Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Forced to upgrade

herman.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 303 posts

Re: Forced to upgrade

#41

Post by solstice »

keiferski wrote: post #38

To play devil’s advocate here, I actually think iPhones have some of the best longevity and resale value, compared to virtually any other product or brand - except perhaps if we go back decades to appliances made near the middle of the century. The fact that a device can be perfectly usable for 5+ years is pretty good compared to most other things I find myself buying and replacing in less time. Otherwise I think the…

That could work (given sufficiently good build-out of the data network), but for the mid-term you'd still need to have a way to receive SMS for 2FA etc.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#42

Post by akie »

epistasis wrote: post #23
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste ( https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-... : ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to…

That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years. Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact…

Of course the tragedy is that we're doing neither.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#43

Post by ctenb »

This is one of the reasons I decided to buy a fairphone, because I noticed the effort that company was putting in supporting older devices with android updates, even though the hardware vendors like qualcomm don't support it anymore.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#44

Post by lifestyleguru »

The supply and demand optimizes for cost extraction, ignoring customer preferences, health, and sanity. So here we are sitting in our crossovers scrolling our phablets with unlimited data for tiktok and instagram.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#45

Post by keiferski »

solstice wrote: post #41
keiferski wrote: post #38

To play devil’s advocate here, I actually think iPhones have some of the best longevity and resale value, compared to virtually any other product or brand - except perhaps if we go back decades to appliances made near the middle of the century. The fact that a device can be perfectly usable for 5+ years is pretty good compared to most other things I find myself buying and replacing in less time. Otherwise I think the…

That could work (given sufficiently good build-out of the data network), but for the mid-term you'd still need to have a way to receive SMS for 2FA etc.

Google Voice or Twilio could solve this, I think?

Re: Forced to upgrade

#46

Post by conradfr »

epistasis wrote: post #23
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste ( https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-... : ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to…

That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years. Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact…

Does it takes into account all the things that a smartphone replaces, in both usage and hardware?

Re: Forced to upgrade

#47

Post by genericspammer »

The authors frustrations are shared by many.

I used an iPhone 6 way past its expiry date. It also became slower over time for no reason until it was essentially unusable.

Finally I bought a refurbished iPhone SE 2020 for 200 euros in 2022. It felt almost like going back to a brand new iPhone 6 in both performance and features.

I hope to keep it until the inevitable performance drop makes it annoyingly slow, then buy a refurbished iPhone SE 2022 and repeat.

After the SE 2022 becomes unusable there will be no good alternative left in the market for someone who only wants a small, simple phone without an abundance of stupid features, then I guess I’ll just stop using smartphones.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#48

Post by esskay »

Hard_Space wrote: post #4

This also counts for desktop Macs. Twice in the last 20 years I have had to explain to my elderly Dad that even though his expensive Mac could last another thirty years, it's now a paperweight, or something to be 'repurposed'. I have wondered sometimes if hardware manufacturers actively seek out significant road-mapped hardware changes (such as Intel>ARM, etc., in case of Apple) in order to keep sales rolling in and…

Yup my dad bought an iMac back in 2014. It was that one model that didn't support targeted display mode. It broke about a month back (looks like drive failure) but had been having tons of issues before this due to newer software dropping support.

He should be able to just buy a cheap mac mini second hand and plug it into that gorgious 5k imac display, but nope. Cant do that.

Apple just like every other company could not give less of a crap about ewaste. There is absolutely zero reason why they couldn't relax the limits on older hardware to allow it to be repurposed.

What's now going to happen in my dads case is he'll buy a cheap 4k monitor, probably a second hand mac mini and send the iMac to a charity for recycling.

The whole Intel -> ARM thing though was absolutely about performance and Intel's utterly awful processors holding them back. The forced upgrades were just a bonus for Apple.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#49

Post by thaumaturgy »

epistasis wrote: post #23
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste ( https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-... : ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to…

That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years. Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact…

Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity.

Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily.

Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#50

Post by objclxt »

esskay wrote: post #40
thefz wrote: post #34

Wasn't EU's right to repair law also mandating at least 5 years of updates? Just make 10. With all the money these companies make, they can dedicate some people to taking care of legacy hardware.

It's sad that we consider 5-10 years to be "legacy" in any way shape or form. It does seem to very much just be at the consumer level. We've still got servers chugging away in datacenters that are pushing 15 years old and still have several years of life left in them.

> It does seem to very much just be at the consumer level. We've still got servers chugging away in datacenters that are pushing 15 years old and still have several years of life left in them.

The datacenter is temperature controlled and the air is filtered. The server is locked in the rack and never moves. By comparison, your laptop or your phone go through hell on a daily basis.

Post reply on HN