4 ms·

It can be a bit hard to find reliable/repairable electronics. I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring

It can be a bit hard to find reliable/repairable electronics. I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while. I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.). Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver. Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos. To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts. For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.). My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.) The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.

Mochsner 4y ago
Try fair phone or pine phone. You wont get anything from apple/google/samsung etc. For smart watches, just dont. Unless it's Joey Castillos sensor watch or something
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Once you've used a Samsung Note for a few weeks, you'll never go back to a phone without a built in stylus. The boost in productivity far outweighs the drawbacks of stock firmware. If you know of another phone with a built-in stylus, or any third-party firmware for a Note 10 Lite, I'm all ears.
- rtpg 4y ago
  I'm still rocking an Apple Watch series 3. I know a couple people rocking old iPhones, and just doing battery swaps every once in a while. It's not necessarily the best option but god do they feel like devices that last long (especially compared to the "barely usable on arrival" that is most mid-tier android).
- antonly 4y ago
  I must say I am extremely disappointed by my FairPhone 3+. I have had mine now for about two years, and on the hardware-side it's okay. The camera is garbage, even on the model with the better camera (3+). The build quality is okay. I like the ease of ordering new parts, and it disassembles relatively easily (especially compared to all other flagship phones I am aware of). The thing that makes is borderline unusable for me is the software. A software update broke caller identification in LTE networks. All incoming calls would be marked as "Unknown number". This is worse than it sounds, as you can not call back if you missed a call, as you don't know who called. The support said it was aware of this issue, and that a patch was "on the way". In the mean time we should just disable LTE. Well, since the 3G network is dead, the only other option is Edge, which is utter garbage. They fixed it after three months(!). A while later, the automatic display brightness adjustment just broke, randomly going to the lowest brightness setting, and then recovering a couple of seconds/minutes later. My Fairphone got the android 11 update a month ago (better late then never), but that just broke more things. YouTube playback of anything more than 720p is unwatchable at 10-15fps. I get regular messages that something crashed due to being out of memory (nothing I was doing crashed). I sometimes cannot open the android dropdown menu, I have to really exaggerate the gesture to get any response. I am seriously considering flashing a custom rom, as I have had less pain and problems with LineageOS in the past.

Mochsner 4y ago

Try fair phone or pine phone. You wont get anything from apple/google/samsung etc. For smart watches, just dont. Unless it's Joey Castillos sensor watch or something

dotancohen 4y ago
Once you've used a Samsung Note for a few weeks, you'll never go back to a phone without a built in stylus. The boost in productivity far outweighs the drawbacks of stock firmware. If you know of another phone with a built-in stylus, or any third-party firmware for a Note 10 Lite, I'm all ears.
rtpg 4y ago
I'm still rocking an Apple Watch series 3. I know a couple people rocking old iPhones, and just doing battery swaps every once in a while. It's not necessarily the best option but god do they feel like devices that last long (especially compared to the "barely usable on arrival" that is most mid-tier android).
antonly 4y ago
I must say I am extremely disappointed by my FairPhone 3+. I have had mine now for about two years, and on the hardware-side it's okay. The camera is garbage, even on the model with the better camera (3+). The build quality is okay. I like the ease of ordering new parts, and it disassembles relatively easily (especially compared to all other flagship phones I am aware of). The thing that makes is borderline unusable for me is the software. A software update broke caller identification in LTE networks. All incoming calls would be marked as "Unknown number". This is worse than it sounds, as you can not call back if you missed a call, as you don't know who called. The support said it was aware of this issue, and that a patch was "on the way". In the mean time we should just disable LTE. Well, since the 3G network is dead, the only other option is Edge, which is utter garbage. They fixed it after three months(!). A while later, the automatic display brightness adjustment just broke, randomly going to the lowest brightness setting, and then recovering a couple of seconds/minutes later. My Fairphone got the android 11 update a month ago (better late then never), but that just broke more things. YouTube playback of anything more than 720p is unwatchable at 10-15fps. I get regular messages that something crashed due to being out of memory (nothing I was doing crashed). I sometimes cannot open the android dropdown menu, I have to really exaggerate the gesture to get any response. I am seriously considering flashing a custom rom, as I have had less pain and problems with LineageOS in the past.