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Any component could theoretically cause someone to want to upgrade their phone, but in practice, some would be more frequent driving factors than others. Have y

Any component could theoretically cause someone to want to upgrade their phone, but in practice, some would be more frequent driving factors than others. Have you done market research to identify these? If you were to make only those replaceable, you'd derive much of the benefit, but only incur some of the cost. A phone with only some modular parts would hopefully be not as thick as one with all parts modular. You'd have fewer random bugs, since there are fewer combinations. Regarding software updates, that would be taken care of by a phone made by Google, like Nexus. Concretely, how much thicker would the Pixel be if the camera were replaceable? 1mm? I'd take that tradeoff, particularly since the additional mm of thickness would result in better battery life.

rincebrain 10y ago
I do work for Google, but not on anything phone-related, and have no more information about what goes into phone design decisions than most others randomly sampled on HN. Consequently, no, I have no market data on what drives phone replacement, though my own limited circle of personal experience suggests either catastrophic failure or a threshold of the device performing unusably poorly as the most common reasons, more than wanting a shiny upgrade. The phone would probably be more than 1mm thicker in order to accommodate a sturdy mount for the modular thing to slot into alone, let alone whatever additional wiring overhead might be involved for having enough bandwidth to speak arbitrary optical device protocols encapsulated in some standard - and then you might have a failure as version 1.x can only speak up to 2K resolution, 2.x 4K, and so on, so you might end up needing a phone upgrade _anyway_ to get that 4k camera. Yes, paying upfront for a device like the Pixel buys you X years of device updates, but there are plenty of people who can't afford to buy a phone for the upfront price all at once, even if it might offer cost savings on modular upgrades later. I might also take that tradeoff, but then, I prioritize durability in my phones over tiny size, since I have relatively large hands and a habit of breaking my phones.

rincebrain 10y ago

I do work for Google, but not on anything phone-related, and have no more information about what goes into phone design decisions than most others randomly sampled on HN. Consequently, no, I have no market data on what drives phone replacement, though my own limited circle of personal experience suggests either catastrophic failure or a threshold of the device performing unusably poorly as the most common reasons, more than wanting a shiny upgrade. The phone would probably be more than 1mm thicker in order to accommodate a sturdy mount for the modular thing to slot into alone, let alone whatever additional wiring overhead might be involved for having enough bandwidth to speak arbitrary optical device protocols encapsulated in some standard - and then you might have a failure as version 1.x can only speak up to 2K resolution, 2.x 4K, and so on, so you might end up needing a phone upgrade _anyway_ to get that 4k camera. Yes, paying upfront for a device like the Pixel buys you X years of device updates, but there are plenty of people who can't afford to buy a phone for the upfront price all at once, even if it might offer cost savings on modular upgrades later. I might also take that tradeoff, but then, I prioritize durability in my phones over tiny size, since I have relatively large hands and a habit of breaking my phones.