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Forced to upgrade

herman.bearblog.dev

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Re: Forced to upgrade

#101

Post by HermanMartinus »

mrweasel wrote: post #24
Klonoar wrote: post #10

If you were on an iPhone 8 and wanted to upgrade but keep TouchID, the SE3 is still a fine device. It's possible I'll grab one before the SE4 just to hold on to TouchID a bit longer.

Upgrading to an iPhone 16 seems like a weird choice, given that the SE3 exists and it pretty much perfect. One argument that I can see it that the 16 is two years newer, and should get updates at least two year more. The price difference between the two phones however is much to big to justify getting the 16, unless there's some feature you really need.

Hey, author here. I decided on the 16 since its support lifetime started this year. If I'd gotten the SE (which I seriously considered since it has a more appealing form factor and touchID) I would only have a 4 year support lifetime as opposed to the full 6.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#102

Post by rini17 »

objclxt wrote: post #96
rini17 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself. Some people prefer to handle their devices with care and expect to get longevity in return.

> Some people prefer to handle their devices with care and expect to get longevity in return I guarantee you however carefully you are handling your device it is a world apart from a datacenter.

So? Refurbished ThinkPads with added 10+yr life expectance don't exist?

Re: Forced to upgrade

#103

Post by soerxpso »

The feeling of upgrading to something worse has always been my gripe. I think the last time a phone upgrade was purely positive for me was the switch from flippy phones to touchscreens. I don't need whatever new gimmick they're pushing that year, which usually just serves to get in the way. I certainly don't see how I benefit from this new "feature" where my old earbuds don't work without a dongle.

I use Android, and I agree that the Android ecosystem is worse about this, although neither option is acceptable. At this point I would pay more for a newly-manufactured model from 2010 than for the current model, if it could still support modern apps (even though it alludes me how the price keeps going up and not down).

Re: Forced to upgrade

#104

Post by bmicraft »

toast0 wrote: post #56
ciconia wrote: post #22

The real question, IMO, is why the need to release a new model every year? I think a lot of the churn of both hardware and software had nothing to do with technological progress, and everything to do with generating sales.

I don't think it's unreasonable to release new hardware every year. Apple is iterating on CPUs on an annual basis, and the new CPUs make for a better phone. It probably doesn't often make sense for a user to upgrade a single step (anymore), but if you're buying, the newer one has a better cpu, so it's worth considering. That'a separate from software churn though. Desktop OSes tend to support hardware for much longer…

> Apple does better than Android here

Google is supporting their current models until at least Q2 2031.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#105

Post by ozim »

mplewis wrote: post #64
bambax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> compared to most other things What other things? In my home most appliances are 15+ years old -- ovens, washing machines, even most Sonos things are around 20 years old. My Yamaha PF-P 100, bought in 1994, still works perfectly well. A smartphone is certainly more complex than a MIDI keyboard, but why would we need to upgrade the OS constantly.

Security.

Totally - like people don't have banking apps on their ovens or midi keyboards and are not keeping like half of their lives on a washing machine.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#106

Post by epistasis »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #49
epistasis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're definitely helping me prove my point, what are those other environmental impacts?

Let's imagine we can stop a single car from needing to be produced: that will dwarf all the mining impacts from probably thousands of phones! Cars are soooo much worse along any angle you can possibly imagine, yet people are misdirected from their use of cars to worrying about miniscuke rounding errors from their phones.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#107

Post by shepherdjerred »

IndrekR wrote: post #9
nextlevelwizard wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to be quite cynical if you see Apple's transition to ARM only as a ploy to get people to replace their Intel based machines. I am sure it is a nice bonus, but performance and efficiency just went through the roof. With yearly iPhone releases it is harder to justify upgrades. Like for author - upgrading from working phone to newer model while not gaining anything significant is stupid.

If the computer here is 20 years old, then we are talking about PowerPC based Mac. So two transitions over this devices lifetime: PowerPC -> Intel -> ARM.

Yeah, it was really strange when Apple migrated to the niche x86 architecture. Definitely a money grab.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#108

Post by toast0 »

lloeki wrote: post #92
toast0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's unreasonable to release new hardware every year. Apple is iterating on CPUs on an annual basis, and the new CPUs make for a better phone. It probably doesn't often make sense for a user to upgrade a single step (anymore), but if you're buying, the newer one has a better cpu, so it's worth considering. That'a separate from software churn though. Desktop OSes tend to support hardware for much longer…

> That'a separate from software churn though. I'd say that is correct. In a sense it's like part availability for cars or washing machines, and is similarly quite an outrageous situation too: around here law mandates 10y of parts availability; trouble is, reliability has progressively improved to the point that this becomes ludicrously insufficient. An example: I bought a car five years ago, it's well tended and show…

Windows 11 needs an SSE4.2, which limits to Intel Nehalem and newer (2008+), although I don't know what revision Atoms are needed, and AMD Bulldozer and newer (2011+).

You'll most likely need to bypass the cpu model check, and the tpm check for an older machine, but otherwise should work. Windows 10 support's more hardware, of course. I forget where Linux cuts off now, I think it's somewhere between a 486 and a Pentium Pro/II. Although I'd expect you do need a 64-bit CPU to run modern software.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#109

Post by epistasis »

akie wrote: post #42
epistasis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#110

Post by epistasis »

xorcist wrote: post #76
epistasis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is carbon emissions a suitable measurement of the environmental impact of electronic waste?

I am using it because it's the only impact that I see measured anywhere on electronic waste, and I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure it out on my own.

If you have a better quantification of species lost, of ecological diversity lost, of land lost, I would absolutely love to hear it, but I have not found anything better despite my research!

Also, the environmental and ecological damage that we are facing from global warming is so utterly massive in comparison to all other ecological damage that we do, that any other avoided damage needs to be placed in the context of halting global warming. Humans will survive climate change, and a lot of other species will survive too, but the dieoff of species from it is so shocking that focusing on the small amounts of mining for phones in comparison to the massive amounts of mining and e-waste from cars seems, well, at best misguided. And if I'm being more honest, I think it's actually quite harmful to environmental action to focus any attention on phones when action on cars is so much more impactful.

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