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These phones are also way cheaper than the iPhone5s was at its launch. If you pay $350 for your phone and replace it after 2 years, that seems to me to be bett

These phones are also way cheaper than the iPhone5s was at its launch. If you pay $350 for your phone and replace it after 2 years, that seems to me to be better than paying $700 for your phone and replacing it after 4 years?

leadingthenet 8y ago
Why? That's just consumerist thinking. With iOS 12, my 3 and a half year old phone works even better than when I bought it. Why create useless waste?
- aetherson 8y ago
  Because, for example, your 3.5 year old phone has a way worse camera than a modern phone. It doesn't have wireless charging. Its hardware has deficiencies that are noticeable even if the raw speed of the CPU is still fine.
- jsight 8y ago
  "consumerist thinking"? What other kind of thinking should a consumer have? And waste? My old Android phones are pretty useful even with marginally older software. None of them have non-patched remote execution bugs that would make them risky, thanks to the fact that some of the more risk prone components (built in browser, play services, etc) get updated independently from the OS.
thebruce87m 8y ago
What are the resale values in your example?
- aetherson 8y ago
  Not very much. The resale value of a 4 year old iPhone is sub $100. Even if you get literally $0 for a 2 year old Android, you aren't changing the cost calculations very significantly.
JustSomeNobody 8y ago
That's just a lot of waste. Cause you know most people aren't going to find a way to recycle those old phones.
- aetherson 8y ago
  I don't think that +/- 1 more phone per person per two years is a terribly big deal in the grand scheme of things.
  - GijsjanB 8y ago
    You'd be mistaken. That would be a lot of phones and hence a lot of (rare) metals being delved. Sadly, even something as precious as a mobile phone is a throw away product nowadays. I have no solution, it's us, consumers, who are doing this. But please don't pretend it doesn't matter. Maybe, just maybe, if we could innovate on the recycling of our old phones, it would matter less.
    - aetherson 8y ago
      How about you quantify how much of an increase in waste it would be? My prior is that almost all appeals to waste conservation fall apart when you examine them in depth.
      - GijsjanB 8y ago
        Ok, shooting from the waist. Say on average people use their phone 3 years. Say, we could stretch that to 4 years. Roughly 2/3 of the world population owns a phone, that's 5 billion phones. That means we would save 5 billion phones every 12 years, or: more than 400 million phones every year. I love innovation as much as the next guy/gal, but getting all those products to 7.5 billion people is probably not (yet) sustainable for our planet. What if we could make (in this case mobile phone) producers (partly) responsible for the waste disposal/recycling of their products?
        8y ago

leadingthenet 8y ago

Why? That's just consumerist thinking. With iOS 12, my 3 and a half year old phone works even better than when I bought it. Why create useless waste?

aetherson 8y ago
Because, for example, your 3.5 year old phone has a way worse camera than a modern phone. It doesn't have wireless charging. Its hardware has deficiencies that are noticeable even if the raw speed of the CPU is still fine.
jsight 8y ago
"consumerist thinking"? What other kind of thinking should a consumer have? And waste? My old Android phones are pretty useful even with marginally older software. None of them have non-patched remote execution bugs that would make them risky, thanks to the fact that some of the more risk prone components (built in browser, play services, etc) get updated independently from the OS.

thebruce87m 8y ago

What are the resale values in your example?

aetherson 8y ago
Not very much. The resale value of a 4 year old iPhone is sub $100. Even if you get literally $0 for a 2 year old Android, you aren't changing the cost calculations very significantly.

JustSomeNobody 8y ago

That's just a lot of waste. Cause you know most people aren't going to find a way to recycle those old phones.

aetherson 8y ago
I don't think that +/- 1 more phone per person per two years is a terribly big deal in the grand scheme of things.
- GijsjanB 8y ago
  You'd be mistaken. That would be a lot of phones and hence a lot of (rare) metals being delved. Sadly, even something as precious as a mobile phone is a throw away product nowadays. I have no solution, it's us, consumers, who are doing this. But please don't pretend it doesn't matter. Maybe, just maybe, if we could innovate on the recycling of our old phones, it would matter less.
  - aetherson 8y ago
    How about you quantify how much of an increase in waste it would be? My prior is that almost all appeals to waste conservation fall apart when you examine them in depth.
    - GijsjanB 8y ago
      Ok, shooting from the waist. Say on average people use their phone 3 years. Say, we could stretch that to 4 years. Roughly 2/3 of the world population owns a phone, that's 5 billion phones. That means we would save 5 billion phones every 12 years, or: more than 400 million phones every year. I love innovation as much as the next guy/gal, but getting all those products to 7.5 billion people is probably not (yet) sustainable for our planet. What if we could make (in this case mobile phone) producers (partly) responsible for the waste disposal/recycling of their products?
      - 8y ago