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I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Smart

I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-nathan-proctor https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...: ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to death elsewhere. I was a very late smartphone adopter and I'm already trying to reduce the amount I depend on this thing; too much of their marketing always struck me as being more akin to new sneakers than life-improving tech. As a dev I understand the challenges of supporting older hardware. As a conscious consumer, I wish there were another option available in the market, and I haven't yet decided what I'll do when my current device finally needs to be retired.

nextlevelwizard 2y ago
Yearly phone upgrades are akin to new sneakers. People want the latest thing, they do not need it. Phones have not improved for years in significant ways. There has been no new features. Only improvement has been cameras, but really how good of a camera does your average person need in their daily lives?
- adastra22 2y ago
  Do your sneakers last 7 years? Mine barely last 1.
  - mnky9800n 2y ago
    I feel like they used to last longer but now I get literal holes in them
  - nextlevelwizard 2y ago
    Time span is different, but people who like sneakers buy multiples per year.
epistasis 2y ago
That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years. Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.
- akie 2y ago
  Of course the tragedy is that we're doing neither.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.
- conradfr 2y ago
  Does it takes into account all the things that a smartphone replaces, in both usage and hardware?
- thaumaturgy 2y ago
  Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity. Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily. Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.
mrweasel 2y ago
I only replaced my iPhone 7 in 2021, with an SE, because it's a work phone and they didn't want to deal with battery replacement. It was (/is) is a perfectly capable phone for the vast majority of people.
selykg 2y ago
I always trade my phones in to Apple, who reuse/recycle large portions of it. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-products/story?id=37872881 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-produ... Not sure if there's a better document that talks more about it, that was just what I could quickly find.
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  I love that Apple locks other people out of using even genuine parts for repairs and servicing, but is happy to collect them from people to reuse, themselves.
seoulbigchris 2y ago
> A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Not about the phone (I have iPhone 12), but I have an app called Trunk Notes which is a wiki reader / editor. It was one of the only wiki apps I found that could work cooperatively with my own markdown vimwiki that I keep on my desktop (and sync via Dropbox or similar). A few years back, it complained that it would no longer work in iOS version something-or-other and the author apologized because he could no longer maintain it. I never got around to deleting it, and to my surprise it still works to this day.

nextlevelwizard 2y ago

Yearly phone upgrades are akin to new sneakers. People want the latest thing, they do not need it. Phones have not improved for years in significant ways. There has been no new features. Only improvement has been cameras, but really how good of a camera does your average person need in their daily lives?

adastra22 2y ago
Do your sneakers last 7 years? Mine barely last 1.
- mnky9800n 2y ago
  I feel like they used to last longer but now I get literal holes in them
- nextlevelwizard 2y ago
  Time span is different, but people who like sneakers buy multiples per year.

epistasis 2y ago

That article is awfully short on estimating environmental impact. Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years. Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.

akie 2y ago
Of course the tragedy is that we're doing neither.
- epistasis 2y ago
  I would argue that not lowering our car use drastically is a tragedy, and that our phone waste is a rounding error in comparison. And that the second tragedy is that so much media effort is spent focusing the public on rather meaningless phone waste rather than something meaningful like car use.
conradfr 2y ago
Does it takes into account all the things that a smartphone replaces, in both usage and hardware?
thaumaturgy 2y ago
Let's not define "environmental impact" solely in terms of carbon emissions and then do a trivial comparison to some mundane activity. Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily. Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.

mrweasel 2y ago

I only replaced my iPhone 7 in 2021, with an SE, because it's a work phone and they didn't want to deal with battery replacement. It was (/is) is a perfectly capable phone for the vast majority of people.

selykg 2y ago

I always trade my phones in to Apple, who reuse/recycle large portions of it. https://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-products/story?id=37872881 https://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-produ... Not sure if there's a better document that talks more about it, that was just what I could quickly find.

FireBeyond 2y ago
I love that Apple locks other people out of using even genuine parts for repairs and servicing, but is happy to collect them from people to reuse, themselves.

seoulbigchris 2y ago

> A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps. Not about the phone (I have iPhone 12), but I have an app called Trunk Notes which is a wiki reader / editor. It was one of the only wiki apps I found that could work cooperatively with my own markdown vimwiki that I keep on my desktop (and sync via Dropbox or similar). A few years back, it complained that it would no longer work in iOS version something-or-other and the author apologized because he could no longer maintain it. I never got around to deleting it, and to my surprise it still works to this day.