SoylentNews

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/openai-launches-chatgpt-with-search-taking-google-head-on/

One of the biggest bummers about the modern Internet has been the decline of Google Search. Once an essential part of using the web, it's now a shadow of its former self, full of SEO-fueled junk and AI-generated spam.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new feature of ChatGPT that could potentially replace Google Search for some people: an upgraded web search capability for its AI assistant that provides answers with source attribution during conversations.
[...]
Each search result in ChatGPT comes with a citation link, and users can click a "Sources" button beneath responses to view referenced materials in a sidebar that pops up beside the chat history.

The new search system runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, which OpenAI says it post-trained using synthetic data output from its o1-preview model.
[...]
ChatGPT with Search also helps OpenAI take advantage of its new publishing partnerships and reframe those media relationships into something beyond merely scraping web data to train its AI models, which caused legal trouble in the past.
[...]
As mentioned above, over the past few years, OpenAI has established new partnerships with major news organizations, collaborating with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media.
[...]
In a hands-on test of ChatGPT with Search, the new feature seemed to consistently pull relevant links from the web while answering our questions, but it wasn't perfect, returning a few errant sources here and there. It also sometimes provided irrelevant images that were shown beside some search results.
[...]
All these new avenues for ChatGPT to potentially prefer one website, source of information, company, brand, or shop brings up a big question: Will OpenAI offer preferential content placement for media partners or advertisers in the future?
[...]
In the future, OpenAI plans to add to the new search feature with custom answers for shopping and travel-related queries. The company also plans to use OpenAI's o1 series for deeper search capabilities and expand the search experience to Advanced Voice Mode and Canvas features.

The search function launches today for ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers through chatgpt.com and mobile apps. Enterprise and education users will gain access in the coming weeks, with a broader rollout to free users planned over several months.

owl writes:

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/column-live-nation-decision-will-force-companies-rethink-consumer-arbitration-2024-10-29/

Oct 29 (Reuters) - In a case against entertainment behemoth Live Nation (LYV.N), a U.S. appeals court has rejected a common corporate tactic to combat mass consumer arbitration and has cast doubt on whether companies can force consumers into consolidated arbitration protocols.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Monday that Live Nation, the parent company of Ticketmaster, cannot compel its customers to arbitrate antitrust claims because Live Nation's mandatory arbitration provisions were too unfair to be enforceable.

As my Reuters colleague Mike Scarcella reported, the appeals court concluded that the mass arbitration protocol offered by Live Nation's arbitration provider, New Era, featured rules that were "so dense, convoluted and internally contradictory to be borderline unintelligible." (New Era disputed that characterization, insisting that its rules are "objective [and] easy to understand.")

...

In a concurrence, VanDyke said flatly, "The Federal Arbitration Act just does not apply to the type of mass 'arbitration' contemplated by Live Nation's agreements."

That has to be a chilling sentence for companies relying on batch-and-bellwether protocols to mitigate the time and expense of defending thousands of arbitration demands.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun might pick up one graviton every billion years. To snag one in a decade, another calculation has suggested, you’d have to park a Jupiter-size machine next to a neutron star. In short: not going to happen.

A new proposal overturns the conventional wisdom. Blending a modern understanding of ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves with developments in quantum technology, a group of physicists has devised a new way of detecting a graviton — or at least a quantum event closely associated with a graviton. The experiment would still be a herculean undertaking, but it could fit into the space of a modest laboratory and the span of a career.

[...] Currently, Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity attributes gravity to smooth curves in the space-time fabric. But a conclusive graviton detection would prove that gravity comes in the form of quantum particles, just like electromagnetism and the other fundamental forces. Most physicists believe that gravity does have a quantum side, and they’ve spent the better part of a century striving to determine its quantum rules. Nabbing a graviton would confirm that they’re on the right track.

But even if the experiment is relatively straightforward, the interpretation of what, exactly, a detection would prove is not. The simplest explanation of a positive result would be the existence of gravitons. But physicists have already found ways to interpret such a result without reference to gravitons at all.

[...] It’s hard to experimentally probe gravity because the force is extremely weak. You need huge masses — think planets — to significantly warp space-time and generate obvious gravitational attraction. By way of comparison, a credit card-size magnet will stick to your fridge. Electromagnetism is not a subtle force.

One way to study these forces is to disturb an object, then observe the ripples that travel outward as a consequence. Shake a charged particle, and it will create waves of light. Disturb a massive object, and it will emit gravitational waves. We pick up light waves with our eyeballs, but gravitational waves are another matter. It took decades of effort and the construction of the colossal, miles-long detectors that make up the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) to first sense a rumble in space-time in 2015 — one sent out by a collision between distant black holes.

[...] It would take another conceptual leap to go from a gravitational wave detector to a detector for individual gravitons. In the recent paper, which appeared in Nature Communications in August, Pikovski and his co-authors outlined how the graviton detector would work.

fliptop writes:

Citing various market and macroeconomic headwinds, Electric vehicle startup Fisker Group, a luxury sports car maker, filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy and shut down all operations to restructure its business and seek funding from investors:

Fisker had begun deliveries of its Ocean battery-electric crossover SUV in 2023 to compete with Tesla, but by February 2024 the vehicle began having various problems. Some of the problems included suddenly losing power, loss of brake power, defective key fobs, and front hoods opening at high speeds. The vehicle also had difficulties with gear shifting.

Fisker warned that it may not have enough money to survive the next 12 months in its fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb. 29. Other problems arose as in June, former Fisker employees revealed the company had no plan to stockpile spare parts for Ocean vehicle repairs.

The spare parts problem led technicians and employees to dismantle perfectly good cars to provide spare parts.

Previously:

• Bankrupt Fisker Says It Can't Migrate its EVs to a New Owner's Server (2024)
• Henrik Fisker Debuts EMotion EV at CES (2016)
• Fisker Automotive Comes Back Under New Name, Plans to Launch Electric Car (2016)

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Reddit's getting more popular:

In May 2023, Reddit announced that its API would no longer be free, signaling the demise of most third-party Reddit apps and the start of a new Reddit era. Reddit was always interested in making money, but the social media platform's drive to reach profitability intensified with its API rule changes, which was followed by it going public and other big moves. With Reddit reporting this week that it has finally turned its first profit, we can expect further evolution from Reddit, whether old-time Redditors like it or not.

In its fiscal Q4 2024 results announced on Tuesday [PDF], Reddit said that in the quarter ending on September 30, it made a profit of $29.9 million. This is significant growth from fiscal Q3 2024, when Reddit lost $7.4 million. Revenue, meanwhile, was up 68 percent year over year, going from $207.5 million to $384.4 million. Reddit is expecting $385 to $400 million in revenue for fiscal Q4.

[...] Of course, more users give ads sold on Reddit the chance to gain more eyeballs, something that can help drive ad sales. Reddit's ad revenue has grown alongside its daily user base. In Q3 2024, Reddit made $315.1 million in ad revenue, a 56 percent year-over-year increase.

Reddit has historically made the majority of its revenue from ad sales. Huffman has long claimed that Reddit started charging for its API in order to prevent big companies, like Google, from using Reddit content for free AI training. However, the high pricing killing third-party apps also fed Reddit's goals of getting users onto its native website and apps—where Reddit sells ads.

Reddit is expected to continue its aggressive ads push, including by exploring new ways to incorporate ads into the user experience. For example, Reddit has previously discussed exploring the addition of ads in Reddit search and in comments. It also added ads to conversation pages and made personalized ads mandatory this year.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Much of mathematics is driven by intuition, by a deep-rooted sense of what should be true. But sometimes instinct can lead a mathematician astray. Early evidence might not represent the bigger picture; a statement might seem obvious, only for some hidden subtlety to reveal itself.

Unexpectedly, three mathematicians have now shown that a well-known hypothesis in probability theory called the bunkbed conjecture falls into this category. The conjecture — which is about the different ways you can navigate the mathematical mazes called graphs when they’re stacked on top of each other like bunk beds — seemed natural, even self-evident. “Anything our brain tells us suggests the conjecture should be true,” said Maria Chudnovsky, a graph theorist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new work.

[...] In the mid-1980s, a Dutch physicist named Pieter Kasteleyn wanted to mathematically prove an assertion about how liquids flow throughout porous solids. His work led him to pose the bunkbed conjecture.

[...] The bunkbed conjecture says that the probability of finding the path on the bottom bunk is always greater than or equal to the probability of finding the path that jumps to the top bunk. It doesn’t matter what graph you start with, or how many vertical posts you draw between the bunks, or which starting and ending vertices you choose.

For decades, mathematicians thought this had to be true. Their intuition told them that moving around on just one bunk should be easier than moving between two — that the extra vertical jump required to get from the lower to the upper bunk should significantly limit the number of available paths.

[...] In June, Lawrence Hollom of the University of Cambridge disproved a version of the bunkbed problem in a different context. Instead of dealing with graphs, this formulation of the conjecture asked about objects called hypergraphs. In a hypergraph, an edge is no longer defined as the connection between a pair of vertices, but rather as the connection between any number of vertices.

[...] In the meantime, Pak says, it’s clear that mathematicians need to engage in a more active discussion about the nature of mathematical proof. He and his colleagues ultimately didn’t have to rely on controversial computational methods; they were able to disprove the conjecture with total certainty. But as computer- and AI-based lines of attack become more common in mathematics research, some mathematicians are debating whether the field’s norms will eventually have to change. “It’s a philosophical question,” Alon said. “How do we view proofs that are only true with high probability?”

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Intel posted a $16.6 billion loss in the third quarter – the largest in the silicon veteran's history – as it booked more than $18 billion in restructuring and impairment related charges.

While the loss was obviously not what Intel wanted, revenues for the quarter came in at the upper end of forecasts at $13.3 billion – up four percent from last quarter, though still down six percent from last year.

Executives expect Intel to continue to rebound in the fourth quarter, forecasting revenues of between $13.3 and $14.3 billion – a decrease of 7.14 and 13.6 percent year over year. In spite of this, the prospect of another flat to positive quarter of sequential revenue growth was enough to send the embattled chipmaker's share price skyward.

Intel's share price surged by up to 15 percent in after-hours trading on what investors saw as a positive outlook. However the biz has fallen a long way from its glory days, and faces numerous challenges with respect to ongoing restructuring costs which are expected to challenge profitability again in the third quarter.

During the third quarter, Intel faced in excess of 18.5 billion dollars in charges associated in part with its plan to cut 10 billion in annual spending – announced amid mass layoffs last quarter.

As you might expect, cutting 15,000 staff by the end of the year will save Intel a boatload of cash in the future. But in the short term it must write many severance and early retirement checks.

According to CEO Pat Gelsinger, the bulk of the layoffs occurred during the quarter – but even this only accounted for $2.2 billion of the charges. Another $528 million of restructure-related costs were somewhat vaguely attributed to "non-cash charges."

The largest of the losses were instead driven by the decision to write off $9.9 billion worth of deferred tax assets accumulated over the past three years of losses, CFO David Zinsner explained.

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/11/microsoft-delays-rollout-of-the-windows-11-recall-feature-yet-again/

When Microsoft launched its Copilot+ AI PC initiative over the summer, one of the flagship features was Recall, a feature that would log months' worth of your PC usage, with the stated goal of helping you remember things you did and find them again. But if you've heard of Recall, it's probably because of the problems that surfaced in preview builds of Windows before the feature could launch: It stored all of its data in plaintext, and it was relatively trivial for other users on the PC (or for malicious software) to access the database and screenshots, potentially exposing huge amounts of user data.

[...] Microsoft has officially announced that the Recall preview is being delayed yet again and that it will begin rolling out to testers in December.

"We are committed to delivering a secure and trusted experience with Recall. To ensure we deliver on these important updates, we're taking additional time to refine the experience before previewing it with Windows Insiders," said Microsoft Windows Insider Senior Program Manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement provided to The Verge.

[...] When it does start to roll out, Recall will still require a Copilot+ PC, which gets some AI-related features not available to typical Windows 11 PCs. To meet the Copilot+ requirements, PCs must have at least 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, plus a neural processing unit (NPU) that can perform at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in":

A former jockey who was left paralyzed from the waist down after a horse riding accident was able to walk again thanks to a cutting-edge piece of robotic tech: a $100,000 ReWalk Personal exoskeleton.

When one of its small parts malfunctioned, however, the entire device stopped working. Desperate to gain his mobility back, he reached out to the manufacturer, Lifeward, for repairs. But it turned him away, claiming his exoskeleton was too old, 404 media reports.

"After 371,091 steps my exoskeleton is being retired after 10 years of unbelievable physical therapy," Michael Straight posted on Facebook earlier this month. "The reasons why it has stopped is a pathetic excuse for a bad company to try and make more money."

According to Straight, the issue was caused by a piece of wiring that had come loose from the battery that powered a wristwatch used to control the exoskeleton. This would cost peanuts for Lifeward to fix up, but it refused to service anything more than five years old, Straight said.

[...] As this infuriating case shows, advanced medical devices can change the lives of people living with severe disabilities — but the flipside is that they also make their owners dependent on the whims of the devices' manufacturers, who often operate in ruthless self-interest.

[...] That some of these manufacturers can come and go isn't the point, though. As 404 notes, the issue is the nefarious practices that many of them use to make their devices difficult to fix without their help.

[...] "This is the dystopian nightmare that we've kind of entered in, where the manufacturer perspective on products is that their responsibility completely ends when it hands it over to a customer," Nathan Proctor, head of the right to repair project at the US Public Interest Research Group, told 404. "That's not good enough for a device like this, but it's also the same thing we see up and down with every single product."

"People need to be able to fix things, there needs to be a plan in place," he added. "A $100,000 product you can only use as long as the battery lasts, that's enraging."

Original Submission

NotSanguine writes:

ProPublica is reporting on a number of ad networks posting fake/deceptive/scam ads on Meta properties.

Reporting highlights from TFA:

• Deceptive Political Ads: Eight deceptive advertising networks have placed over 160,000 election and social issues ads across more than 340 Facebook pages in English and Spanish.
• Harmed Users: Some of the people who clicked on ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges or lost health coverage, among other consequences.
• Spotty Enforcement: Meta removed some ads after first approving them, but it failed to catch others with similar or identical content — or to stop networks from launching new pages and ads.

More from TFA:

In December, the verified Facebook page of Adam Klotz, a Fox News meteorologist, started running strange video ads.

Some featured the distinctive voice of former President Donald Trump promising "$6,400 with your name on it, no payback required" just for clicking the ad and filling out a form.

In other ads with the same offer, President Joe Biden's well-known cadence assured viewers that "this isn't a loan with strings attached."

There was no free cash. The audio was generated by AI. People who clicked were taken to a form asking for their personal information, which was sold to telemarketers who could target them for legitimate offers — or scams.
[...]
Klotz's page had been co-opted by a sprawling ad account network that has operated on Facebook for years, churning out roughly 100,000 misleading election and social issues ads despite Meta's stated commitment to crack down on harmful content, according to an investigation and analysis by ProPublica and Columbia Journalism School's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as research by the Tech Transparency Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit that researches large tech platforms. The organizations combined data and shared their analyses. TTP's report was produced independently of ProPublica and Tow's investigation and was shared with ProPublica prior to publication.

The network, which uses the name Patriot Democracy on many of its ad accounts, is one of eight deceptive Meta advertising operations identified by ProPublica and Tow. These networks have collectively controlled more than 340 Facebook pages, as well as associated Instagram and Messenger accounts. Most were created by the advertising networks, with some pages masquerading as government entities. Others were verified pages of people with public roles, like Klotz, who had been hacked. The networks have placed more than 160,000 election and social issues ads on these pages in English and Spanish. Meta showed the ads to users nearly 900 million times across Facebook and Instagram.
[..]
Most of these networks are run by lead-generation companies, which gather and sell people's personal information. People who clicked on some of these ads were unwittingly signed up for monthly credit card charges, among many other schemes. Some, for example, were conned by an unscrupulous insurance agent into changing their Affordable Care Act health plans. While the agent earns a commission, the people who are scammed can lose their health insurance or face unexpected tax bills because of the switch.

The ads run by the networks employ tactics that Meta has banned, including the undisclosed use of deepfake audio and video of national political figures and promoting misleading claims about government programs to bait people into sharing personal information. Thousands of ads illegally displayed copies of state and county seals and the images of governors to trick users. "The State has recently approved that Illinois residents under the age of 89 may now qualify for up to $35,000 of Funeral Expense Insurance to cover any and all end-of-life expenses!" read one deceptive ad featuring a photo of Gov. JB Pritzker and the Illinois state seal.

There's much, much more, so please do read TFA.

What say you Soylentils? What's the solution to this sort of thing? My solution was to leave Facebook (in 2014) and never return.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

The Android 15 update didn’t include a battery charging limit feature that some had expected, but it got everyone talking about the best way to maximize your battery life. With seven-year update commitments from some Android phone manufacturers, the onus is now on us to stop our batteries from degrading too far.

What was most striking to us about the results of this poll was that less than 12% of you don’t use any battery management tricks at all. With battery degradation being a slow and subtle process, we assumed that many more people wouldn’t consider it. But hey, we should have given our tech-savvy readers more credit.

While it’s clear that you do indeed take battery health seriously, there isn’t a consensus amongst the responses on the best way to address it. Almost 33% of you follow the advice to only charge the battery to 80% full, while slightly more of you use adaptive charging. The latter approach intelligently slows the charging process based on usage patterns to reduce battery wear and extend its overall lifespan. This could include fast charging to around 80%, then slowly topping up from there when you’re not in a hurry to unplug. 7.6% of you suggest you use two or more of these tricks, which is a real dedication to getting the most out of your battery.

If you don’t use any battery management tricks and you’re keen to start now, it’s worth checking out the battery settings in your device. It only takes 30 seconds and could keep your battery healthy for another six months.

janrinok: I charge my 'phone when the battery is getting low, usually overnight, and in the morning it is 100%. I purchased my 'phone in 2016 and it is still using the original battery. It might (and I am not certain) just be beginning to lose a fraction of its charge over a 2 day period. Do you use a special charging cycle? How long does a battery normally last you? And do you replace the battery or just upgrade to the latest and greatest on the market?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Courts Agree That No One Should Have a Monopoly Over the Law. Congress Shouldn't Change That:

Some people just don't know how to take a hint. For more than a decade, giant standards development organizations (SDOs) have been fighting in courts around the country, trying use copyright law to control access to other laws. They claim that that they own the copyright in the text of some of the most important regulations in the country – the codes that protect product, building and environmental safety--and that they have the right to control access to those laws. And they keep losing because, it turns out, from New York, to Missouri, to the District of Columbia, judges understand that this is an absurd and undemocratic proposition.

They suffered their latest defeat in Pennsylvania, where a district court held that UpCodes, a company that has created a database of building codes – like the National Electrical Code--can include codes incorporated by reference into law. ASTM, a private organization that coordinated the development of some of those codes, insists that it retains copyright in them even after they have been adopted into law. Some courts, including the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, have rejected that theory outright, holding that standards lose copyright protection when they are incorporated into law. Others, like the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in a case EFF defended on behalf of Public.Resource.Org, have held that whether or not the legal status of the standards changes once they are incorporated into law, posting them online is a lawful fair use.

[...] We've seen similar rulings around the country, from California to New York to Missouri. Combined with two appellate rulings, these amount to a clear judicial consensus. And it turns out the sky has not fallen; SDOs continue to profit from their work, thanks in part to the volunteer labor of the experts who actually draft the standards and don't do it for the royalties. You would think the SDOs would learn their lesson, and turn their focus back to developing standards, not lawsuits.

upstart writes:

A brief, jargon-free explainer on the freer future of the social web:

Idealist nerds have a long history of giving terribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it goes with Fediverse, a portmanteau of "Federation" and "Universe," and the potential future of the social internet. But what does that mean?

Put simply, the Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to one another. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts.

There are a lot of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I'd like to avoid that, so here's my good faith attempt to explain what the Fediverse is in plain English.

First, though, let's talk about email.

Email is decentralized (and why that matters for the Fediverse)

Anyone with an email address can email anyone else. Gmail users, for example, aren't limited to talking with other Gmail users—they can send messages to Outlook users, Yahoo Mail users, and even people who are running their own email servers in their basement. Basically, anyone with an email address can write anyone else with an email address. To put it another way, email is decentralized.

There is no one company or institution that is in charge of email—there are many different email providers, all of which are compatible with each other. This is because email is an open protocol, one that anyone who wants to can build a service for.

The largest social media networks do not work this way right now. You can't follow an X user via Facebook, for example, or subscribe to a Reddit community from Tumblr. That's why all of those websites are full of screenshots from the other ones—people want to share posts from other sites but there's no good way to do so. That's a problem the Fediverse seeks to remedy.

The Fediverse is an attempt to make social networks more like email—that is, to allow users on different services to follow and interact with each other anywhere they want, without signing up for a million different accounts.

Frosty Piss writes:

It's been a month and a half since Darl McBride kicked the bucket (who?), and nary a mention in the press. But then, perhaps most Linux followers today where not alive or old enough to have experienced Mr. McBride's assault on Linux that could have very well ended it's life as Open Source. Of course I'm talking about way back in the Stone Age when SCO sued IBM, Red Hat, Novell, and others for ownership of the Linux kernel. Those of us who were around followed the now defuncted Groklaw for the latest dirt on this legal entanglement that is now for the most part forgotten.

From the wikipedia link:

McBride has been controversial in the information technology industry for his role as the CEO of SCO in asserting broad claims of intellectual property ownership of the various UNIX operating systems derivatives developed by IBM under a license originally granted by AT&T Corporation. Open source, free software and Linux developers and supporters, and the computer industry at large have been outspoken and highly critical and skeptical of McBride and SCO's claims in these areas.

Ty Mattingly, a former Novell Executive Vice President and co-worker of McBride was quoted as saying, "Congratulations. In a few short months you've dethroned Bill Gates as the most hated man in the industry."[6] McBride claimed he received death threats as a result of the SCO-IBM lawsuits, and had a package of worms mailed to his home, prompting him to carry a firearm and to employ multiple bodyguards.[4] During an interview, when asked about the popularity of the lawsuit against IBM, McBride answered: "We're either right or we're not. If we're wrong, we deserve people throwing rocks at us."[7]

Under McBride's leadership, SCO saw a surge in stock price from under $2 in March 2003 to over $20 just six months later. Following several adverse rulings issued by the United States District Court in Utah, SCO's stock value dropped to under $1. On April 27, 2007, NASDAQ served notice that the company would be delisted if SCO's stock price did not increase above $1 for a minimum of 10 consecutive days over the course of 180 business days, ending October 22, 2007.[8]

Original Submission

upstart writes:

These prices are a joke, right?

Google is finally selling refurbished Pixel phones on its own web store like many other phone makers do. This is great to see because the last thing this world needs is another 500 grams of e-waste in a landfill when it can be repaired and resold. It would be even better if Google were serious about it.

I love the idea of buying a refurbished phone. You get a warranty from the manufacturer and you can trust that anything wrong with the hardware was addressed by someone who knows what they are doing so it works like it is supposed to work. You don't get that when you buy a used phone, so a lot of folks will spend a little more for a phone that was made whole once returned.

There's a right way to do it, and then there is the way Google is doing it.

A look at the phones currently for sale highlights the problems with Google's strategy. We see the Pixel 6a, Pixel 6, Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 7, and Pixel 7 Pro. You might already notice the first issue: three of these five phones will not get updated to Android 16.

The Pixel 6 series phones will stop seeing platform updates in October 2024, or within days after this article was written. They will still get security updates until 2026, which I think are more important than version updates, but most people don't see it that way. Buying a "good as new" phone directly from Google and not having access to some of the new features we see just a year later with the new OS upgrade will sour a lot of buyers on the program.

[...] The other, and potentially bigger, problem is the prices. I wouldn't buy a refurbished phone from Google for the amount it is asking because it's too much.

You can buy a brand new Pixel 7 Pro cheaper than what Google is asking for a refurbished Pixel 6 Pro. Brand new, still in the wrapper, and a model year newer. Oh, and it will be updated to Android 16, too. If you want to spend $539 buy the Pixel 7 Pro for $399 and some good earbuds instead of spending it on a refurbished phone that's a year older.

It's easy to laugh and think this is just Google being Google again, but this is a serious problem. By pricing these phones so high, people aren't going to buy them. Google isn't going to keep them forever, and in the end, they end up being stripped of any material that's easy to get while the rest goes into a landfill.

[...] Google can afford to sell these refurbs dirt cheap and it gets even more eyeballs on Google's services so Google makes even more money selling ads. I don't know why the company won't do it, but it should.

Original Submission