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Forced to upgrade

herman.bearblog.dev

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121–130 of 303 posts

Re: Forced to upgrade

#121

Post by immibis »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #112
okanat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is more about hardware / software bundling than the openness of the source code. Windows is as proprietary as it gets. I was able to upgrade my desktop PC from 2008 to Windows 10. It required removing quite a bit bloatware but it works. Actually, I have a negative example for FOSS for you. I have a laptop with an Nvidia GPU on it from 2012. I cannot use it under Linux since Linux world is terrible at API / ABI sta…

> Actually, I have a negative example for FOSS for you. I have a laptop with an Nvidia GPU on it from 2012. I cannot use it under Linux since Linux world is terrible at API / ABI stability. So Nvidia driver has stopped working. Your example of FOSS not working... is the proprietary nvidia driver breaking? Even though it would almost certainly work if your card were supported by the open source drivers?

The proprietary Nvidia driver works fine. Linux from this decade refuses to work with it. Linux broke it, not Nvidia.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#123

Post by frackintoaster »

pbmonster wrote: post #84
mplewis wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Security.

Nothing inherent makes security on 7 year old hardware any more difficult than on 2 year old hardware. Also, we're getting into the differences between upgrades (what OP said) and updates (the thing necessary to keep up with security) here. I'm having a really hard time coming up with an OS feature introduced in a full OS upgrade within the last 10 years that I actually want. I would have been perfectly content with…

This is.. not true. A lot of hardware change is involved in modern mobile device security. Apple has come a long way from the iPhone 7 in hardware security and no amount of patching software is going to introduce a new cryptographic coprocessor.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#124

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

Those rare metals are not gone, they are inside the discarded phones to be mined again.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#125

Post by frackintoaster »

Look, we live in a capitalist world. (Most of us)

Companies have a need to make money, for better or worse, that’s how it is. Companies like Apple have to balance the economic viability of maintaining developers on software - for them to keep being updated - with keeping users happy.

Modern smartphones are not analogous to gas cookers. They’re about 100 times more complex, with third party, hardware, software, security and economic interplay.

Reducing it to “My fridge worked for 20 years why doesn’t my iPhone?” is just a stupid argument. Your phone is not a banana.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#126

Post by putzdown »

The main message I take from this story is that a decent quorum of consumers want Apple to offer a smaller phone in each generation. The OP seems not to have minded having to upgrade eventually, just not to a “virtual tablet.” I’ve heard others express the same desire.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#128

Post by creole_wither »

Contortion wrote: post #118

Fairphone guarantees 8 years of updates for the Fairphone 5.

From looking at their website, that is 8 years of software updates. Not 8 years of Android version updates. Apple has released security updates for 10 year old devices such as iOS 12.5.7 which released in 2023 and runs on iPhone 5s.

Re: Forced to upgrade

#129

Post by abtinf »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #63
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…

I'm typing this on my 5-year old Samsung A30 that, aside from a screen crack I take full responsibility for, is still in perfect working conditions. I never encountered any app that refuses to install despite my device being stuck on Android 11. The only reason this sometimes happen is because of geofencing, or apps built for Pixel phones. I only started to look for acquiring a new device because telecom operators ar…

Just out of curiosity (I’m not familiar with the current state of android software support) does your phone still get security updates and, assuming it does, how much longer do you expect them to continue?

Re: Forced to upgrade

#130

Post by devops99 »

The older iPhones are nice products. It's a shame there are so many gaps in driver support for these devices. A lot of people would be happy to run something like GrapheneOS on them.
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