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I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

kooslooijesteijn.net

151–160 of 300 posts

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#151

If they want to use an old phone, they can just stop updating their apps and not installing new apps. I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things. I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort so that I can run their apps on my old device. It is not just the overhead of supporting multiple different OS versions with different technologies, it i…

I wonder if you could run modern Vim/Emacs or if even they are too resource hungry by now.

Vanilla Vim and Emacs are pretty small by today standards. They can run everywhere. Emacs was born text only, BTW. If you start turning on language servers, that becomes the larger part of the editor and the actual editor is just a small fraction of the total.

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#152
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still use my OnePlus 5 which is now (almost) 5 years old! It has 8GB of memory with Android 13 and a custom ROM. It's still faster than some phones that are released today. I agree though that some apps are extremely resource intensive for the sometimes seemingly things they have to do.

Funny. I'm still on a OnePlus 6 and I see similar bizarre freezes as OP when I open the photo gallery. Or just when starting the camera often I have to wait 15-20s before the phone realizes that I have pictures. Sometimes when swiping through the gallery it will become excessively slow and stop reacting to panning / swiping / zooming. It's what is driving me close to grabbing a new phone at some point this year.

OnePlus 6T here and finally thinking it's time to step up. My previous phone was the OnePlus 2T so seems right to go up to the 10T now and do every 4 versions.

I've not had anything quite that drastic, but there are definitely a few small niggles I think I'll notice once they're not there. Main reason I think I'll upgrade is the usb port is becoming quite sensitive, it's 50/50 if it likes a particular cable now

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#153
post #120

I've mentioned this on here before, but my otherwise perfectly functional Pixel 3A has been out of security-patch support for nearly a year. It's disgusting honestly, my only options are to try to find some open source project keeping patches up to date, have my most important information on an unpatched device, or throw it in the trash.

LineageOS looks like your best bet: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sargo/

Honestly my best bet is to never buy an android again, which is what I will likely be doing.

(I know the original article I'm commenting on _is about iPhones_, but their phone is from 2016, and mine is from 2019, which from the perspective of losing support in 2022 is basically twice as good)

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#154

If they want to use an old phone, they can just stop updating their apps and not installing new apps. I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things. I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort so that I can run their apps on my old device. It is not just the overhead of supporting multiple different OS versions with different technologies, it i…

No, you cannot. Apple does not give you the freedom to use old versions of software. You can't downgrade your iOS version. You can only upgrade apps, and iOS only lets you download the latest available version of an app for your version of iOS. Need to do a device reset? If you have managed to keep any apps on old versions, you'll get upgraded now. And you can't even save APKs and sideload because of Apple's develope…

You don't need to downgrade iOS if you never update it. I agree with some apps becoming unusable because vendors force updating. This is similar to all other industries though (albeit faster-paced): I can't play PS5 games on my PS4, it is hard to get replacement parts for my 10 year old vacuum.

As I said, I'm still sporting a 11 year old iPad and using it for what it can do. It works for me. But I'm not expecting to use it like a modern iPad with modern software.

I agree with the device reset, that sucks. I never had to do that so I hadn't thought about this.

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#155
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ipad Mini2 owner here. Twitter doesn't work. Their app now shows _maybe_ 5% of tweets that my logged in user does. Safari is slow as crap on the website. Google voice still rings and shows notifications, but can't function because no updates are available and something in the api is broken. A non-zero number of sites show no-css warnings or just crash because it's an old JS interpreter. (HN though -- it's still rocki…

FWIW the $600 iPad Air is a wonderful device. It’s light, extremely fast, and the battery lasts forever compared to my older iPad and Samsung tablets. There’s a lot to be said about software longevity but the gains made by Apple’s newer CPU/SOCs is really impressive and noticeable day-to-day.

The mini is the _right_ size for me, and cell is a requirement. Default sized iPads look comically large, without even considering the pros.

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#157
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same issue with Android, FYI. We have a Ring with the app installed on an old phone that we use as the "household" phone. I was going to "upgrade" the household phone to be an old tablet which while newer and running a later version of Android, is still old. Can't install the Ring app on the newer tablet because it is too old. So we are stuck with the even older phone unless we buy something new.

Can you download and save the .apk file of the older app perhaps? This obviously would require you to know ahead of time what you were going to potentially use the device for in the future, which is ridiculous.

Yes, you can do that with the adb CLI.

Of course it's a viable solution only for an archivist/advanced users, not so for common users who just wish to keep their old device running smoothly.

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#158
Just get the battery replaced. You wrote this entire article without trying the cheap repair service they offer that normally restores it to 100% speed.

Try it then come back to us. 99% of the time its only slow because of battery throttling.

Re: I don’t want a new phone, but I’m probably buying one

#160
post #15

> Now you may think that it’s slow as mud in a pond. But, contrary to my experience with previous models, the iPhone SE actually got faster with iOS updates! ... > Starting some apps takes really long, like 10–20 seconds. ... > Some apps get slow and unresponsive Resetting my phone helped, but then within a week or two, the same apps are slow again. Rather contradictory article.

How do you even tell that some apps got faster. Apple probably just put in faster animations and the user thinks the app is fast because things move quicker while they wait for the app do to something.
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