On 27/03/2015 5:34 PM, Russell Coker wrote:
On Fri, 27 Mar 2015, Andrew McGlashan <andrew.mcglashan@affinityvision.com.au>
It's a real pity that non-tech people will never understand the extent of some problems that are real; but that is no excuse for Samsung not getting us reasonable update to fix such problems.
People shouldn't need to understand the extent of the problems.
The problem here is that unrestricted capitalism is clearly and directly against the best interests of citizens. Companies should be compelled to make products work well for a reasonable period of time. There are statutory warranties for hardware, so if you buy a Samsung phone and it stops working within a year they have to replace it.
The consumer law in Australia should cover it just the way it is, but try to enforce and no-one will sell anything here. Those statutory warranties are bare minimum, they don't cover what is actually required by law here in AU.
I think that we also need statutory warranties for software. If you buy a new commodity item and it needs an SSL update within 5 years then I think that the supplier should be compelled to provide it. I think that a good way of implementing that would be to have a higher tax rate for products that have no guarantee of security fixes (IE imports of small quantities). If the tax difference was $50 per item and Samsung was expecting to ship 1M items to Australia then it would be good business to offer such support.
They absolutely should be doing updates on at least the S3, if not also the S2 and them not doing so may well be one of the reasons that the S5 didn't sell anywhere near as well as expected! A.