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> a removable battery and OS updates for two years This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the pr

> a removable battery and OS updates for two years This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the production of electronics should not be understated. I have a Nexus 5 as a backup phone. It works just as well as my main handset. I know how to duck the G-surveillance and I'm able to keep it alive because I have the knowledge to install roms. Not everyone does. Personally, I much prefer Android over iOS. But when someone asks me what phone they should get I always tell them to buy an iPhone. This is one of the reasons why.

kllrnohj 7y ago
> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste should not be understated. Note it's 2 years of feature updates not 2 years and it turns into a brick. Everything will still work and you'll still get new apps and app updates for far longer than 2 years. Security updates go for longer, too.
- neilalexander 7y ago
  Given that Apple are still managing to roll out operating system updates to iPhones that are 5 years old, a potent question is why Google and Android device manufacturers are either unable or unwilling to attempt to do the same. Planned obsolescence isn't just an attack on your customers, it's also environmentally irresponsible.
  - kllrnohj 7y ago
    Apple does also cut features when they roll out those updates though. Not all iOS versions are equal. It is a shame Android's update story is bad, but realistically it also doesn't matter much. Non-enthusiasts tend to not even want major updates in the first place (it's a chore - especially if anything changed on them). It sucks for app developers a lot more than it matters to the majority consumer.
    - megaremote 7y ago
      > Apple does also cut features when they roll out those updates though. Not all iOS versions are equal. Only when the hardware does not support the features.
      - panpanna 7y ago
        It is widely established that Apple selectively disables features on previous generations to force people buy new ones. Example: with ios7 siri was disabled for some devices. Worked just fine on jailbroken devices.
  - penagwin 7y ago
    It's because of how updates work. A good overview is here [0] Basically for an android phone to get an update, Google, the Carrier, the Manufacturer, etc. all have to update the OS for that specific model, of which there are hundreds/thousands of models of phones. Apple doesn't let the carriers configure the OS, and is also the manufacturer. They also have only like a dozen models. So they basically get to skip all of the parts that slow down updating your IOS version. [0] https://www.xda-developers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/HTC-Anatomy-of-an-Android.jpg https://www.xda-developers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/HT...
    - bscphil 7y ago
      That's just an excuse. The Nexus 5X got updates directly from Google, but it was discontinued a year after it was released. ~1 year after the last 5X was sold, it received the last feature update (Android 8.1). ~2 years after the last 5X was sold, it received the last security update.
      - dgacmu 7y ago
        Google doesn't make the CPU or hardware components that need firmware updates. Apple has far more control.
        kalleboo 7y ago
        There's no way that hardware firmware on the CPU(?!) is what's holding back Android updates.
        ansible 7y ago
        Yes and no. If you're not getting updates from the chip vendor, you're going to have a hard time moving to later version of Linux, for example. It would cost a lot of money to port new software to the platform, and then the question is... who's going to pay for it? If everyone still using a Nexus 5X chips in $50 USD to fund continued development, then maybe that could continue. But it is easier at some point to just buy a new phone.
- sciurus 7y ago
  I checked https://www.android.com/one/ https://www.android.com/one/ and see monthly security updates are promised for three years.
  - panpanna 7y ago
    Note that this is the minimum requirement by contract. Samsung for example is still updating 4 year old note devices.
coryfklein 7y ago
> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the production of electronics should not be understated. Can you elaborate on this? Because I'm thinking of the amount of garbage I put in the bin over a period of two whole years, and the size of my phone, its packaging, chargers, cables, and manuals all together is just not even comparable. Even if you add in the environmental cost of the manufacturing I can't imagine it's even a drop in the bucket compared to other waste. I'm sure it is a good idea to optimize for waste in some respect, but cell phones seem like they must contribute such a minuscule relative amount so as to be safely ignored for now.
- staz 7y ago
  plenty or rare earth element https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/our-smartphone-addiction-is-costing-the-earth-1299378 https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobi... Also plenty of other elements in your smartphone that you wouldn't find in your normal bin
  - indecisive_user 7y ago
    That article meanders quite a bit, but it didn't convince me that the environmental impact from manufacturing phones is a huge concern, just that the price of some rare earth elements will increase as our current supply runs low, at which point we'll create new mines to increase the supply again. And how much of that impact is mitigated from recycling phones after you upgrade?
    - beowulfey 7y ago
      As with anything, any bit counts. It may not seem like it makes a huge difference but in general anything that mitigates the culture of consumerism helps prevent waste. Yes your own immediate impact on global waste is much higher from your kitchen trash than your device purchases. But people buying a new device every year, regardless of what they do with it after, encourages companies to keep producing these products at tremendous rates, which in turn results in far more environmental impacts due to everything that comes with it. It’s sometimes hard to see the effects beyond the scope of what we see on a day to day basis, but they are absolutely there at the societal level.
drusepth 7y ago
>This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years? As someone who buys a new phone around every 2-3 years, two years is perfect for me. I know the developers are focusing on making the update work as well as they can on just the last two years' worth of hardware, and not "wasting time" on making it work well on lesser/older hardware. Take "wasting time" here defined as selfishly as possible. If I'm buying a new phone every 2 years, any amount of development time that goes into making sure that update works on 3+-year-old phones is wasted on me, and explicitly means less development time was spent on features that are actually relevant to me. Honestly, I'd be just as happy if updates were guaranteed for just 1 year (though I'd probably just sit for a year without updates between upgrades), and I'd definitely be less happy if they were guaranteed for 5 years because I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.
- pgcj_poster 7y ago
  > I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward. In what ways do you feel that cell phones need to be pushed forward? Phones have been capable of doing everything I want and more for many years now. My biggest complaint is how quickly they become insecure.
- kalleboo 7y ago
  Do you just throw away your old phone? Mine become hand-me-downs. Until her birthday this year, my mother-in-law was using my old iPhone 5S, a 6-year-old phone which still runs the latest iOS. Now she got my wife's old iPhone 6S (4 years old), and my wife has my old iPhone X (3 years old). Throwing away a phone after 2 years is incredibly wasteful.
  - drusepth 7y ago
    I usually sell or give them away to friends that need them, with anything that isn't wanted sitting in reserve in case I ever need a backup phone (I always keep an extra one in my backpack in case my current driver breaks). The only phone/tablet I've actually thrown away was my 2012 Nexus 7 that finally completely died last year. Everything else finds a home somewhere. :)
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> I know how to duck the G-surveillance and I'm able to keep it alive because I have the knowledge to install roms. This is unconvincing. The Nexus 5 is prone to hardware failure. My ability to install roms didn't help at all when the phone stopped recognizing its own permanent storage.
mda 7y ago
Why do you throw it away after 2 years? It still gets security updates. Perfectly useable for more time.
pvinis 7y ago
What's interesting is that most people that buy the 140 dollar phones tend to keep them for 3 or 4 years, and people who buy the flagship 1000+ dollar phones, tend to keep them for 1 or 2 max.
- melling 7y ago
  Yeah, I’m getting a new iPhone every year on the Apple trade-in plan. Somehow I doubt that Apple just throws my phone away.
signal11 7y ago
This. 2 years (and 3 for security) is a joke.
mcovey 7y ago
My phone is going on 3 years. No removable battery, but I followed the iFixit guide and managed to replace the battery anyway a few months ago, since it had lost a lot of capacity. I intend to keep it for another 2-3 years at least.
rstuart4133 7y ago
> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? If it was a laptop of desktop definitely not. And initially I wasn't happy with 2 years on a mobile phone because I thought they would age like their bigger brethren. The reality is none of my mobile phones have aged gracefully. They've all slowed down to almost unusable some time after the 2 year mark, despite me fighting my way past the glue and tape to replace the non-replaceable battery. The really annoying part for me, a veteran embedded programmer who has rolled his own multitasking operating systems, is I have no idea what is causing this slowdown. Nothing I've done fixes it, up to and including including re-imaging the flash. With my latest phone I've come to accept that I'll be replacing it in 2 years. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P which cost me around $1200, which I planned to have for about 5 years (but didn't). This time around it is a Nokia 8.1 which cost me a tad over $400, so even on a 2 year vs 5 year replacement schedule it would cost me less than the 6P. The thing that did catch me by surprise is the Nokia 8.1 is a better phone than the 6P ever was - faster, better screen. Do things really move that fast in the mobile space? Maybe they do - everyone is adding bigger and bigger IPU's now. Compare that to desktop CPU's: I don't think they don't have IPU's yet. Which brings me back to my original point. That 5 year expectation was set by my experience with desktop's. It seems for all sorts of reasons that experience doesn't translate to mobile phones.

kllrnohj 7y ago

> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste should not be understated. Note it's 2 years of feature updates not 2 years and it turns into a brick. Everything will still work and you'll still get new apps and app updates for far longer than 2 years. Security updates go for longer, too.

neilalexander 7y ago
Given that Apple are still managing to roll out operating system updates to iPhones that are 5 years old, a potent question is why Google and Android device manufacturers are either unable or unwilling to attempt to do the same. Planned obsolescence isn't just an attack on your customers, it's also environmentally irresponsible.
- kllrnohj 7y ago
  Apple does also cut features when they roll out those updates though. Not all iOS versions are equal. It is a shame Android's update story is bad, but realistically it also doesn't matter much. Non-enthusiasts tend to not even want major updates in the first place (it's a chore - especially if anything changed on them). It sucks for app developers a lot more than it matters to the majority consumer.
  - megaremote 7y ago
    > Apple does also cut features when they roll out those updates though. Not all iOS versions are equal. Only when the hardware does not support the features.
    - panpanna 7y ago
      It is widely established that Apple selectively disables features on previous generations to force people buy new ones. Example: with ios7 siri was disabled for some devices. Worked just fine on jailbroken devices.
- penagwin 7y ago
  It's because of how updates work. A good overview is here [0] Basically for an android phone to get an update, Google, the Carrier, the Manufacturer, etc. all have to update the OS for that specific model, of which there are hundreds/thousands of models of phones. Apple doesn't let the carriers configure the OS, and is also the manufacturer. They also have only like a dozen models. So they basically get to skip all of the parts that slow down updating your IOS version. [0] https://www.xda-developers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/HTC-Anatomy-of-an-Android.jpg https://www.xda-developers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/HT...
  - bscphil 7y ago
    That's just an excuse. The Nexus 5X got updates directly from Google, but it was discontinued a year after it was released. ~1 year after the last 5X was sold, it received the last feature update (Android 8.1). ~2 years after the last 5X was sold, it received the last security update.
    - dgacmu 7y ago
      Google doesn't make the CPU or hardware components that need firmware updates. Apple has far more control.
      - kalleboo 7y ago
        There's no way that hardware firmware on the CPU(?!) is what's holding back Android updates.
        ansible 7y ago
        Yes and no. If you're not getting updates from the chip vendor, you're going to have a hard time moving to later version of Linux, for example. It would cost a lot of money to port new software to the platform, and then the question is... who's going to pay for it? If everyone still using a Nexus 5X chips in $50 USD to fund continued development, then maybe that could continue. But it is easier at some point to just buy a new phone.
sciurus 7y ago
I checked https://www.android.com/one/ https://www.android.com/one/ and see monthly security updates are promised for three years.
- panpanna 7y ago
  Note that this is the minimum requirement by contract. Samsung for example is still updating 4 year old note devices.

coryfklein 7y ago

> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the production of electronics should not be understated. Can you elaborate on this? Because I'm thinking of the amount of garbage I put in the bin over a period of two whole years, and the size of my phone, its packaging, chargers, cables, and manuals all together is just not even comparable. Even if you add in the environmental cost of the manufacturing I can't imagine it's even a drop in the bucket compared to other waste. I'm sure it is a good idea to optimize for waste in some respect, but cell phones seem like they must contribute such a minuscule relative amount so as to be safely ignored for now.

staz 7y ago
plenty or rare earth element https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/our-smartphone-addiction-is-costing-the-earth-1299378 https://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobi... Also plenty of other elements in your smartphone that you wouldn't find in your normal bin
- indecisive_user 7y ago
  That article meanders quite a bit, but it didn't convince me that the environmental impact from manufacturing phones is a huge concern, just that the price of some rare earth elements will increase as our current supply runs low, at which point we'll create new mines to increase the supply again. And how much of that impact is mitigated from recycling phones after you upgrade?
  - beowulfey 7y ago
    As with anything, any bit counts. It may not seem like it makes a huge difference but in general anything that mitigates the culture of consumerism helps prevent waste. Yes your own immediate impact on global waste is much higher from your kitchen trash than your device purchases. But people buying a new device every year, regardless of what they do with it after, encourages companies to keep producing these products at tremendous rates, which in turn results in far more environmental impacts due to everything that comes with it. It’s sometimes hard to see the effects beyond the scope of what we see on a day to day basis, but they are absolutely there at the societal level.

drusepth 7y ago

>This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years? As someone who buys a new phone around every 2-3 years, two years is perfect for me. I know the developers are focusing on making the update work as well as they can on just the last two years' worth of hardware, and not "wasting time" on making it work well on lesser/older hardware. Take "wasting time" here defined as selfishly as possible. If I'm buying a new phone every 2 years, any amount of development time that goes into making sure that update works on 3+-year-old phones is wasted on me, and explicitly means less development time was spent on features that are actually relevant to me. Honestly, I'd be just as happy if updates were guaranteed for just 1 year (though I'd probably just sit for a year without updates between upgrades), and I'd definitely be less happy if they were guaranteed for 5 years because I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.

pgcj_poster 7y ago
> I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward. In what ways do you feel that cell phones need to be pushed forward? Phones have been capable of doing everything I want and more for many years now. My biggest complaint is how quickly they become insecure.
kalleboo 7y ago
Do you just throw away your old phone? Mine become hand-me-downs. Until her birthday this year, my mother-in-law was using my old iPhone 5S, a 6-year-old phone which still runs the latest iOS. Now she got my wife's old iPhone 6S (4 years old), and my wife has my old iPhone X (3 years old). Throwing away a phone after 2 years is incredibly wasteful.
- drusepth 7y ago
  I usually sell or give them away to friends that need them, with anything that isn't wanted sitting in reserve in case I ever need a backup phone (I always keep an extra one in my backpack in case my current driver breaks). The only phone/tablet I've actually thrown away was my 2012 Nexus 7 that finally completely died last year. Everything else finds a home somewhere. :)

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> I know how to duck the G-surveillance and I'm able to keep it alive because I have the knowledge to install roms. This is unconvincing. The Nexus 5 is prone to hardware failure. My ability to install roms didn't help at all when the phone stopped recognizing its own permanent storage.

mda 7y ago

Why do you throw it away after 2 years? It still gets security updates. Perfectly useable for more time.

pvinis 7y ago

What's interesting is that most people that buy the 140 dollar phones tend to keep them for 3 or 4 years, and people who buy the flagship 1000+ dollar phones, tend to keep them for 1 or 2 max.

melling 7y ago
Yeah, I’m getting a new iPhone every year on the Apple trade-in plan. Somehow I doubt that Apple just throws my phone away.

signal11 7y ago

This. 2 years (and 3 for security) is a joke.

mcovey 7y ago

My phone is going on 3 years. No removable battery, but I followed the iFixit guide and managed to replace the battery anyway a few months ago, since it had lost a lot of capacity. I intend to keep it for another 2-3 years at least.

rstuart4133 7y ago

> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? If it was a laptop of desktop definitely not. And initially I wasn't happy with 2 years on a mobile phone because I thought they would age like their bigger brethren. The reality is none of my mobile phones have aged gracefully. They've all slowed down to almost unusable some time after the 2 year mark, despite me fighting my way past the glue and tape to replace the non-replaceable battery. The really annoying part for me, a veteran embedded programmer who has rolled his own multitasking operating systems, is I have no idea what is causing this slowdown. Nothing I've done fixes it, up to and including including re-imaging the flash. With my latest phone I've come to accept that I'll be replacing it in 2 years. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P which cost me around $1200, which I planned to have for about 5 years (but didn't). This time around it is a Nokia 8.1 which cost me a tad over $400, so even on a 2 year vs 5 year replacement schedule it would cost me less than the 6P. The thing that did catch me by surprise is the Nokia 8.1 is a better phone than the 6P ever was - faster, better screen. Do things really move that fast in the mobile space? Maybe they do - everyone is adding bigger and bigger IPU's now. Compare that to desktop CPU's: I don't think they don't have IPU's yet. Which brings me back to my original point. That 5 year expectation was set by my experience with desktop's. It seems for all sorts of reasons that experience doesn't translate to mobile phones.