5 ms·

I think normally I'd look for the Pixel or the iPhone but my next purchase will be supporting FairPhone. When I think about how powerful I need my phone to be

I think normally I'd look for the Pixel or the iPhone but my next purchase will be supporting FairPhone. When I think about how powerful I need my phone to be I don't need the best. I want something I can fix and update myself; something that's supported for more than a couple of years; something that is a little "better" for the planet. Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices?

throwaway81523 5y ago
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? The old joke about Microsoft Word driving an upgrade treadmill (no matter how fast your computer gets, Word will still take 30 seconds to boot) still applies, except it's to web browsers. Welcome to the future, where every tweet will include its own multi-megabyte, cpu hungry javascript app.
marginalia_nu 5y ago
I stopped looking at what the marketers tell me I'm supposed to want in a phone, and went shopping for phones that have what I actually want: Durability and battery life. I've started getting those rugged phones of the sort they market at construction workers. They're brilliant. Water/mud/dust/salt resistant, you can drop them however many times you feel like without cracking the screen, battery life is alomost two days (and that is while using the thing). They're also pretty big and clunky, the camera is unimpressive, and the performance is middling at best, but I honestly don't mind that at all.
- Seattle3503 5y ago
  Some of Samsung's rugged phones still let you replace the battery as well. In addition to having a headphone jack and SD card slot.
- r_klancer 5y ago
  Actually, I'm very rough with my phones and considered buying a ruggedized phone, but went with a Pixel 5. It has a rubberized back and has held up very well over the last 10 months of use with only a screen protector (no case). In fact, it held up better than my previous phone, a Moto Z2 Force I bought because Toms Hardware Guide named it the most durable: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toughest-smartphone-drop-test,37083.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toughest-smartphone-drop-t... Also, it turns out that the camera sometimes matters more than you might expect. Other people in my family care somewhat that the pictures and videos I took of my kids using the Moto were pretty meh--and some pictures didn't get taken because the camera system was so slow. (Oh, and the audio on those videos was poor.) The Pixel has a much, much nicer camera and microphone. (Obligatory disclaimer: I became a Google employee a few months after purchasing my Pixel.)
  - pgAdmin4 5y ago
    I have pixel3a without any case or screen protector. I am using it from last 2 years and it dropped like 100 times, so far no issue. Still going strong. Waiting for Pixel 6Pro to be launched in India.
  - jonathantf2 5y ago
    Running a 5, just preordered the 6 Pro. I was amazed at how easily the 5's screen got microscratches on the screen literally a day out of the box. Thankfully it had another hardware fault so I got to RMA it and screen protect the new one straight away.
acomjean 5y ago
>Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? As someone with an years old iPhone 6, I haven't once said, I wish this phone was faster. Maybe a better camera would be nice, but that's about it. Maybe with the ability to plug a phone into a screen and keyboard and use it as a computer (As is starting to happen) I'd want more power but right now I'm good as long as my battery is holding. I just wish more of these phones still had headphone jacks...
- zemvpferreira 5y ago
  I just upgraded from an iPhone 6s to a lightly used 2020 SE for around $300 and I have to say, I didn't get it till I got it. I don't take photos and browsing hacker news is probably the most computing-intensive thing I do on my phone, but I'm really enjoying the longer battery life and general responsiveness of the new device. I kinda wish I'd upgraded sooner.
weirdsquid 5y ago
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? No, people do the same things with every new generation of smartphones. Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on. It's equally stupid in my opinion that the software we use to accomplish those activities is constantly becoming more and more bloated and have ever increasing hardware requirements to run smoothly! At the end of the day many common mobile apps do the same damn thing they did 7 years ago, but good luck running some of them on hardware that old (assuming you can even find a phone that has a new enough OS). Anyway, I'd love to support Fairphone as well, but I'm upset that they removed the headphone jack in order to sell their new wireless earbuds. For a company that's supposedly all about sustainability, repair-ability, etc. that's a pretty stupid move. Removing a basic feature in order to sell another product is the opposite of sustainable. It's greedy, and I thought Fairphone was against that.
- breuleux 5y ago
  > Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on. They don't "require" it per se, but the power does help. Apps will load and start faster, scrolling social media will stutter less, more processing can be applied on photos to make them look better, more processing can be done locally to avoid latency, and everything will be generally more responsive. More powerful hardware doesn't only serve compute-intensive tasks, it helps for everything. If you have money to spare, it's worth it. So what happens is that phone A has a latency of 0.2s to perform a task and people are like, that's fine. Then phone B comes out with a latency of 0.05s and people are like, oh, that's so snappy, I love it, so they buy that. Then developers are like, we know 0.2s was fine, so we've got 0.15s of budget to add some features. It's kind of a vicious circle, because every step is logical: it's logical for people to buy faster devices to get snappier operation, and it's logical for developers to use the margin between snappy and slow to add new features. TBH, if we could freeze all hardware development at all levels for a few years, it would do wonders for software and I think we'd ultimately come out ahead, but we all know that's never going to happen.
jeltz 5y ago
I only bought my Pixel 5 because it was not huge. Most phones are too large for my hands, including the Fairphone and the Pixel 6. The Pixel 5 is almost too big too.
zz865 5y ago
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? My problem is they are too good. If they were duller, harder to use, jerky video, crashing games etc I wouldn't be so addicted.
intricatedetail 5y ago
They use clever marketing to sell legacy hardware made in China. Not sure why people catch the hype. Probably because there is quite big gap in the market for a phone that is ethically made. If you renove marketing bs, I can't see how it is any good.
hug 5y ago
> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? Yes, many many people. The simplest widespread example would be that anyone recording for Tiktok or Instagram clips will be re-encoding and downscaling 4k video while applying ML transforms to the video stream. And it's all done live. You might not do it, but your local neighbourhood teens do.
camel_Snake 5y ago
the camera app alone takes a lot of power. Carmack discusses it a bit in this article[0], but essentially Google uses a ton of software to overcome the often mediocre hardware, and the camera app is a great example of that. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/the-google-silicon-team-gives-us-a-tour-of-the-pixel-6s-tensor-soc/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/the-google-silicon-t...

throwaway81523 5y ago

> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? The old joke about Microsoft Word driving an upgrade treadmill (no matter how fast your computer gets, Word will still take 30 seconds to boot) still applies, except it's to web browsers. Welcome to the future, where every tweet will include its own multi-megabyte, cpu hungry javascript app.

marginalia_nu 5y ago

I stopped looking at what the marketers tell me I'm supposed to want in a phone, and went shopping for phones that have what I actually want: Durability and battery life. I've started getting those rugged phones of the sort they market at construction workers. They're brilliant. Water/mud/dust/salt resistant, you can drop them however many times you feel like without cracking the screen, battery life is alomost two days (and that is while using the thing). They're also pretty big and clunky, the camera is unimpressive, and the performance is middling at best, but I honestly don't mind that at all.

Seattle3503 5y ago
Some of Samsung's rugged phones still let you replace the battery as well. In addition to having a headphone jack and SD card slot.
r_klancer 5y ago
Actually, I'm very rough with my phones and considered buying a ruggedized phone, but went with a Pixel 5. It has a rubberized back and has held up very well over the last 10 months of use with only a screen protector (no case). In fact, it held up better than my previous phone, a Moto Z2 Force I bought because Toms Hardware Guide named it the most durable: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toughest-smartphone-drop-test,37083.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toughest-smartphone-drop-t... Also, it turns out that the camera sometimes matters more than you might expect. Other people in my family care somewhat that the pictures and videos I took of my kids using the Moto were pretty meh--and some pictures didn't get taken because the camera system was so slow. (Oh, and the audio on those videos was poor.) The Pixel has a much, much nicer camera and microphone. (Obligatory disclaimer: I became a Google employee a few months after purchasing my Pixel.)
- pgAdmin4 5y ago
  I have pixel3a without any case or screen protector. I am using it from last 2 years and it dropped like 100 times, so far no issue. Still going strong. Waiting for Pixel 6Pro to be launched in India.
- jonathantf2 5y ago
  Running a 5, just preordered the 6 Pro. I was amazed at how easily the 5's screen got microscratches on the screen literally a day out of the box. Thankfully it had another hardware fault so I got to RMA it and screen protect the new one straight away.

acomjean 5y ago

>Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? As someone with an years old iPhone 6, I haven't once said, I wish this phone was faster. Maybe a better camera would be nice, but that's about it. Maybe with the ability to plug a phone into a screen and keyboard and use it as a computer (As is starting to happen) I'd want more power but right now I'm good as long as my battery is holding. I just wish more of these phones still had headphone jacks...

zemvpferreira 5y ago
I just upgraded from an iPhone 6s to a lightly used 2020 SE for around $300 and I have to say, I didn't get it till I got it. I don't take photos and browsing hacker news is probably the most computing-intensive thing I do on my phone, but I'm really enjoying the longer battery life and general responsiveness of the new device. I kinda wish I'd upgraded sooner.

weirdsquid 5y ago

> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? No, people do the same things with every new generation of smartphones. Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on. It's equally stupid in my opinion that the software we use to accomplish those activities is constantly becoming more and more bloated and have ever increasing hardware requirements to run smoothly! At the end of the day many common mobile apps do the same damn thing they did 7 years ago, but good luck running some of them on hardware that old (assuming you can even find a phone that has a new enough OS). Anyway, I'd love to support Fairphone as well, but I'm upset that they removed the headphone jack in order to sell their new wireless earbuds. For a company that's supposedly all about sustainability, repair-ability, etc. that's a pretty stupid move. Removing a basic feature in order to sell another product is the opposite of sustainable. It's greedy, and I thought Fairphone was against that.

breuleux 5y ago
> Call, text, scroll social media, take photos, or make Google searches. That kind of stuff. None of those activities require powerful hardware, so I will never understand why some smartphones need processors more powerful than the damn PC I'm typing this on. They don't "require" it per se, but the power does help. Apps will load and start faster, scrolling social media will stutter less, more processing can be applied on photos to make them look better, more processing can be done locally to avoid latency, and everything will be generally more responsive. More powerful hardware doesn't only serve compute-intensive tasks, it helps for everything. If you have money to spare, it's worth it. So what happens is that phone A has a latency of 0.2s to perform a task and people are like, that's fine. Then phone B comes out with a latency of 0.05s and people are like, oh, that's so snappy, I love it, so they buy that. Then developers are like, we know 0.2s was fine, so we've got 0.15s of budget to add some features. It's kind of a vicious circle, because every step is logical: it's logical for people to buy faster devices to get snappier operation, and it's logical for developers to use the margin between snappy and slow to add new features. TBH, if we could freeze all hardware development at all levels for a few years, it would do wonders for software and I think we'd ultimately come out ahead, but we all know that's never going to happen.

jeltz 5y ago

I only bought my Pixel 5 because it was not huge. Most phones are too large for my hands, including the Fairphone and the Pixel 6. The Pixel 5 is almost too big too.

zz865 5y ago

> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? My problem is they are too good. If they were duller, harder to use, jerky video, crashing games etc I wouldn't be so addicted.

intricatedetail 5y ago

They use clever marketing to sell legacy hardware made in China. Not sure why people catch the hype. Probably because there is quite big gap in the market for a phone that is ethically made. If you renove marketing bs, I can't see how it is any good.

hug 5y ago

> Does anybody use all of the new power of these incredible devices? Yes, many many people. The simplest widespread example would be that anyone recording for Tiktok or Instagram clips will be re-encoding and downscaling 4k video while applying ML transforms to the video stream. And it's all done live. You might not do it, but your local neighbourhood teens do.

camel_Snake 5y ago

the camera app alone takes a lot of power. Carmack discusses it a bit in this article[0], but essentially Google uses a ton of software to overcome the often mediocre hardware, and the camera app is a great example of that. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/the-google-silicon-team-gives-us-a-tour-of-the-pixel-6s-tensor-soc/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/10/the-google-silicon-t...