> If Apple were liable for their defective products then they might decide not to ship them at all until they can be sure enough that the risk of the lawsuits putting them out of business is small enough that they can absorb it.
> This worked wonders for other industries (notably: automotive, airlines, medicine). It may slow them down a bit, you may have a wait a bit longer for the next iteration of some gadget. But that's a small price to pay in my opinion.
That's quite a big price for non life-critical equipment that is a billion times more complex than a pacemaker or the safety-critical parts of an airplane or car.
A billion times more complex than the safety-critical parts of an airplane? I think you lack perspective on avionics packages and the safety measures that are undertaken in that industry. Additionally, I think you're vastly over estimating how complex a smartphone is.
A billion might be hyperoble (although i dont think its a totally unreasonable guess either), but phone software is many GB large, i could easily believe that there are a million more MC/DC points in phone software, than in the safety critical part of airplane software.
Pacemakers are one of literally millions of regulated medical devices. If my CPAP fails one night, I don't die, but it's still regulated to ensure it's not gonna fail. You want this to be pacemakers vs Tetris but it's not. It's hearing aids and contact lenses and insulin pumps and wheelchairs and nebulizers and all kinds of devices that will not get you killed if they fail AND YET they are highly regulated and rightly so.
I mean, i assumed from context it was meant regulated in the way life-critical devices are regulated, since the mentioned industries like airlines that have elements that must apply with the regulations life-critical software has to be (e.g. full mc/dc test coverage and what not).
If the goal posts are being moved to regulated in any form, phones already meet this criteria as there exists regulations they are subject to.
So what regulation precisely did you have in mind and would it prevent the issue being discussed?
> This worked wonders for other industries (notably: automotive, airlines, medicine). It may slow them down a bit, you may have a wait a bit longer for the next iteration of some gadget. But that's a small price to pay in my opinion.
That's quite a big price for non life-critical equipment that is a billion times more complex than a pacemaker or the safety-critical parts of an airplane or car.