Do you guys miss owning things and they were just...yours? Like, you paid money for them and then you had them and you had full control over them and someone half a world away wasn't able to reach into your house and break them or make them do evil things?
I drive a 30-year-old Nissan pickup truck for this exact reason. Not sure why, but I get a small sense of joy knowing that the corporate overlords aren't "watching" me drive. Of course they're "watching" me on my phone (as I drive the beater truck), but that's a different story.
That old truck is probably polluting 10-30× more than a modern one. While corporations have their flaws, they have spent time and money making engines more efficient and reducing harmful emissions.
In France, we have mandatory car checkup every few years where they test the pollution from the back of the car.
My old car, made in early 90 barely emitted more pollutant than regulation allow.
Ended up buying a Volkswagen Passat, very impressive it emitted a lot less. Then dieselgate happened... Now it's barely under what the regulation allow.
Keep your old polluting car, in the grand scheme of things it is better than buying a new one that end up polluting much more to build than what you would gain in everyday emission.
your theory assumes that everyone is lying about their emissions and then later assumes that your old car is not, in fact, lying about emissions. also that you can just keep an old car running indefinitely on a limited budget.
there wasn't much pressure from regulation to have low pollution emissions in car during the early 1990, beside the car i'm speaking about, a golf 2, has such a small diesel engine that it makes sense it would pollute very little compared to the much heavier and much more powerful passat (at least compared to the whooping 50 horse power the golf had !).
i can still remember avoiding road too steep lol.
Beside, when i am saying that keeping the older car is better for environment, i am not theorizing but speaking about things that have been studied.
> Specifically, researchers find keeping older fuel efficient cars on the road longer reduces CO2 emissions significantly more than speeding up the global transition to green technology.
I wish more people were aware of this. I'm often reminded of a conversation I overheard at my high school retail job:
$OLDGUY_CUSTOMER (to my coworker): "Wow, I just saw a big crash on [nearby arterial road]! The entire front of the car was smashed in!"
$COWORKER: "Oh no! Was the driver alright?"
$OLDGUY: "Yeah, he seemed fine. There wasn't an ambulance or anything." [beat] "Man, they don't make them like they used to. When I was young, cars didn't crumple like that - it was much safer!"
That old truck will pollute less in its lifetime than the amount of energy it takes to produce a modern automobile, let alone the cumulative energy spent to sustain a consumer base ready to sign a new lease every 36 months for the latest and greatest in aggregated conflict minerals + spyware on wheels, it just does it all over the poors someplace else instead of where you live.
my headphones just popped up an alert on my phone that turned out to be an ad for a nascar race. that got their app uninstalled. if they ever realize that they can start shoving ads directly into my ears that's when the headphones themselves get taken out back and smashed with a hammer.
YouTube. I think in most cars it’s gonna be a discrete component that can just be unplugged. The big question is what functionality you lose, and whether you can live with that tradeoff.
Anecdotally, my 2023 Kia's infotainment unit is one big plastic box that I was able to access by just prying up some plastic and undoing a handful of screws.
I was applying some dielectric grease to the USB port used for Android Auto (in order to prevent intermittent disconnects while driving) but I wouldn't be surprised if one of the many other cables plugged into it led to a cell antenna on the exterior.
There are also software options; I was able to disable the "telematics" in the same vehicle by inputting a (frankly schizophrenic) combo of rolling back the date, touching random invisible trigger zones in menus, and entering a leaked PIN to access the appropriate service menu on the infotainment unit.
Figuring all that out was unfortunately quite difficult, although I imagine you might be able to get "official" help if your local dealership is friendly and willing to bend the rules. I had to settle for a lot of keyword massaging on Google.
You don't understand the situation in this case. This is not some auto-update, people have to put some serious effort into updating manually... effin soundbar.
Why on earth would anybody do that? I have these speakers, exactly model D, it works flawlessly either via eArc with TV or Bluetooth with both android and apple, there is absolutely nothing to fix or improve. You have to tinker with USB key and obscure series of actions or install a dedicated app on phone to force an update - why would anybody ever need such an app in first place? I am minimizing amount of apps on my phone, and not installing every semi-unknown low quality crap just because I can. That's basic security 101.
You can tweak basses directly on remote for these. These speakers are not HiFi albeit cca fine performers, realistically you will never need more from them (and TBH that one feature is absolutely stellar idea that many much more expensive receivers don't have, when kids go sleep I lower basses since they travel easier through walls and doors).
Its like pushing unknown BIOS updates to motherboard when your PC works perfectly fine, and then complaining it isn't anymore. Its sad state of 2025 electronics in general, but it was exactly same 10 or even 15 years ago, this ain't something new or unknown.
Turning of the dammed display would be an improvement. I don't want an animation playing telling me that yes it's still connected to the TV via eARC every time I change the volume on the TV.
Being able to disable the "microphone off" indicator LED would also be great.
A couple days ago, I was thrown by one of my Windows devices pitching an ad for a video game to me in the notifications. I immediately disabled the related setting, which was of course enabled by default. Every device you buy is rigged by default to encourage you to buy more things.
Not really. My iPhone, and especially my AirPods, have gotten massive feature upgrades since I bought them, and I didn't have to pay a thing.
And I assume my WiFi router updates have helped prevent people doing evil things with my devices.
Samsung's update here is obviously a massive fail, but it's one consumer device out of tens of thousands. I think it's clear the benefits outweigh the harms on the whole. Definitely sucks if you bought this particular soundbar though.
Maybe the issue to me is that I don't get to pick. My headphones have only gotten the ability to show ads on my phone because some of the functionality is only available via an app which pops up alerts to buy more headphones. My router updates have probably improved security but they definitely keep resetting my DNS which gives people the ability to track my browsing and I don't think that's an accident. I don't get to decide that I only want the security update, or the functionality update, it comes bundled with the privacy invasion and the constant shrieking of advertisements like baby birds. These "free" updates are not without cost. Nothing is actually free, not even on the internet. I'd love to go to a model where I get to pick among features to add to my devices, but if my decision is between everything or nothing I pick nothing.
It's hilarious because I bought second hand Focal Aria 936 floor standing speakers for half the price one of these sound bars will set you back. They were only slightly more than one of these sound bars second hand!
It's not even like people don't have the option, they're just suckers for marketing and don't fully research anything. Free markets are useless if the consumers are this dumb.
