
I was born without one, I can relate to the experiences my parents had, and none of it screams “back in the days life was radically different”.
Sure you’d go to places to purchase object you can touch and your brain wasn’t melted by being exposed from an early age to Tiktok.
Coming back to your point, I’m not being obtuse, a smartphone is not as life changing (for the better) when it comes down to your daily life.
My peep, smartphones redefined the way humans go about the world and in turn how the world is structured. What the hell are you on about? As someone who lived even without internet, I can assure you that the way we handled the world was indeed massively fucking different in so many ways, I wouldn’t even know where to begin to explain. The smartphone is as impactful, if not more than the telephone, the radio and the television. All of those techs literally reshaped the world and our social interactions.
Sure you’d go to places to purchase object you can touch and your brain wasn’t melted by being exposed from an early age to Tiktok.
Do you know how much the world changed because people don’t “go to places”? Because they text instead of phoning? Because they can record everything at any time? Because they don’t carry a fuckton of devices, paper and other support tools? You literally don’t know what you’re taking about. And yes, impact to society includes the bad stuff as well.
You clearly haven’t thought about it and take a lot of things for granted, which is weird considering your stance on the relationship between labor and capital.
Developing new medicines is world-changing innovation, cheaper and more plentiful food is. iPhones are so inconsequentials that most people don’t have one.
Let’s now talk about Smartphones and your daily experience. You wake up (alarm clock?), you wash yourself (inconsequential), you check heavily manipulated news (I guess it gives a slightly more diverse option than TV or Newspaper, but I’d consider that a credit of the Internet), you go to work (gps were a thing before smartphones, and you get survelliance as a tradeoff, but I guess it’s one of the most tangible advantage to be notified live of traffic) or connect with MS teams. Time to eat, I guess you go somewhere, take a walk, or use the smartphone (the internet I guess) to get a limited selection of various cathegory of hyperprocessed slobs. You work and then you stop. But wait, you are always connected so your boss hit you up live and make you work for the big family another 2 hours. You text your buddies to go have a beer later, which you could have 100% done preplanning it or using basic phone. You have fun pulling from your own personal unique life experience or maybe you consume/comment together some idiotic vertical video just like millions are doing at the exact same time everywhere else. You go home.
Such innovation, many plus.
Big minus: people waste a lot of time on their phones
Big plus: you can waste a lot of time where in y2k you’d have been bored
I listened to a lot more radio before I had a smartphone. Now there’s so much YouTube, so many podcasts
Developing new medicines is world-changing innovation, cheaper and more plentiful food is. iPhones are so inconsequentials that most people don’t have one.
The fact that many people don’t have one doesn’t mean it didn’t reshape the world! Holy shit! It’s like saying antibiotics didn’t revolutionize medicine because many people didn’t need one ever.
Honestly this discussion is too inane to continue. I’m out.
I mean, same? I was mostly engaging for the sake of other people, you clearly have a very narrow idea of what constitutes progress and what an alternative more balanced society would bring (it’s not the extraction of toxic rare metals).
Reading through this discussion and considering my own daily life, I find that indeed my utilization of smartphones is limited to primarily other existing advances in technology not directly associated with phones. Primarily Internet. In fact, I might be a bit abnormal because my 8 hours at work, my phone is not directly on my person and rarely used. I do, however, need to utilize it for 2FA authentication ~1-2 times per day. Which, digital personal keys were a thing before phones.
So yeah, I’d say that smartphones aren’t a big advancement, but the combination of multiple other technological advancements.
If my sister and I got into a debate at the dinner table one of our parents would go get the dictionary to decide who was right. If you wanted to know something specific you would have to go to the library and actually do research. Now you can just get the tl;Dr from Wikipedia or whatever.
Sure but those of us old enough to have competed with each other in knowing facts we ban phones until after the argument
I get caught for bullshitting after winning an argument much more now than I did before Internet in your pocket
Okay, sure, I’ll play devil’s advocate. The engineering that goes into a single iPhone is unfathomable. It would take an entire lifetime of study to even try to produce something close.
But Apple pays about a jillion engineers about a jillion dollars each, and so they’re able to create new iPhones every year or so. That was 100% powered by capitalism.
Yeah, workers physically put the pieces together. Do you think any of them could design an iPhone without any help or reference? Or a single body to tie it all together?
Socialism was made under capitalism.
Using the same logic, that would make socialism powered by capitalism. Well, that, climate breakdown and school shootings: all powered by capitalism.
Yeah, in a capitalist system the difference between a smart person with a good idea and a successful person is capital.
With enough capital you don’t need to be smart or have any good ideas. You don’t even need to be a person.
Yea we can still innovate without capitalism, though, and even in spite of it people still develope things just for the fun of it. They even create non-profits designed around making things accessible and writing standards to help keep everyone organized. Fuck, Linux distros are free, dude. Literally this post points out that the people working on the software and the design are also of the working class and you’ve glossed over that.
Capitalism is the system which puts capital first. It a system whereby having money is having power and not having money is a death sentence. It is a system that that says equates your current monetary value with your value to society and which suppresses anything that cannot be monetized. So many people can’t even have hobbies anymore without some feeling of guilt and weird conservatives won’t stop shitting on the arts like they’re so broken as people they no longer understand the concept of enjoyment or living for more than just producing stock value.
Under a system that focuses on making sure people are cared for you can still have private business. A system which has safety nets and offers free education, healthcare, and basic utilities is one in which the ordinary person is free to live their life instead of worrying about losing their job and their employment-connected health insurance.
You’re not playing devil’s advocate by ignoring important details, you’re just being weird and wrong. Also no one fucking asked, anyway.
Dude is the living "and yet you participate in society. I am very happy intelligent. " meme, you’re wasting your time.
I don’t disagree with any single point that you’ve made. I agree with most of them.
But you mentioned linux. Tell me again, Linus Torvald, was he employed under a capitalist country when he created linux? How about most of its contributors?
Your point is easily defeated. Please make a better argument.
You can’t genuinely believe that that’s an argument for why mine has been “defeated”?
It took my two seconds to verify that Linus Torvald did his work with Linux on his own time and at university, not in the pursuit of capital. Since his childhood he has simply found joy in computers and does these things because he genuinely wants to. He worked at Transmeta for six years afterwards and then left to go work for one of the non-profits that eventually became the non-profit Linux Foundation. His whole fucking shtick is that the software should be open-source.
He’s also from Finland, a country well know to prioritize its citizens’ well-being. That care allows citizens to pursue their goals with a level of safety that capitalism cannot offer.
You’re either a weird, pathetic troll and/or unfathomably stupid. Either way this conversation isn’t going to get us anywhere.
Engineers are workers. Well paid yes, but you’re going against the wrong people, they’re not capitalists and don’t make the decisions that matter.
Then, why do you think an a economy post capitalist wouldn’t be able to develop smart phones? Do you think we’d return to feudalism and the world would devolve into dark ages and all the scientific knowledge would disappear?
Do you think people cannot collaborate without capitalism?
People do all the time in academia and science.
Absolutely not! I’d ask why they should, and obviously there are many reasons.
Is the “help or reference” coming from other workers?
It’s coming from someone who dedicated their entire life to being smarter than you or me about electronics.
Go on. Give your opinion.
Is/was that person not a worker?
At what point do they stop benefiting from their labor? They obviously can’t keep working in the next things and the next thing. They might be a one trick pony. You would need robust social programs like ubi.
Eventually the money to start the process comes from somewhere like a bank or private loans. Sure, the workers could fund the venture by themselves, but nobody wants to take that kind of risk. Taking a job at a company is basically paying money to avoid risk.
Entry to the market is a bigger obstacle than risk. You can’t just make a phone at home from scraps. You need an army of workers and machines and supply chains and business relationships and licenses.
You don’t actually have to have any of those things because you can have other companies make those parts for you and then even hire a company to assemble it for you. Apple doesn’t make screens or tiny screws or batteries. At least they don’t have to I’m not sure how their supply chain works. You could do presales on a site like Kickstarter and make the phone. The issue is getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable as all of those companies are going to charge you a set up fee, so the more parts you buy, the lower the cost per part. You’d also have to design a phone that gives people a compelling reason to buy it. Selling stuff is hard probably harder than making the product itself. You’d also need the usual business overhead like an accountant and an attorney.
That’s still market entry as the biggest obstacle, rather than risk. Getting enough people to buy it in order to make it viable is, itself, a factor of how much can be invested in marketing the phone. Designing a phone still requires at least a team of workers, if not an army, because that requires designing both the phone and software in addition to making it all work together in a usable product.
You also can’t just start up a phone company from a lemonade stand. You need starting capital. Hence, market entry.
I would start by making a dev board in an SBC form factor like the raspberry pi and use an os like graphene and make it compatible with Linux. You could sell that and have your backers do testing for you while you build the rest of the phone. Then once the phone was built you could try to build an os of your own.
I’m pretty sure your cobbled together hackathon project wouldn’t be functional as a phone, cell towers wouldn’t communicate with it and it wouldn’t make calls. Also, where did you even get backers? How did you attract them and scam them out of their money? And now you’re using them to outsource your labor team??
Market barriers are real.
Workers take plenty of risk to change jobs, homes, and even countries for a new job. The risks they take are comparatively much more significant than a venture of a millionaire or billionaire capitalist. That risk is somehow not rewarded under capitalism. Not to mention that the capitalist “risk” is nothing more than a scare tactic
That aside, someone “putting in money” doesn’t mean they were useful and deserve any credit. It just means that you have an unjust system where the actual innovators have to agree to be exploited to survive.
once the Return of Investment has been made
It’s extremely difficult to get started. I suppose I could live in a van down by the river and dumpster dive until I can make money from a product or service. However, many products and services require multiple workers to accomplish. If course businesses exploit workers and prevent competition. Those things should be addressed. However, it becomes extremely difficult to add a layer of fairness because some people will say that they deserve more than another person. Some people will get jobs based on who they know and who likes them. Does everyone get paid equally? Do you measure performance on some way? That creates competing interests and competition among workers. I worked in a shop under a “flat rate” system. It was constant bullshit with some guys doing anything they could to steal work from other guys. People would lie to get more work or bill customers for extra labor. It was a shit show.
Does everyone get paid equally
Anarchist chad: Yes.
So, you’ve chosen violence
… It’s coming from the culmination of, like 5 decades of absurdly educated engineering. If you want to call them workers, then sure.
They weren’t workers? is this “absurdly educated engineering” like a magic ghost inhabiting the halls of Apple HQ? Is this “engineering” in the room with us right now?
Seriously, I fail to grasp the point you’re trying to make here…
…you do know what engineering is, right? It’s… Definitely not a magic ghost inhabiting halls. It’s learning physics, electronics, programming, and, well, engineering to create novel solutions to problems people have.
My point is that capitalism, for all of its failures, does indeed sometimes produce better things. You unequivocally hating on it, for no discernable reason; I I can’t find a reason for that.
You do know that engineering doesn’t exist independently, right? It comes from humans. And you know what those humans typically are? Workers.
My point is that capitalism, for all of its failures, does indeed sometimes produce better things. You unequivocally hating on it, for no discernable reason; I I can’t find a reason for that.
[Citation needed].
Workers produce better things. Have been doing it before capitalism and will be doing it after. There’s no need for a leecher class above them.
I’m starting to think you’re not just playing devil’s advocate…
How will we educate those workers, in order to produce better things? I guess some “workers” will be smarter than others. More intelligent. Should we send those stupider workers to the fields? Make them work off their stupidity while the genius, better workers invent new machines?
blinks
What does education have to do with anything? How does that even follow towards someone “sending them to the fields”? This is the mother of non-sequiturs…
My point is that capitalism, for all of its failures, does indeed sometimes produce better things.
I’ve yet to see how capitalism has done that where other systems could not, though?
The capitalists are the ones who own Apple in the OP, so the designers using decades of research are still workers. Apple paying them a bunch to work together is what gets them to make the iphone, sure, but you can’t say that no other system wouldn’t have eventually had a similar invention
In fact, I’m quite certain that if we had a more anarchistic system instead of capitalism we’d have gotten phones or something similar sooner, as groups of nerds were working on them as early hobby projects but told to stop by their bosses and work on other more profitable shit instead
Capitalism does justify the need and expense of the device. Which is something, I guess.
What does that even mean?
well yeah most of its operating software was derived from opensource projects, but capitalists exploited those opensource project without giving the tinest bit back, so…
If you want to talk about Apple specifically, then consider this. When they began making popular tech like MacBooks and Ipods, they justified the prices by giving free warranties. They would replace or repair any device at no extra cost of the consumer. Well, they stopped doing that and then wanted you to pay an annual fee to get the same service. Then they did away with that and now it’s pay per repair or replacement and the prices went up instead of down. My theory is that was their business target in the first place. Get their products wide spread, and then pull rug out from under the consumer. To me, Apple is the best example of capitalism
That’s simply not true. Apple still has the same one year limited warranty they had when iPods were released. Steve Jobs justified the higher premium because you were getting “the store in the box,” referring to the in-store troubleshooting and educational support at no extra cost.
Source: worked for Apple for over a decade
One year. Not lifetime
Yeah that’s what they said. You’re the one who said lifetime, which was never true.
3 is normally the default for expensive items though, right?
What the hell is a store in a box?? Without cool aid it doesn’t make sense
Steve Jobs’ name for a help desk at no marginal cost
It means support and education at no cost. Troubleshooting and diagnostics is free at the Genius Bar. You only pay if hardware is replaced out of warranty. Free device and software education classes are available all day.
AppleCare still exists. So this is misinformation.
And just as an antidote, I have not felt like Apple has ever “pulled the rug out” on me and I’m an Apple product consumer. Are you?
I was
This isn’t really true.
Apple, at least here in the UK, give a 1 year warranty as is the law and anything repairs that need doing that are not the fault of the consumer (ie dropping and breaking the screen) are covered under this warranty. Furthermore, if there is a problem with a line of products then they will extend the warranties to cover that issue for a longer period of time.
You can pay to have AppleCare+ which will extend this warranty and add on accidental damage too.
There are plenty of legitimate reasons to shit on Apple without having to make up new ones.
Also, iPhones are a lot cheaper than they were a few years ago and they’re cheaper than their Samsung counterparts when comparing Pro vs Pro, etc.
MacOS is infinitely better than windows.
Yeah, no. Not even close. If nothing else, window management on MacOS is a fucking joke. The only thing that makes it less shitty is 3 party apps like rectanglesapp.
The settings menu is a fucking joke and laid out by the dumbest motherfuckers you’ve never met.
It prioritizes wifi above Ethernet.
The list goes on and on and on. MacOS is a messy hodgepodge of shit that barely works.
Windows has a lot of issues too, but thankfully, they are always fixable or have a workaround. In many cases, you have zero recourse on MacOS and if you don’t like it you can send an angry email to Mr tim apple.
Are you actually arguing that the settings menu in windows is better than digshit??? Settings on Mac are all in one location lol.
It prioritizes wifi above Ethernet.
No it doesn’t. I don’t know why you think that, do a speed test and you’d easily see that’s not true.
Windows has a lot of issues too, but thankfully, they are always fixable or have a workaround. In many cases, you have zero recourse on MacOS and if you don’t like it you can send an angry email to Mr tim apple.
This is just baloney. Mac is UNIX. You can change pretty much anything you like about it. Your entire comment is pretty much false.
Sure the window management is shit but everything else is a better user experience and it’s not filled with bloatware and ads like windows. Plus it’s Unix based.
Sadly we program with windows at work as we use C# .Net. And my gaming rig is windows as I don’t got time for Linux, but I would take a mac at work all day over windows.
Applecare is still around so you’re wrong already.
Look, Apple’s done some shitty stuff and as an iPhone and MacBook owner I won’t deny it. Every company right now is desperately trying to find ways to charge more for less because there aren’t really any corners left to cut for capitalism to pump stock numbers up but infinite growth is still making its usual demands.
Apple products are still way more robust than the competition and they’re way ahead on things like ARM and making OSs that aren’t complete trash(Windows is a worthless piece of shit and always has been, even at its best. I own and regularly use a self-built gaming PC, so I experience it all the time). I’ll buy their products because their shit actually works and can be relied on. Plus I was able to finance my laptop at 0% and honestly the price I paid for my 14” MacBook Pro was comparable to what I would have paid for the same tier back in 2010 when I got my first MacBook so honestly, with inflation and all, it was surprisingly affordable(it was still really expensive, I won’t lie).
Anyhow it kinda sounds like you don’y have much experience with these products or haven’t learned from your experiences with them and just want to ride that bandwagon. Look into the awful shit Samsung has been doing or how expensive some of the other Android options are and you’ll see that this goes way beyond your specific hate of “the evil fruit company”. Capitalism is just rotten everywhere.
Ya know when you immediately start with condescension, I give no fucks what you have to say
That wasn’t condescending. They are telling you that you are wrong, which you are. It’s okay to be wrong - it’s how you handle it that matters…
Getting told I’m wrong isnt the point. It’s how I was told
For a while there, the Darwin OS was open source.
“It’s better to be a pirate than join the navy” - Steve Jobs
Darwin is open source. It uses some closed source device drivers but the core OS is APSL which is an open source license.
All modern devices are made using one form of slave labor or another.
https://ethical.net/technology/the-slavery-supported-the-device-in-your-pocket/
I think that’s what they must when they say “built by capitalism.”
I mean, any other usage would be utterly ridiculous. So, that must be what they mean.
It literally is. The idea I’ve seen around is that these things couldn’t be built without someone getting the short end of the stick. They also believe that no one would innovate without a profit motive. These people genuinely believe that the only other option is flipping entirely over to that garbage attempt the soviets made at communism. They fundamentally cannot comprehend the idea of nuance and so “capitalism is the only idea that works”.
We know that CEO wages are insane and that the reason we can’t afford stuff is our stagnant pay. We know that people innovate for their own curiousity all the time. We know that capitalism actually hates innovation because it means retooling and spending money on R&D and we’ve seen it fight progress basically at every turn or watched it buy up competition so it wouldn’t have to any real work.
So yea, you’re right.
Yes and workers in the Soviet Union also made telephones. But only for the party leaders who didn’t see there was a need for ordinary people to have phones.
Yes, workers make phones in any system. But who decides how many to make and what price to charge for them?
You’re basically arguing that this process had nothing to do with capitalism. Like Apple isn’t capitalist, it’s just workers working. Like what is the logic here. Those workers didn’t do it to create the iPhone… they did it because the capitalist who wanted to create the iPhone was paying them. So that his privately owned firm could compete against other similar firms in the market.
