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Apple now endorses Right to Repair legislation (www.404media.co)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I believe this is genuine support of the bill from Apple. Between Right to Repair winning in Massachusetts and the EU demanding compliance, I think Apple decided to flip the script. They would want to continue the illusion of customer friendly tech.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks again for explaining ans elaborating in depth.

I‘ve been saying this for years and I might sound like a broken record by now:

As someone who has spent 18 yrs in marketing I have the strong suspicion that „occasional blatant misrepresentations“ are not the problem. They are pretty easy to spot.

What isn’t as easy to spot is the following:

Having tons of fun while drinking an alcoholic beverage
Being so cool and free when smoking a cigarette

Those are two types of ads that don’t „misrepresent“ the product but still play with your desires (being accepted and having status).

Now people always go like „but thats how you make ads!“ Not true. Thats how you make them now. It used to be (google it) and in parts still is a product representation instead of a lifestyle brand thing.

This is where I see the danger, especially for young and/or vulnerable people. They are told that „cool, connected people need this“ and their subconscious gobbles it up.

Now a lot of people go „but I am not like this.“ Wrong, you and I and everyone else is like this. You just may not be as susceptible to it than others are, hurray! This argument still makes you unempathetic towards the endless number of people who are less mentally strong than you are.

I could go on for days. Probably should write a q & a about it and link to it at some point.

Some facts:

companies use mental health professionals to analyse how to break our critical thinking to sell us more stuff, regardless if we need it
alcohol and tobacco ads are banned in some countries for the exact reason that they were so successful (and deadly) with the lifestyle idea
it is easy to break this by disallowing closed ecosystems, proprietary protocols and forcing interoperability and open standards
outlawing lifestyle ads and any kind of misleading/easily misunderstandable language or pictures will stop pulling in non tech people into buying or wanting a phone they cant even use fully.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was awesome, thanks for sharing.

I fully get what you're saying and I think I know a thing or two about how lifestyle branding consumes people's lives to the point where they're fully absorbed.

Social media platforms seem to be by far the worst offenders of stimulating this kind of addiction (let's just name it for what it is).

Coming from a background of designing products, as opposed to selling them I tend to be focused on product representation, rather than selling an idea. Which is not actually the route to making stupid amounts of money.

You've convinced me that marketing is definitely part of the problem. Here in the Netherlands they've recently (about two years ago) relaxed some legislation on online gambling (gambling itself is legal, just the ads weren't) and since we've seen a surge of ads on television and social media featuring sports icons and influencers. The result has been a giant increase in profits, which directly corelates to figures of increased debt, prevalent mostly in young adults. I firmly believe this is toxic and needs to be fixed asap.

If you do decide to host a Q&A I'll be sure to have a look for more cool insights.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you very much! I appreciate the acknowledgment.

You‘re correct and then some, Social Media is more or less a giant ad platform, at least conventional ones are. The fediverse has no real „ads“ but a lot of jerks try to advertise for free here. That’s hardly gonna be a real problem (I hope).

Product design sounds like a cool job as well. Still tech or something else entirely?

The issue with marketing is precedent:

you go to mcd‘s or any other burger restaurant, the image shows giant burgers.
your mouth waters, you order a burger
what arrives bears no resemblance with the picture. This should be outlawed!

From there we have precedent that we are allowed to lie „a little bit“. Not keep information for us like a good salesman but outright misrepresent the product.

The same goes for all other products. You see a motor drill in a hardware store prospect: 39,99* Farther down the page, it says „if you are gold member [and we sell your data], otherwise 139.99.“

And there you have it again, precedent. If we allow giant companies to market like this, we shouldn’t wonder why they bullshit us in every other alley (taxes, labor laws, environment).

Thanks for encouraging me to make a q&a, will definitely let you know if I do. But since you‘re seemingly one of three people on the internet who is open to learn stuff, how would you think some kind of podcast/blog? Would you participate?