10 ms·

An interesting point of anecdata is that I didn't choose to upgrade my perfectly good three-year-old smartphone. I was forced to do so by the weight of compulso

An interesting point of anecdata is that I didn't choose to upgrade my perfectly good three-year-old smartphone. I was forced to do so by the weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. I'm sure the hardware would last several more years if the vendors would allow me to run the same software that was originally installed on it.

geodel 6y ago
> weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
If there is any individual guilt here, I don't think that would free you from it. Though I'm not very convinced of the individual guilt angle. It's a systemic problem of incentives (lack of good ones).
- forinti 6y ago
  Look at the countries that were labeled Sustainable Economies in recent years (Cuba and Ecuador). Is there a way to convince people in rich countries to live with the same level of consumption as these countries do? Can you even convince these countries to stay as they are?
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    > Cuba An island nation that the most powerful country in the world has been trying to cripple economically for half a century. > Ecuador A country with a smaller GDP than that majority of US states. These are probably not good or representative examples of how this would work writ large.
- foolmeonce 6y ago
  I think Linux is on the cusp of being up to the task, so not buying a device now with more open than average hardware is a decision worthy of remorse. But a few years ago it made little difference unless you considered yourself a psychic for forecasting future vendor behavior.
  - reificator 6y ago
    > I think Linux is on the cusp of being up to the task, so not buying a device now with more open than average hardware is a decision worthy of remorse. You're right, I think 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
    - foolmeonce 6y ago
      Linux is now the best desktop, despite no advances since 1998..
      - wyre 6y ago
        i3 came out in 2009..
    - chaosharmonic 6y ago
      Tbf Android is also starting to converge back toward mainline. AOSP is one patch away from booting off of it, assuming you have drivers. To that end, Google is beginning to move the ecosystem toward a generic device kernel, with a set of hardware interfaces for handling those drivers in a standard way across devices. This would enable custom kernels to target a range of compatible devices at once, which (among other things) would then simplify porting over alternative Linux-based OSes. Including the convergent ones we're starting to see pop up on way less impressive hardware.
abawany 6y ago
I wonder if things would change if the os updates were handled by a different vendor, i.e. a model where the phone makers sold hardware and os vendors sold installs/updates? Maybe if the motivations of phone makers were decoupled from the os vendors, then phones could be supported a while longer due to the os vendors desire to improve their profit?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Arubis 6y ago
  There’d need to be some fairly heavy regulation in place to keep the separate vendors from collaborating/colluding. Intel and Microsoft were perfectly happy to keep their shared customer base on a rapid, predictable upgrade path for about two decades. Granted, of course, the upgrades were _attractive_ so long as Moore’s Law held out.
- SilasX 6y ago
  So like Windows in the 90s? That was it’s own nightmare for gaming with random crashes and games not working.
  - phatfish 6y ago
    I think the OP means like Windows now. My laptop doesn't get Windows updates held back because Dell wants to sell me the latest model. Drivers are also much better with the original vendors version most likely working fine even if it's not on the laptop manufactures list of tested drivers. Desktops are effected even less.
forinti 6y ago
I only upgraded my phone recently because I couldn't get a new battery. Sure, the new one is better, but the old one did everything I wanted it to do.
- beenBoutIT 6y ago
  The funny thing is that cellphones have gotten slim to the point that adding replaceable batteries and upgradable RAM wouldn't make them ridiculously thick or heavy.
  - dTal 6y ago
    I don't believe a replaceable battery needs to make a phone any thicker or heavier. Just take anything that's glued now and secure it with machine screws instead. "Replaceable battery" isn't the same as "swappable in the field with no tools", and while that's nice to have, it's not necessary in order to forestall device obsolescence.
api 6y ago
Software bloating to consume all available space is a long-observed trend that has been called Eroom's law, for Moore's law backwards. What Moore's law giveth, Eroom's law taketh away. Here is what an 8-bit CPU with 64KiB of RAM could do in 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg Obviously this is far behind current UIs in areas like resolution and graphics, but it's not so strikingly far behind that it's unusable or unrecognizable. Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really? What would a quad-core 2ghz machine with 16GiB of RAM be able to do if software were written in equivalently efficient ways, dispensing with so much unnecessary bloat and layers of indirection?
- matthewmacleod 6y ago
  * Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really?* You haven’t described what modern software does though. You’ve just listed a random subset of features.
  - api 6y ago
    Modern software that does more or less the same thing as old software uses 10X to sometimes as much as 100X the resources to do the same thing. I am arguing that more colors, higher resolutions, and prettier text is not sufficient to account for this bloat. Examples: simple paint programs, text editors, terminals, mail clients, basic word processing, and so on. In all cases resource requirements have exploded to an extent that can't easily be explained by gains in features or capability.
ta1234567890 6y ago
I still use an iPhone 6 as my main phone, and works great. The trick is that I haven't upgraded iOS in at least a couple of years. I also kept an iPhone 5 as a music player at home, until a few months ago when, despite not upgrading the software, it became unusably slow (even for just playing music).
- rajangdavis 6y ago
  What if there is a security issue with your OS?
  - escardin 6y ago
    They're screwed unless they update. Luckily the iPhone 6 was still getting security updates as of this year. It doesn't have ios 13+ but it does have security updates on 12. As a 6 user for another month or so, my biggest complaint isn't slowness, it's the lack of ram that causes apps to be closed readily whenever you switch, compounded by the apps having to boot/reload again. Most of the apps I use aren't IOS apps, they're things like chrome. This is nothing like using a 3g or a 4 until they stopped getting updates, those were downright painful to use. This is merely frustrating. I don't know what people expect from their phones, but 5-6 years of updates and the phone still running well is incredible. I hope my next iPhone gets me another 6 years. It seems likely. I don't know what it's like in Android land, but I expect that the number people using a phone at all for 6 years is even less than those using old iPhones. At least they had way more ram for a same era phone.
    - solveit 6y ago
      > I don't know what people expect from their phones, but 5-6 years of updates and the phone still running well is incredible. My phone is a computer that happens to occasionally make calls. I expect a flagship computer to easily last a decade and phones should too. In fairness, this attitude of mine is fairly recent and probably attributable to the fact that phones are now the price of computers. So it only applies a little to the iPhone 6, but will apply in full power to the next iPhone.
    - 6y ago
User23 6y ago
Your smartphone isn't the problem, the problem is irresponsible businesses. We used to have the same kind of crap in the USA. Companies insisted they couldn't be economically viable without dumping toxic waste into our rivers and lakes.
- jlarocco 6y ago
  > We used to have the same kind of crap in the USA. Oh we still do: https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-26-12-theres-pig-blood-in-the-water-slaughterhouse-caught-dumping-into-river-that-supplies-houstons-drinking-water/ https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-26-12-there...
narrator 6y ago
Surprised nobody has mentioned Android on here. The Galaxy Note 4 is now 6 years old. It was the last flagship smartphone with a removable battery. It still works great.
- beenBoutIT 6y ago
  RIP the removable battery. Apparently the massive consumer demand for phones with low Z-heights has made replaceable batteries an impossibility and that's that. Same story for laptops. It's a only a matter of time before Tesla and other electric car OEMs realize they can force customers to buy new cars by making their batteries irreplaceable. All they need to do is build the batteries into the frame in such a way as to slim the cars profile and consumers will be fine with it. Something like a disposable low-profile Tesla Fiero with a 3-4 year maximum lifespan will quickly become the unavoidable reality car makers have always wanted to impose on the consumer.
  - bergstromm466 6y ago
    > made replaceable batteries an impossibility I was pretty excited to see that the new Fairphone actually has a user replaceable battery
    - Vinnl 6y ago
      All previous ones had that too. Additionally, it has a user-replacable screen, camera, and audio module, off the top of my head. Of course, that's also the point of the product.
      - bergstromm466 6y ago
        Yes, thanks for adding that important fact!
        beenBoutIT 6y ago
        What will it take to get replaceable batteries on mainstream phones designed for US cell networks?
e40 6y ago
This is one of the main reasons I switched from Android to iOS. Got really tired of getting new phones when they would run out of updates. I hope to keep my 11 for 6 years, maybe more.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
The "smartphone" world needs the equivalent of NetBSD for larger form factor computers and development boards. An open-source, modifiable, freely available, experimental OS that can run on both old and new "smartphone" computers. With larger form factor computers the tradeoff has generally been less hardware support on the very newest ones. Over time however the support for newer hardware generally increases as contributors have the chance to tinker with it. Instead of losing performance from the same hardware, users generally gain performance over time. Whatever one may think of this dynamic, it does allow for the longest possible use of hardware. Tech companies should be shamed for the "disposable" computer culture they have put so much effort into creating. It is possible to improve software without requiring new hardware. With the prices Apple charges for hardware, there should not be any forced obsolescence.
- swiley 6y ago
  You're probably looking for postmarketos. I run it on my pinephone although I think it supports some androids.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    Would rather wait for NetBSD support of Pinephone.
sliken 6y ago
Maybe a law stating that anytime someone stops updating the OS for a consumer device they have to release source so the community can support it themselves.

geodel 6y ago

> weight of compulsory upgrades to OS and apps that now make what was once a decent enough product completely unusable. Software developers and companies alike are very proud of it. I can understand companies defending it due to commercial concerns. But developers defending addition of enormous number of dependencies, bloating the software and calling it best practice to reuse existing components saddens me.

hombre_fatal 6y ago

If there is any individual guilt here, I don't think that would free you from it. Though I'm not very convinced of the individual guilt angle. It's a systemic problem of incentives (lack of good ones).

forinti 6y ago
Look at the countries that were labeled Sustainable Economies in recent years (Cuba and Ecuador). Is there a way to convince people in rich countries to live with the same level of consumption as these countries do? Can you even convince these countries to stay as they are?
- 542354234235 6y ago
  > Cuba An island nation that the most powerful country in the world has been trying to cripple economically for half a century. > Ecuador A country with a smaller GDP than that majority of US states. These are probably not good or representative examples of how this would work writ large.
foolmeonce 6y ago
I think Linux is on the cusp of being up to the task, so not buying a device now with more open than average hardware is a decision worthy of remorse. But a few years ago it made little difference unless you considered yourself a psychic for forecasting future vendor behavior.
- reificator 6y ago
  > I think Linux is on the cusp of being up to the task, so not buying a device now with more open than average hardware is a decision worthy of remorse. You're right, I think 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    Linux is now the best desktop, despite no advances since 1998..
    - wyre 6y ago
      i3 came out in 2009..
  - chaosharmonic 6y ago
    Tbf Android is also starting to converge back toward mainline. AOSP is one patch away from booting off of it, assuming you have drivers. To that end, Google is beginning to move the ecosystem toward a generic device kernel, with a set of hardware interfaces for handling those drivers in a standard way across devices. This would enable custom kernels to target a range of compatible devices at once, which (among other things) would then simplify porting over alternative Linux-based OSes. Including the convergent ones we're starting to see pop up on way less impressive hardware.

abawany 6y ago

I wonder if things would change if the os updates were handled by a different vendor, i.e. a model where the phone makers sold hardware and os vendors sold installs/updates? Maybe if the motivations of phone makers were decoupled from the os vendors, then phones could be supported a while longer due to the os vendors desire to improve their profit?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Arubis 6y ago
There’d need to be some fairly heavy regulation in place to keep the separate vendors from collaborating/colluding. Intel and Microsoft were perfectly happy to keep their shared customer base on a rapid, predictable upgrade path for about two decades. Granted, of course, the upgrades were _attractive_ so long as Moore’s Law held out.
SilasX 6y ago
So like Windows in the 90s? That was it’s own nightmare for gaming with random crashes and games not working.
- phatfish 6y ago
  I think the OP means like Windows now. My laptop doesn't get Windows updates held back because Dell wants to sell me the latest model. Drivers are also much better with the original vendors version most likely working fine even if it's not on the laptop manufactures list of tested drivers. Desktops are effected even less.

forinti 6y ago

I only upgraded my phone recently because I couldn't get a new battery. Sure, the new one is better, but the old one did everything I wanted it to do.

beenBoutIT 6y ago
The funny thing is that cellphones have gotten slim to the point that adding replaceable batteries and upgradable RAM wouldn't make them ridiculously thick or heavy.
- dTal 6y ago
  I don't believe a replaceable battery needs to make a phone any thicker or heavier. Just take anything that's glued now and secure it with machine screws instead. "Replaceable battery" isn't the same as "swappable in the field with no tools", and while that's nice to have, it's not necessary in order to forestall device obsolescence.

api 6y ago

Software bloating to consume all available space is a long-observed trend that has been called Eroom's law, for Moore's law backwards. What Moore's law giveth, Eroom's law taketh away. Here is what an 8-bit CPU with 64KiB of RAM could do in 1986: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9k5Xa2PpEg Obviously this is far behind current UIs in areas like resolution and graphics, but it's not so strikingly far behind that it's unusable or unrecognizable. Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really? What would a quad-core 2ghz machine with 16GiB of RAM be able to do if software were written in equivalently efficient ways, dispensing with so much unnecessary bloat and layers of indirection?

matthewmacleod 6y ago
* Does it really take gigabytes of RAM and multiple 2+ghz cores to deliver the same basic paradigm as this 8-bit CPU in 1986, but in 32-bit color, 4K resolution, and with better language and character set support? Really?* You haven’t described what modern software does though. You’ve just listed a random subset of features.
- api 6y ago
  Modern software that does more or less the same thing as old software uses 10X to sometimes as much as 100X the resources to do the same thing. I am arguing that more colors, higher resolutions, and prettier text is not sufficient to account for this bloat. Examples: simple paint programs, text editors, terminals, mail clients, basic word processing, and so on. In all cases resource requirements have exploded to an extent that can't easily be explained by gains in features or capability.

ta1234567890 6y ago

I still use an iPhone 6 as my main phone, and works great. The trick is that I haven't upgraded iOS in at least a couple of years. I also kept an iPhone 5 as a music player at home, until a few months ago when, despite not upgrading the software, it became unusably slow (even for just playing music).

rajangdavis 6y ago
What if there is a security issue with your OS?
- escardin 6y ago
  They're screwed unless they update. Luckily the iPhone 6 was still getting security updates as of this year. It doesn't have ios 13+ but it does have security updates on 12. As a 6 user for another month or so, my biggest complaint isn't slowness, it's the lack of ram that causes apps to be closed readily whenever you switch, compounded by the apps having to boot/reload again. Most of the apps I use aren't IOS apps, they're things like chrome. This is nothing like using a 3g or a 4 until they stopped getting updates, those were downright painful to use. This is merely frustrating. I don't know what people expect from their phones, but 5-6 years of updates and the phone still running well is incredible. I hope my next iPhone gets me another 6 years. It seems likely. I don't know what it's like in Android land, but I expect that the number people using a phone at all for 6 years is even less than those using old iPhones. At least they had way more ram for a same era phone.
  - solveit 6y ago
    > I don't know what people expect from their phones, but 5-6 years of updates and the phone still running well is incredible. My phone is a computer that happens to occasionally make calls. I expect a flagship computer to easily last a decade and phones should too. In fairness, this attitude of mine is fairly recent and probably attributable to the fact that phones are now the price of computers. So it only applies a little to the iPhone 6, but will apply in full power to the next iPhone.
  - 6y ago

User23 6y ago

Your smartphone isn't the problem, the problem is irresponsible businesses. We used to have the same kind of crap in the USA. Companies insisted they couldn't be economically viable without dumping toxic waste into our rivers and lakes.

jlarocco 6y ago
> We used to have the same kind of crap in the USA. Oh we still do: https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-26-12-theres-pig-blood-in-the-water-slaughterhouse-caught-dumping-into-river-that-supplies-houstons-drinking-water/ https://houston.culturemap.com/news/city-life/01-26-12-there...

narrator 6y ago

Surprised nobody has mentioned Android on here. The Galaxy Note 4 is now 6 years old. It was the last flagship smartphone with a removable battery. It still works great.

beenBoutIT 6y ago
RIP the removable battery. Apparently the massive consumer demand for phones with low Z-heights has made replaceable batteries an impossibility and that's that. Same story for laptops. It's a only a matter of time before Tesla and other electric car OEMs realize they can force customers to buy new cars by making their batteries irreplaceable. All they need to do is build the batteries into the frame in such a way as to slim the cars profile and consumers will be fine with it. Something like a disposable low-profile Tesla Fiero with a 3-4 year maximum lifespan will quickly become the unavoidable reality car makers have always wanted to impose on the consumer.
- bergstromm466 6y ago
  > made replaceable batteries an impossibility I was pretty excited to see that the new Fairphone actually has a user replaceable battery
  - Vinnl 6y ago
    All previous ones had that too. Additionally, it has a user-replacable screen, camera, and audio module, off the top of my head. Of course, that's also the point of the product.
    - bergstromm466 6y ago
      Yes, thanks for adding that important fact!
      - beenBoutIT 6y ago
        What will it take to get replaceable batteries on mainstream phones designed for US cell networks?

e40 6y ago

This is one of the main reasons I switched from Android to iOS. Got really tired of getting new phones when they would run out of updates. I hope to keep my 11 for 6 years, maybe more.

1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago

The "smartphone" world needs the equivalent of NetBSD for larger form factor computers and development boards. An open-source, modifiable, freely available, experimental OS that can run on both old and new "smartphone" computers. With larger form factor computers the tradeoff has generally been less hardware support on the very newest ones. Over time however the support for newer hardware generally increases as contributors have the chance to tinker with it. Instead of losing performance from the same hardware, users generally gain performance over time. Whatever one may think of this dynamic, it does allow for the longest possible use of hardware. Tech companies should be shamed for the "disposable" computer culture they have put so much effort into creating. It is possible to improve software without requiring new hardware. With the prices Apple charges for hardware, there should not be any forced obsolescence.

swiley 6y ago
You're probably looking for postmarketos. I run it on my pinephone although I think it supports some androids.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Would rather wait for NetBSD support of Pinephone.

sliken 6y ago

Maybe a law stating that anytime someone stops updating the OS for a consumer device they have to release source so the community can support it themselves.