I also dislike this move by Motorola. It's like using tamper proof screws and violates the idea from Make: "If you can't open it, you don't own it."
DIY/Makers and anyone else who ends up repairing fancy devices (phones, after market stereo head units, various lab equipment) have constantly fought with this type of thing. It comes in forms of bios that self destruct, glue that's only purpose is to break something internal if a panel is removed, or tamper proof screws on replacement parts.
See the Makers "Bill of Rights" - http://cdn.makezine.com/make/MAKERS_RIGHTS.pdf (pdf). I tend to judge companies on whether or not their products are outright MADE to prevent me from being able to fix it myself. If I can't, I won't buy products from them again. As @meunierc said, "vote with your dollars."
I used to repair cameras for a living and Sony point and shoots drove me crazy. We couldn't fix them because there is no real frame or chassis holding it together. Once you take it apart, good luck getting it back together.
One that sticks out to me are the early 00's palm devices. Driver support dropped off after 6 MONTHS, copious glue in weird places (covering traces and connectors) and they'd yell at you if you called their tech lines (for unopened, warranty covered devices). Treo's weren't any better either. Ugh.
Needless, they lost a couple hundred devices sold because of that.
The commercial sector has learned that certain product segments are filled with people who are not "into" the product (e.g. a lamp is a lamp). Thus, Wal-Mart-type stores rule. Most people buying these products do not make their decisions based on longevity or ease of repair.
Motorola has actually been honest enough about this to tell you to buy from someone else.
Everyone loses with this, though. Motorola loses because their devices are more expensive and take more effort to manufacture. Apathetic consumers lose because the devices are more expensive and geeks are less likely to be inclined to improve the ecosystem. And geeks lose because the devices are more expensive and harder to hack.
It makes no good sense for Motorola to burn cash on making their phones harder to hack when they don't need to - it's only managerial paranoia that leads to this, as best I can tell.
Motorola is not loosing money on this. They have accounting numbers that tell them that having a modifiable device ups their support cost. People without the real technical ability or (worse) people with no technical ability that have friends/relatives who do the 'upgrade' for them cost money in support. The difference in manufacturing cost over the production run is insignificant (i.e. they are not increasing the end-user cost based on this change).
Companies like Motorola know most of their customers are apathetic to the needs of hackers and look to the bottom line. Apps will still run on the phone, so customers will still have that. This is a win for Motorola in the market they serve.
I'd be interested to see some proof that this is why this is happening.
The best reasons I've read for why Apple is so hard on jailbreaking is (a) carrier agreements not liking unlocks and (b) pirating of apps. I find these reasons a bit more compelling, although like I said I'd like to see more information about it.
I appreciate that Motorola is honest. It is still a PITA to tell a distant in-law/customer/acquaintance that I can't fix THEIR phone because of some dumb thing the company decided 2 years ago and has since replaced and forgotten about.
The Moto decision is just a tiny thing that probably won't affect much in the grand scheme of things. I just have an issue with the fundamentals. It's a hot button issue for me. ^_^
What do you mean by longevity? The ability to reflash phones with the newest releases long after the hardware can't support them? C'mon, everyone jumps to the next shiny thing every 6 months or whenever their contract expires, especially the hackers.
What you mean by "ease of repair"? How is the ROM getting busted up that you need to reflash the phone?
3 years from now someone's 11 year old kid will be using a technophile uncle's hand me down phone and I'll be asked to repair it when the power connector is worn.
A company that creates a device and directly states "buy something else if you want to modify this" probably didn't make that power connector a replaceable part because it was "easier to just affix it with 2cm of glue."
It's a fundamental issue with the attitude MOTO is presenting.
We're talking about the boot code here, that's all. They didn't embed C4 or toxic nerve gases inside the case if you want to fix Junior's phone years from now.
In all likelihood, Junior is going to throw the phone away and get an ad-subsidized Droid 7 for free. Let's face it, all of this hardware is disposable now. Ask your local VCR repairman.
hardware is currently disposable because this is how manufacturers have decided to make money. not so long ago, it seemed common to upgrade your PC: swap in one component, put in another. you're arguing to just buy a new device completely.
why do you think throwing away, rather than improving, something that so much energy, material and other resources went into creating, is a good idea?
I get what you're saying that this is how it is and that it's an insignificant thing. I'm opposed to making hardware disposable and I see this move as another step in that direction, thus I disagree with what MOTO has done.
please don't assume everyone is as imprudent, lavish and wasteful as some stereotype you seem to have.
i replace devices when they are no longer of use to me, or if something significantly more useful comes along. actually useful not hype.
i got my current phone in 2005: i only have one phone, and this phone works well. i've repaired this phone: a year ago it fell in water and stopped working so i stripped it down, cleaned it up, checked for obviously blown circuits, replaced bits until it worked again.
What do they gain by doing this? I just don't get it. I have no problem with them not supporting hacking their devices but to go out of the way to prevent it (let alone bricking it) doesn't make any sense. We wouldn't accept it from a computer manufacturer, so why with a phone?
EDIT:
I know most here will get it but this drives me crazy because it stifles progression. Did Motorola every think that their next best engineers might be the kids that are so passionate about this stuff that they want to tinker with their phone in these ways?
Motorola has the OEM mindset. Verizon is their customer. Verizon wants people to pay for tethering. Maybe GPS navigation. Maybe they don't want high bandwidth apps allowed on their 3G network. Since there's basically no market for unlocked phones in the US companies like Motorola and HTC can't really stand up to the carriers. It'd be suicide. (HTC is doing the same types of things by digitally signing the boot loader code on their handsets)
As I understand it, Motorola/Verizon did not do this with the original Droid. It seems strange that they would start now.
Bootloader signing, though annoying and, I think inappropriate for a manufacturer to do is non-destructive. Intentionally bricking a phone is another thing entirely: it's vandalism.
Yes, they were quite closely involved in that one. Which begs the question of will Google do something about this. I'm not sure this is something they are really looking to take a stand on but bricking a device is going too far. Maybe they should revoke license to Google apps on this phone until that feature is fixed.
Verizon has sold a lot of Android handsets at this point. Maybe they're starting to feel the strain on their network? or perhaps it has something to do with the Droid X's HDMI output and DRM?
A class lawsuit protects those who are oblivious to the problem. This is how you lose your rights - one by one, until you no longer remember you once had them.
And you should never forget telcos are their clients. As long as consumers buy locked subsidized phones under the illusion they are paying less, we will see market distortion like this.
BTW, Brazilian law mandates unlocked/unlockable phones and subsidies are just as present.
IMO, this is about protection of revenue stream. Sale of the hardware is only the first transaction. Ongoing licensing and kickbacks from second-order sales is the second: bandwidth, app sales, accessories, etc.
If users modify their phone, they could possibly escape the locked-down universe this maker has created, and therefore metaphorically short-circuit revenue stream plans.
In short, it's about control. Manufacturer control of the user, but not user's control of the device. (Note I deliberately said "user" not "owner" since I believe that best reflects the viewpoint of the manufacturer.)
And people say Apple is evil... at least Apple has never put fuses like this into their hardware. If Motorola had any kind of market share, they'd take evil to a whole new level.
I was planning on getting the Droid X until I learned of this. It's a slap in the face and unfortunately most people won't even realize it. Slowly innovation and growth in smart phones will slow and no one will realize why. They won't realize they were cutting of their own noses. How popular was Moto's Linux phone before android? Not as popular as they are, that's for sure. They need the hackers and tinkers to push the platform forward. Moto and Verizion sure has heck won't do it.
The efuse paranoia has, to a large degree, already been debunked. DroidLife[0] quotes BGR[1] as saying:
"The current theory being put forth by the non-alarmists in the Android hacking community suggests that the DROID X is locked in a similar manner to the Milestone. Though it may be difficult to crack, and may lead to many hairs being pulled out, mucking with the bootloader probably won’t brick your phone."
It's a shame there isn't a way to place blinking tags around this comment, arrows pointing at it. Until this efuse problem has been proven 'in the wild' it's nothing more than a possibility, and from the BGR article (I searched this thread first to see if someone had already posted it) it seems this efuse has been in place in previous Droid models but has never been used.
That is a dangerous statement dolinsky my man. That means that we should buy the phone only to realize we got a gimped device for the purposes of verizon deciding which software features to lock so they can charge us 10 bucks a month for each.
from the source, the things checked before blowing the fuse are: "the firmware information (what we call ROMS), the kernel information, and the bootloader version"
it seems like if you get any kind of corruption, in any part of the above components, for any amount of time, your phone becomes a brick.
corruption happens: my previous phone was a motorola. i stopped using it because it would randomly redirect phone calls to other numbers in the phone book (but it was usable for a long period despite this).
motorola phones' get corruption (which keep essential functions working), but now any temporary, minor problem results in permanent, intentional bricking.
The article mentions that it must be fixed at the hardware level by Motorola. I wonder if there is something that can be done to disable this, such as jumping two pins on the main PCB. A steady hand and a small soldering iron can work wonders.
I've had motorola phones randomly call people. And not let me hang up my phone calls until I pull the battery. At least they didn't take 10 minutes to boot like the blackberry.
Damn it. Just cancelled my order (placed yesterday). Funny thing is I was switching from AT&T to Verizon to get it, so now Verizon has not only lost my $200 but my future monthly fees as well.
Now I'm considering the Nexus One, but then I wonder when the Nexus Two might come out? From a hardware standpoint (aside from the 8GB internal storage, HDMI out and bigger screen) the DroidX doesn't look that much better.
Can you get FroYo on the Incredible without any jailbreaking or other messing around?
I've been thinking of getting a Nexus One specifically because of FroYo (and its wireless tethering -- which finally puts it on feature parity with my old Nokia E61i), but it's fairly expensive and I'm loath to drop $500+ on something if there's something better on the market or about to come on the market.
"Jailbreaking" doesn't exist on Android phones (for the most part cough Motorola). Installing firmwares does.
According to HTC, Froyo is set for auto-update on the Incredible in Q3 sometime. Or you can just install one of the firmwares that's out on the web and get it today.
On Android, you have to 'root' the phone in some fashion in order to install firmware. On a couple Android phones, the rooting process is 'supported', but on most models, rooting relies on exploiting the phone in the same way a jailbreak would.
We have an unlimited plan. Verizon really can't decide to start metering it now without a re-write to contract which would allow consumers to break their contracts (presumably).
Are you 100% certain of that? Most people who've purchased something labelled as unlimited have purchased a medium sized data plan. I'm suggesting selling larger ones.
The main reason Verizon would want something like this is to prevent un-paid for tethering. But this doesn't stop that. You can still get root on a Moto ROM and still install a tethering app.
I really like how companies don't understand that the possibility to modify and fiddle with a device makes this device much more attractive for the right customers lke us hackers.
Hackers have been online tastemakers to some extent, but not so much in the hardware realm. This is why the companies don't care. I wonder why this is the case?
Not quite as evil, but T-Mobile Germany is preventing me from flashing my HTC Hero and at the same time delay official updates by months. Suffice to say, I won't ever buy a phone from a mobile phone company again - they suck at software!
The only phone you actually have control over is a Nexus One. People still have to root HTC's other phones, Motorola phones, iPhones, and just about every other usable consumer phone device.
I don't really care, and I certainly wouldn't change my recommendation of a phone to a consumer based on this. But read to the end before you downvote :)
As a vendor, dealing with hacks, jailbreaks, and other such things is remarkably expensive. Consumers (not developers) wind up installing these things without understanding the implications of what they're doing. The OS breaks, the applications break, things go haywire, things go bad. The hardware vendor, the OS vendor, and the application vendor all take the blame and have to deal with the support costs. We get support e-mails all the time that can be traced to iOS jailbreak-induced issues.
It's a massive pain in the neck that, understandably, a vendor just doesn't want to deal with.
Moreover, as a consumer, it's incredibly wasteful to be spending so much time on trying to break into undocumented systems that the vendors just aren't interested in supporting.
Instead, I want to support vendors that provide more open platforms for a more premium price. It costs more to produce an open, supported platform, and I don't mind paying a little bit for an Android development phone that allows me to experiment with OS-level work, or something like the Ubiquity RouterStation Pro[0] as an alternative to consumer wireless routers. The advantage to me is that hacking the device is supported and I don't have to fight with a consumer manufacturer -- a company with very different priorities to my own -- to do it.
That's ridiculous. To make the over used car analogy, this is if you were to replace the engine on a brand new car you bought with a different one, only to have the car destroy itself, and the new engine you just put in it.
It's one thing to not support the new engine when it has problems. It's another thing to destroy property that someone bought from you after the sale if they use it in a way you don't approve.
I understand it costs more to support an open platform. But it's a choice to support that open platform, and Motorola doesn't have to do that, they can hang up on Joe Average who did installs the mod just like a dealership would do so on anyone who screwed up putting a completely different engine in their brand new car.
Motorola doesn't have to do that, they can hang up on Joe Average who did installs the mod ...
Cars aren't phones. The cost of installing a new engine is very different than the cost of installing a phone hack, the set of people likely to do so (and the associated cost to the manufacturer and other vendors) isn't the same, and there's going to be a lot more consumer awareness about what they're doing by replacing the engine. And really -- modern cars are locked down.
Modern cars are fairly proprietary, but they're not intentionally locked down. They certainly don't attempt to self-destruct upon detecting tampering. Cars actually do the opposite: they attempt to keep going even in the event of improper modification or malfunction (limp-home mode, etc...).
I find locked-down devices annoying, but not unethical. Self-destructs are simply vandalism, and should result in legal action.
I do think that Motorola has gone too far in this, they shouldn't be designing their phone to break when you mess with it.
But you bring up an important point. Many (if not most due to scale) of the people who are rooting their phones are not developers/tinkerers. I was talking to a very non-technical person the other day and they said a friend had sent them instructions on how to jailbreak their iPhone. This person just followed the instructions and then was able to download a navigation app for free. Not so much your noble hacker.
Blah blah blah, DRM is bad so people should be able to steal if they want to, I agree with that. But these companies see the same problems the video game companies have seen and attempted to solve with DRM.
-1: I agree with you up to a certain point, but there's reasonable counter-measures and totally off the wall ones, of which this one is an example of. Encrypting the boot loader as was done in Milestone is a great approach, but actually bricking the phone? I'll go somewhere else.
So you don't mind that they lock down the bootloader so you can't actually install anything else, but you do mind when they lock it just a little bit more to make sure you don't install anything else?
That is an odd argument; the purpose of either technological measure is to keep you out, and most users are just going to download somebody else's "worthy" crack anyway.
I'm assuming your main point is the cost of customer contact/handling after they've done something dumb?
As well as the intangible costs of what customers think and say after things go wrong. Look at how Mac application developers respond to things like Usanity's Haxies.
The implicit assumption here (in order to get from your comment to "…so it's OK that Motorola does this") is that using modded phone software causes more problems for the average consumer than having his phone bricked. Without this assumption, the fact that hacks might cause trouble cannot possibly lead to the conclusion that bricking hardware is a good course of action.
It sounds kind of ridiculous when stated explicitly, doesn't it?
It sounds kind of ridiculous when stated explicitly, doesn't it?
Only if we assume your initial premise. How about this one? The average consumer is never going to try to hack their phone unless someone more knowledgable than them provides the instructions and resources necessary to do it. In other words, average consumer using the phone will never, ever, ever have a bricked phone because of some sort of anti-tampering device.
Motorola wishes to sell a device with a certain set of supported functionality. They do not wish to invest effort in dealing with hacked versions of their devices, and in fact they seem to have contracts with carriers that require them to protect the devices.
Motorola sells you a device that does exactly what they say it does. If you don't like the feature-set of this device, then don't buy it -- Motorola is not required to sell you an open platform and you't not required to buy their closed one.
Again, your argument fails to justify the decision. Try reading your post with "Therefore bricking hacked phones is a good thing" at the end — it makes no sense. If the number of people who would attempt to hack it is that vanishingly small, it's just pointlessly mean with no benefit (since no one was going to try it anyway, right?). If a lot of people are going to try hacking, you're certainly one-upping any problems it would have caused without you bricking the phone.
If the number of people who would attempt to hack it is that vanishingly small.
The number of people that will try to hack it is vanishingly small, but it only takes one.
Once that one person gets their hack working, the number of people that have no idea what they're doing but will still install a hack developed by someone else is surprisingly large.
... "Therefore bricking hacked phones is a good thing" at the end
Therefor, bricking hacked phones is their prerogative, it truly doesn't matter to me or 99.99% of the people buying their devices, and if someone does care, they should buy a device from someone interested in serving the tinkerer market, rather than trying to jury-rig a product from a company that clearly has no interested in supporting your endeavor.
Why brick it then? Wouldn't it be enough to change some status string that would tell the support people that the phone has been messed with and lost its software warranty?
When are you kids going to learn? If you have to root it, hack it, jailbreak it or otherwise mod it against the terms of purchase which you signed voluntarily when purchasing, why are you surprised when your candy is removed from you? If it doesn't do the job and the maker doesn't want it to do the job, it's his problem. Don't act like a spoiled brat and give in to the cat-and-mouse game of hacking and counterhacking.
I can just imagine the reaction if it had been Apple releasing a phone that self-destructed when you modded it. Since this is Android - and Android is 'open' - expect the story to fall into news-cycle oblivion by next week.
There are posts on various Android related forums speaking against this, numerous blog posts, and some people have canceled their orders... so your implicit charge of hypocrisy falls entirely flat in the face of reality. Care to retract it?
There are always at least a half-dozen anti-Apple posts on HN at any given time. I see one post about this, which is already falling off the radar. If this had been about an Apple product, people would be working themselves into a frothy geek-rage.
Wow, Google is giving away their OS for free, and Motorola is locking it up.
It's not even theirs to lock up.
We PAID for it....do they not get the concept of money or what?
DIY/Makers and anyone else who ends up repairing fancy devices (phones, after market stereo head units, various lab equipment) have constantly fought with this type of thing. It comes in forms of bios that self destruct, glue that's only purpose is to break something internal if a panel is removed, or tamper proof screws on replacement parts.
See the Makers "Bill of Rights" - http://cdn.makezine.com/make/MAKERS_RIGHTS.pdf (pdf). I tend to judge companies on whether or not their products are outright MADE to prevent me from being able to fix it myself. If I can't, I won't buy products from them again. As @meunierc said, "vote with your dollars."