Privacy (for robot vacuums) isn’t cheap. via the Verge.
The app is ios only and you need to buy hepa bags every week for it. Those kind of kill it for me.
I use a broom. It’s good for privacy and uses 100% green energy.
You collect them stirckly yourself? No carbon-consuming tech involved?
I do not want to descend into some kind of “but there is always some carbon” point, I just want to point out that a robot powered by, say, solar electricity can be more green than a human-powered broom, production costs included.
Neither of the two is perfectly green, but a solar-powered robot is more efficient in leveraging solar power than human growing and eating plants.
Or do you think this is necessarily not so?
This title is dumb. Companies are not selling all of their products at a loss just to harvest your data[1] and privacy is not significantly more expensive. Don’t let capitalism fool you into believing we’re suffering from anything but the natural progression of “infinite growth”.
We’re so far into dystopia, and used to every company double/triple/quadruple dipping, that the entire concept of a company simply building a quality product, that lasts as long as possible, without ads, or extracting and selling your data, planned obsolescence, or price gouging is insanity… which is itself, batshit insane. This is not an efficient system. It’s a runaway freight train of greed and narcissism that is parasitically killing our host spaceship.
[1] they might be with Alexa hubs and other select data harvesting multipliers, but they’re probably selling them at cost or a tiny loss.
Depends on the business model. Take Apple and Amazon. Apple makes most of its cash off hardware sales. As such, Apple will never sell you a $50 Mac hoping to make the money back thru services or ad revenue of any kind. And why their HomePods cost 3x more than any smart speaker.
On the other hand, Amazon doesn’t make money off hardware. They routinely blow out Fire products at insane discounts. A 10th of what Apple charges for a comparable product. Because they make their cash of sales and services. Products are just a conduit to more lucrative services.
You can’t lump every company into the same money making MO. Every company tends to have their own unique angle.
I mean it’s partially true, do you remember Juicero? The entire goal was to get you integrated into the subscription model. It was well built, but they still priced it in a way that would make people want to buy the service needed to actually use it. Most companies either want subscriptions, or willingly lower build quality just to be able to sell you a new version within a shorter timeframe
The idea you need to buy a “juice pack” rather than literally buying a bag of good frozen fruit and just letting it melt into juice is insane. I hate how companies have everyone convinced they can offer you something and act like its super hard and only they can do it sucks.
I had this realization about computer apps. You can replicate almost any function or code, but it does makes sense often in that domain to simply buy the app if its for keeps and that is maintained.
It was a badly thought out product, I agree. It also failed quite spectacularly because of it. I just brought it up because it was actually a really good deal based on the device quality itself. Sadly the entire press can’t even use normal burlap pouches with fruit inside, it doesn’t produce the pressure. It might have been a turd, but by god, they put as much gold on it as they could.
I think juicers themselves can be a good product, but not with an idiotic business model behind it too. Oh and they should not require WiFi access for DRM verification of the juice packets and device.
It may have been well built, but was still completely idiotic. Who, in his right mind, would buy a proprietary bag of fruit pieces instead of normal fruit that has to be at least half the price.
The business model just didn’t make sense.
planned obsolescence
Apparently the Instant Pot was built without a lot of bullshit and this Atlantic article suggests that was why the company filed for bankruptcy.
https://www.theverge.com/23934731/valetudo-robot-vacuum-hacking
Or you buy a cheap compatible robot and install valetudo
This is cool but it would have to be like a third that price before anyone could take the leap. If anything someone should find some way to hack and replace the spyware in a Roomba or something
Well aren’t you in luck, people are doing exactly that over https://valetudo.cloud/
Not for Roombas but on a couple Xiaomi/Dreame/Roborock models.
