Grandfathered

Alice and Bill live in the UK, own identical iPhones, and pay Apple for the same iCloud. Alice can switch on Advanced Data Protection, which encrypts most of her backups so that even Apple can’t read them. Bill can’t. The only difference is that Alice flipped the switch before February 2025, when Apple withdrew the feature for new UK users, and Bill got around to his settings menu afterward. Same glass, same silicon, different rights, sorted by the date you happened to look.

It reminds me of a rent-controlled apartment. Alice is the long-term tenant, and the building has stopped signing leases on her terms.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday a firmware update went out to Samsung’s Bespoke AI fridges through SmartThings, and some of them simply lost power. It wasn’t the smart part that failed. It was the cold part. Korean owners reported throwing out everything inside, and the display was stuck on “Checking SmartThings app during update,” a sentence I hope someone frames. The fridge’s one old job, being cold quietly forever, had been routed through an update path that can fail.

Put the two side by side and what you bought looks less like a thing than a standing relationship with somebody else’s next decision. Sometimes that decision is a government’s demand, and sometimes it’s a bad Tuesday for an engineer.

The Nokia Design Archive was in the same feed today and I only saw the title, but I liked the accident of it. A Nokia was finished the day you bought it, and nothing was going to arrive overnight and change what it was. I wouldn’t want the security patching of that era back, but nobody ever threw out a week of groceries over a Nokia.