It has everything to do with it. I live in a country that made greenwashing a lifestyle: Finland. Every shop around here advertises how responsible they are with their business. Meanwhile, the quality is often worse than that of brands derided as “fast fashion”. Marimekko* made national headlines some time ago when they licensed a pattern to IKEA, and the IKEA product turned out to be much better quality for a fraction of the price.

It’s very important to target fast and ultrafast fashion, and I’m glad France starts with influencers. The next step should be quality norms. Otherwise, you’re just pricing poor people out, while consumer behaviours and environmental impact stay the same, and owners of established brands get exponentially richer.

*If you don’t know Marimekko, suffice to say I saw Marimekko knockoffs in boutiques in France last week.

If they were introducing some groundbreaking tech I could agree, but they’re using premade components to make their own version of an existing product. And sure, it’s cheaper to manufacture at scale but 5x the going price is way too much. For comparison, Nothing Phone launched 4 years ago at $400. By that logic it should’ve cost ~$1500.

If there were a way that you could have 50% more attention for your kids, yourself, and the people around you, how much would that be worth for you? How much is your attention worth?

Following this logic they could just as well stick a $50 000 price tag in it. It still wouldn’t be defensible.

Manufacturing a phone in small numbers is not cheap

Sure, but is it so much more expensive than manufacturing a HMD 2660, which does more or less the same things and retails for approx. $100?

Let’s be for real, the whole Commodore thing nowadays is milking gen X nostalgia for all it’s worth. And I don’t think it’s worth that much.

I’m not entering the exploitation olympics here, feel free to disregard my argument if Eastern Europe doesn’t clear the suffering threshold in your book.

I’m Eastern European, my country was exploited by USSR until less than 40 years ago. My bad for getting excited about the prospect of being able to walk in old age, it’s all my fault for -checks notes- joining a freedom of trade and movement organisation

deleted by creator

They’re already calling LLMs “AI”, calling dumb terminals “smart glasses” doesn’t seem that much of a stretch. And I think they only scrapped it after unfavourable reporting, not because they couldn’t make it work. Not saying they could make it work well and not be racist in the first place, but when did that ever stop them?

Edit: they only scrapped the code from the consumer product, I’m sure they’ll keep developing it. Another report mentions an internal memo about releasing it during turmoil to minimise backlash. They’re going to push it sooner or later unless law is passed to prevent them.