4 ms·

quite the pedantic answer. lets interpret "within 5 years" as < 6 years (give or take): Now pick an IPhone 4 and good luck with installing/updating anything in

quite the pedantic answer. lets interpret "within 5 years" as < 6 years (give or take): Now pick an IPhone 4 and good luck with installing/updating anything in ios 7.

logicallee 9y ago
The millions of people using iPhone 4's and the price of same on used market show they're far from "unusable." For a non-durable consumer good, the difference between 5 and 8 years (i.e. 1.6x useable lifetime) is hardly "pedantic". Would you say there isn't much difference between a 15 and 24 year mortgage in terms of length of commitment? A phone might be the second largest personal investment many lower-income people make in any object, and it matters at what point it becomes literally unusable.
- user5994461 9y ago
  They are unusable or will be very soon. Old applications refuse to start, the vendor blocks the old version or retired the remote API. New applications don't support older phones, they can't be installed. Batteries die. Screens are broken. Spare parts stop being available after a while. A phone has a life expectancy around 5 years, top.
  - logicallee 9y ago
    I don't dispute anything you've said. We'e just going to have to different definitions of 'unusable, no matter what'.
- CRConrad 9y ago
  No, in the context of real luxury goods, that's still not significant: Compared to a thirty-year-old purse, a seventy-year-old watch, or a three-hundred-year-old piece of jewellery, there is no difference between a five- or an eight-year lifespan of a phone: They're both "flimsy shit; here today, gone tomorrow" in that perspective. Also, a phone will hardly ever be _the_ "second largest personal investment many lower-income people make in any object" -- given how ephemeral the phone's service life is, if those people live past thirty or so, it'll have to be one of several successive such investments. Which is precisely the point: If phones weren't such flimsy pieces of crap, it might be. (Oops, sorry, seems I'm full-on channelling Pirsig here...) But no, BTW, actually I don't see all that much of a difference between a 15-yr mortgage and a 24-yr one. If you get to live your Biblically allotted three-score-and-ten (or more), then they're both "a substantial chunk" of your life. Depending on how a lot of other shit goes -- do you win the lottery, get cancer, have one kid or six...? -- one could be better, or the other. The difference in runtime isn't all that significant. Same thing, only in reverse, with your phone lifetimes: Five years isn't all that different from eight, in that both are rather equally IN-significant chunks of your life.

quite the pedantic answer. lets interpret "within 5 years" as < 6 years (give or take): Now pick an IPhone 4 and good luck with installing/updating anything in ios 7.

logicallee 9y ago

The millions of people using iPhone 4's and the price of same on used market show they're far from "unusable." For a non-durable consumer good, the difference between 5 and 8 years (i.e. 1.6x useable lifetime) is hardly "pedantic". Would you say there isn't much difference between a 15 and 24 year mortgage in terms of length of commitment? A phone might be the second largest personal investment many lower-income people make in any object, and it matters at what point it becomes literally unusable.

user5994461 9y ago
They are unusable or will be very soon. Old applications refuse to start, the vendor blocks the old version or retired the remote API. New applications don't support older phones, they can't be installed. Batteries die. Screens are broken. Spare parts stop being available after a while. A phone has a life expectancy around 5 years, top.
- logicallee 9y ago
  I don't dispute anything you've said. We'e just going to have to different definitions of 'unusable, no matter what'.
CRConrad 9y ago
No, in the context of real luxury goods, that's still not significant: Compared to a thirty-year-old purse, a seventy-year-old watch, or a three-hundred-year-old piece of jewellery, there is no difference between a five- or an eight-year lifespan of a phone: They're both "flimsy shit; here today, gone tomorrow" in that perspective. Also, a phone will hardly ever be _the_ "second largest personal investment many lower-income people make in any object" -- given how ephemeral the phone's service life is, if those people live past thirty or so, it'll have to be one of several successive such investments. Which is precisely the point: If phones weren't such flimsy pieces of crap, it might be. (Oops, sorry, seems I'm full-on channelling Pirsig here...) But no, BTW, actually I don't see all that much of a difference between a 15-yr mortgage and a 24-yr one. If you get to live your Biblically allotted three-score-and-ten (or more), then they're both "a substantial chunk" of your life. Depending on how a lot of other shit goes -- do you win the lottery, get cancer, have one kid or six...? -- one could be better, or the other. The difference in runtime isn't all that significant. Same thing, only in reverse, with your phone lifetimes: Five years isn't all that different from eight, in that both are rather equally IN-significant chunks of your life.