[npodbielski]

> In other words, there was no clear way for Samsung to make money from Galaxy Upcycling. And for a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones per year, that's likely a death sentence for an internal project

How about good PR. This is what is problem with those big corporations: the only thing that matters is money.

[hamdingers]

Seems like a lack of creativity, plus painting themselves into a corner by promising unlocked bootloaders.

Samsung owns SmartThings, a smart home platform. They could've come up with a suite of apps for turning your phone into a SmartThings-connected camera, or motion detector, or remote control, or button panel, or a dashboard, etc. Either charge a little for the apps, or trust that sucking people into the SmartThings ecosystem will cause them to buy hubs and other devices.

Users might be more willing to upgrade their phone if they can turn the old one into a baby monitor vs getting scammed on a trade-in or letting it sit in a drawer.

[bigwheels]

Even good PR is an investment in the brand which can be profitable.

The real problem is the shortsightedness, where the top dogs only care about money coming in the next 3-12 months. Even this is more a reflection of the system that consistently produces companies which operate this way. Which is a reflection of..

[joe_mamba]

>How about good PR.

They already got that good PR when they made those announcements.

[npodbielski]

And more bad PR. I am not sure it was worth it.

[jajuuka]

Fine, I'm just a dumbass. Samsung BAD.

[themafia]

If you want to live in a binary world. Meanwhile for the rest of us "not good" isn't the same as "bad."

[titzer]

> Welcome to capitalism?

Well, judging from the tone of your comment, you said this without a hint of irony or larger awareness, as if just chucking things in a hole, environment and everything be damned, was just sort of inevitable.

> It's just not very practical to throw all that money and time away for such a small use case. It's a literal money pit. Throw money in and get nothing back.

Huh? Saving consumers money by reusing and repurposing perfectly good devices, save energy use, raw materials, distribution, and waste disposal and recycling of perfectly good devices. Those things save the economy and consumers money overall!

We get this not because of capitalism but because of growthism. We get this because big corporations gotta keep generating that profit, regardless of whether they have solved a problem or not. Gotta grow that market, gotta jack that stock.

[npodbielski]

You wrote that like there is no other way. Yes there is. For example I would not consider a job that would consist of writing a malware But I have conscience and doing something like that would make me uncomfortable. Even when I think about myself as more capitalist than socialist.