Very convenient for them and also easy to accomplish by buying the cheapest parts. It's probably eMMC-based and writing a logfile constantly. Source: every Android that has ever died on me in this exact way (four and counting)
It's been a big pain for Tesla as well, where their tiny 8GB emmc on the center screen would fail since they logged to it too much... 134,000 vehicles recalled eventually after they denied it was an issue.
Jesus Christ are they amateurs? These are steel boxes on wheels and we're dealing with the same issues as shitty 200 dollars android tablets from 10 years ago.
That's because all who gets hired at these hyper-fast startups are fresh graduates who can do leetcode by heart.
The people who have been in the field for a decade or more can't be arsed putting up with all that and so you get stupid issues which were solved years ago but the devs were not aware of them.
That affects the infotainment computer only so driving is unaffected. You just wont be able to check your speed etc. But yeah, it's way too common of a mistake.
I don't know how their cars' UI is designed (and I hope I never have to) but if it's the only way to determine car speed or battery capacity, then this goes well beyond infotainment. No wonder they were forced to do a recall.
I recently had to fix the radio in my car for the same reason. Pioneer installed the firmware onto a cheap SD card that they have hidden inside the radio and requires disassembly to replace. Of course they don't offer the original firmware anywhere, luckily someone online has backed it up and I found the file on reddit.
With bottom-of-the-barrel (and/or "value add") IoT garbage, hardware suppliers are a commodity, and under competitive pressure, the winners will be ones that can make cheapest hardware that just about outlasts a typical warranty period of their customers' products. Shorter-lived parts will not bring repeat business; longer-lived parts will get value-optimized further. Failing just after warranty period is Just Right.
Depending on the particular consumer group, this could also backfire in the long term. With consumer warranty being ridiculously short. They will increasingly notice the pattern, that devices from brand X always brick shortly after warranty is over. And maybe moving to more trusting, but pricey brands.
Unfortunately, there are almost no "pricey brands" left that serve the middle range of price/quality. Most of them sold out to or just became replaced by bottom-of-the-barrel shit sellers, that are happy to continuously cycle through dozens of fly-by-night brands. It's still possible to get quality work done, but that's one of the few very premium brands and/or bespoke work; if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
(Just look at Amazon marketplace if you think I’m exaggerating.)
Customers have been "noticing" this pattern for couple decades now; it's not just in tech, but everywhere across the board - from foodstuffs, through appliances, sports equipment, clothing, hygiene, all the way to computing. Unfortunately, this is a pattern in the same sense a tsunami is - you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
Depends. For some product lines there's the "commercial grade" stuff available - for TVs, look into Digital Signage product lines and add some sort of TV stick (or an rpi) to them for the brains, for power tools look at what the tradespeople use (it's probably Bosch blue series, Makita or DeWalt), for kitchen equipment ask your nearest restaurant. For computing, I'd go to Apple (if your ecosystem supports it), Lenovo/Dell/HPs business line stuff (you don't need to buy the next day on-site package, but you want the models that do have that as an option because that's the ones that are both made for easy repair and have better components in the first place) or Framework. You pay quite the hefty premium over Chinesium stuff, but it's worth it.
Only thing I'd stay far away from if you're not trained on how to use them is cleaning supplies of all kinds, hair and body shampoo as the commercial ones are way stronger concentrated and you can do serious damage to your (or your loved ones) bodies if you, say, leave them on too long.
> you notice the wave is growing and about to flood everything around you, but there's fuck all you can do about it.
In terms of online shopping, if the distributor cooperates with the consumer then there is something to do about it.
One of the largest Swiss online shop started to share warranty statistics of all products. That information is quite useful to avoid the cheap and soon to break stuff. Of course it's not perfect, since it only tracks faults within the 2 year warranty period. But it provides a proxy signal for quality. But maybe that only works in smaller markets with less incentives to game the statistics.
I think its worse than that because they don't actually have to log so much. This is choice a developer made, but it would cost nothing (except salary for competent staff) to make the correct choice.
SDs and eMMC also usually have the same feature as the famous IBM “DeathStar” HDDs from the 00's: the thing gets completely hosed when it loses power when write is in progress.
I do not have exact statistics but I believe that this is the most common failure mode of SD cards in embedded systems that we supply (but a friend who works for certain ARM and PowerPC SoC vendor told me that he has statistics that disprove my theory, so take that with a grain of salt).
I recently had an otherwise perfectly fine eMMC-based Samsung phone degraded to unusable floppy disk speeds.
My guess is that their "RAM Plus" feature (aka swap) combined with the memory hungry modern android apps turned out to be a nasty timebomb. Which has or still is bricking millions of smartphones after a few years of usage.
Sounds like fixing that would be really bad for Samsung’s bottom line. Higher cost of materials initially, less frequent upgrades, and only a very small subset of super technical users even realize what the problem is.
That's where the wear levelling comes in, still expose 8GB of space to the host device, but internally have I dunno, twice that in cell capacity that you can move bits to as other cells wear out.
Its a shame mobile devices don't have a SMART equivalent, would be nice to have some warning as something approaches the end of its life.
You do, most SSD controllers already implement this. Have you ever wondered why most SSD's come in slightly odd sizes like 100GB instead of 128GB? The extra space is put aside and used for wear levelling and other maintenance tasks.
I also remember a guide a while ago on how to reprogram a SSD to operate in SLC mode instead of MLC. You lost disk capacity but gained a large performance boost and a reduced error rate.
If I remember correctly it's also about eMMC having a much shorter life than UFS or similar storage. Though yes, unnecessary logging isn't helpful either. (Quick post-googling edit: apparently both use NAND, it's more about wear leveling apparently that makes the differences.)
