This is actually a pretty common concern for businesses on dealing with whether and how to protect themselves when installing improvements, business-critical equipment, or other hard-to-move stuff on land or in a building without a long term lease in place.

The tenant deals with it by either building out a portable infrastructure to where they can move their business quickly if need be, or by protecting themselves legally to where the landlord can’t kick them out on a short notice, by negotiating a long term lease.

This one is the same author addressing this specific Mozilla release.

Yes, this has everything to do with AI, because this is an AI vendor locking out a customer from their ordinary workflow.

At the same time, this is a generalizable example not limited to AI, where any form of vendor lock-in on a critical business function becomes a potential point of failure when the vendor drops the customer or stops working. It’s true of a cloud provider, an email provider, an ISP, any software provider that can revoke access/authority, or even non-tech vendors like a landlord or a temp agency or an electric utility.

I think it’s worth being clear about the scope of the rating. iFixit has always been about repairability defined by parts availability, and its ratings consider software restrictions only to the point where it interferes with the user experience when replacing parts to restore things to the original performance.

Customizability (in software or otherwise) isn’t part of the score. Durability/longevity isn’t part of the score, either. Those are things that I want, too, but I can recognize those are outside the scope of what iFixit advocates for.

I do have some concerns about the partnerships creating a conflict of interest, but sometimes that feedback loop is helpful for improving the product, where the maintainer of a standard also has a consulting business in helping others meet that standard. Ideally there’s a wall between the two sides (advisors versus raters), but the mere fact that one company might do both things isn’t that big of a deal in itself.

Unintuitive locked down garbage that can’t do anything a PC can’t do for half the price.

From the user perspective, enterprise managed Windows is locked down, too, and somehow less reliable.

Most of the software engineers I know in FAANG and similar tier companies use Macbooks to program. Poke around a coffee shop in the bay area during a weekday and look around.

And personally, I switched to Mac about 15 years ago mainly because dependency management and the shell made more sense to me coming from Linux. Windows has always been trash, and most other non-Apple OEMs make the actual physical laptop experience worse (hinges, behavior on closing the lid, trackpad behavior and size, power management, display quality in both brightness and pixel density, webcam/audio behavior).

Jevon’s Paradox is that when there’s more of a resource to consume, humans will consume more resource rather than make the gains to use the resource better.

More specifically, it’s when an improvement in efficiency cause the underlying resource to be used more, because the efficiency reduces cost and then using that resource becomes even more economically attractive.

So when factories got more efficient at using coal in the 19th century, England saw a huge increase in coal demand, despite using less coal for any given task.