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You forget, the camera gets better every year! I've had an iphone for 15 years. I mean, it's fine...i just wish there was incentive for durability and sustaina

• harshalizee 11mo ago
  What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months? I've had only two iPhones for almost 11 years. An iphone 6s and currently an iPhone 13 mini there entire time. They're solidly reliable
  • whiterock 11mo ago
    Oh my, I have found my soulmate on hacker news <3
    • zippyman55 11mo ago
      Its a threesome! (cringe) Yes, our iPhones really get pounded on and end up with so much street credibility as they look like they were shot with bullets but they keep working.
  • sothatsit 11mo ago
    I was using an iPhone 7 up to this year when I got a new 17. The 7 just kept on trucking for a long time, even if the battery did suffer near the end.
  • bee_rider 11mo ago
    I’ve had a 6+ and a 12. I guess 18 should be coming along soon, maybe it will be with an upgrade. But the 12 still feels… I dunno, really quite good. I’ve also had it in a case the whole time, if I opened a box and found this thing I don’t think I’d be unhappy. Other than the inevitable gunk that gets in the speakers and the charging hole, it could be new… I guess it is a race between battery health (80%) and update incompatibility, to see what will kill the thing.
  • cgh 11mo ago
    Since 2010: 3GS, 6S and now an SE. All of them were dropped, submerged and generally knocked around. The SE fell off the top of a moving vehicle. I do use an Otter case.
  • Spooky23 11mo ago
    The camera iterates significantly every other year. My kid plays baseball, from little league to now high school ball. The pictures I can take on my iPhone are incredible. (I’d do the same thing with a Pixel or Samsung if I was a Android person) My work phones are typically on a 4-5 year cycle. I’m currently carrying a 12 or 13 pro. I would have upgraded early for USB-C with that phone, but MagSafe is good enough.
  • gcanyon 11mo ago
    Similar -- I'm currently nursing a 13 mini (the lightning port barely works, so I'm on magsafe). and before that I had an iPhone XS I think -- that one I managed to break the screen (the only time I've ever done that, I dropped it in a metal elevator). I replaced the screen but it was never the same. So I didn't go 11 years on two models, more like 7 years or so. But I'm definitely not on the two-years-and-upgrade plan.
    • wlesieutre 11mo ago
      I had a 12 mini for 5 years, it was a really lucky year to buy one because of MagSafe. The lightning ports just don’t hold up as well as the rest of it.
    • easton 11mo ago
      Did you try cleaning the lightning port out with a toothpick or something? Mine was full of lint and now it works like new.
      • gcanyon 11mo ago
        Thanks, I did. Maybe I just have linty pockets? It can charge sometimes if I press the lightning cable end down or up just so. And that gets a little better maybe if I toothpick it, but only maybe and only for one or two times?
  • bschwindHN 11mo ago
    My only two iPhones have been the iPhone SE 2016, and the 13 mini. I miss the SE but the 13 mini is really nice too. It's a shame because the SE is still perfectly capable of running most software I use on a phone, but that software has just gotten more inefficient over time.
    • SOLAR_FIELDS 11mo ago
      I have the 22 SE and I suspect I’ll get 3 more years out of it before they EOL it. I would have bought the 16e if it wasn’t such a blatant money grab. Touch ID is going to be hard to give up
      • microtonal 11mo ago
        Touch ID is going to be hard to give up I'm kind of the opposite, I would never want to go back to Touch ID. It's so nice that you can set your notifications to be private by default, but the contents will be revealed when you glance at the phone.
        • pasc1878 11mo ago
          I just had to get a new phone old was a 2020 SE (Previous was a 6S plus) so 5 years. The new phone is FaceId ioty is much less reliable than touch id. With touch it just fails if I have wet hands or in cold weather with gloves, faceId fails in many places.
        • SOLAR_FIELDS 11mo ago
          I think it really matters how you store your phone as to the usefulness of Touch ID. Someone storing it in their front pocket will have it always available in an ideal position to unlock on grab, whereas someone storing it anywhere that doesn't lock it in a position like that is going to see less benefit of being able to unlock the thing as they grab it.
      • spectre3d 11mo ago
        Agreed, pulling the phone out of a pocket with my thumb on the home button and having it unlocked and ready to use by the time I look at it is is ideal. Much better than having to pull it out, hold in in a way that it can see my face, then swipe up, then wait for the stupid animation at the top of the screen to finish and the actual unlock to occur and then finally be able to use the device.
  • npsomaratna 11mo ago
    Same here. Had a 7 for years. Upgraded to a 13. So far not felt the need to upgrade. I compare this to when I had an 3G and the 4 came out. The gap between the two was so huge that I upgraded quickly. Reminded me of how quickly PCs evolved in the 90s.
    • reactordev 11mo ago
      The difference was “hang on let me pull over” to “just do it live!”. With 4G, you could actually do something quickly.
  • adastra22 11mo ago
    24 months is on the low end. But I definitely feel the need to replace every 3-ish years, solely for the camera. I have kids and I want better photos.
    • wilg 11mo ago
      “feeling the need to replace it because a better one is available” is not a product reliability or longevity issue!
    • pjmlp 11mo ago
      I have a SLR for that.
      • adastra22 11mo ago
        You have kids? I want pictures At random points throughout the day while doing random things, every day. I’m not a photographer that keeps a SLR camera on me at all times.
        • pjmlp 11mo ago
          I don't see the need to photograph every second of their life, 50 years old over here, having gone through times when taking kids pictures were limited to 12, 24 and 36 attempts.
  • skeeter2020 11mo ago
    >> What do you do with your phones that it doesn't last more than 24 months? Not an Apple product user, but my wife and kids are, and... install the OS upgrade? That pretty much bricked 2 of our phones and a friend's as well.
    • rogerrogerr 11mo ago
      “Pretty much bricked” sounds a lot like “didn’t brick”
      • rurp 11mo ago
        I think a more charitable reading is that OS upgrades left their devices barely usable to the point of having to be replaced. I'm not a big Apple person so don't have personal experience but have heard similar stories from multiple other people, that OS upgrades wrecked the old devices they were still using.
      • spectre3d 11mo ago
        Two iPads, an iPod Touch and an iPhone of mine have been made unusable by OS updates. If Apple had made the cutoff just one OS version sooner, then they would still feel snappy to use. They’re not actually bricked, but completely unusable and essentially e-waste.
  • verelo 11mo ago
    Honestly I wish i knew. I find the battery really gets substantially worse after 12-18 months, and eventually I'm living with it plugged in to avoid getting caught with it low when I'm out. Recently I dropped my phone (while in a case) and now there's a black spot on the screen. Stuff like this. I live a life between a lot of DIY work and software dev, so I'm physically probably rougher on it than most, but also a heavy user of the technology too.
• Gigachad 11mo ago
  In the real world I don't know anyone replacing their phone every 24 months. Usually people keep a phone for 3-4 years and then it gets given to kids/someone else for another few years usage. I doubt any significant number of people are chucking their 1 year old iphone in a draw to sit unused after they get the next one.
  • someperson 11mo ago
    With easier to replace batteries and 3.5mm headphone jacks, I'd wager the secondary market service life would be 2-3 times longer. Not to mention the e-waste from non-repairable battery-based devices like air-pods. Corporation make planned obsolescence decisions that happen to benefit themselves, then can dress it up as "water resistance". Wouldn't be so bad but Apple's anti-consumer decisions are unfortunately imitated.
    • pbh101 11mo ago
      What you describe as pro-consumer is only pro to some consumers, because they come with extra weight, size, and case compromises that every consumer would non-optionally be stuck with. I’d agree with you if we were in some no-compromise world or if there there was significant evidence that Apple wasn’t designing these phones within an inch of their pan-dimensional budget (size, weight, durability, hardware, battery life, etc) and leaving a bunch of room on the table, but that’s an unfounded and easily disproven theory.
      • spaqin 11mo ago
        I would be okay with being "stuck" with a replacement battery and a 3.5mm jack. That's a compromise I'd be wiling to take; but at the end of the day it's all about profit.
        • musicale 11mo ago
          As PP noted, the tradeoff is vs. making things thinner and more waterproof. I'm OK with wireless charging and using the USB port for audio or other purposes, though occasionally I want to use wired Ethernet or Thunderbolt displays at the same time as wired audio, and I also use a wired charge/audio dongle as a car adapter (though there are wireless chargers available.)
• plorkyeran 11mo ago
  I'm on my fourth iPhone in 13 years and have never replaced a phone because of anything related to physical damage. I'd still be on my third but T-Mobile offered such a large trade-in value for my 2020 SE that upgrading was the same price as replacing the battery.
  • someperson 11mo ago
    So you replaced your perfectly functional phone because they made the battery (a consumable) too expensive to replace?
    • majormajor 11mo ago
      The issue with batteries on older iPhones isn't even replacing the battery. Apple will do it for like $80 bucks or so out of warranty. That's WAY cheaper than a new phone. But every new OS version manages to use more CPU and GPU and burn down that battery faster even if it's brand new, since the older chips have to work harder to run them than they had to work to run the older OSes. I replaced my battery which was showing around 83% of original capacity last year, in a 3-4 year old phone. I was skeptical of the 83% reported number. Nope. The new battery didn't last much longer, nowhere close to how long it lasted on the OS it shipped with. (This software-cpu-bloat is not unique to Apple. My Pixel, after 4 years or so, was practically unusable just from the amount of background shit the CPU was doing, compared to when it was new.)
      • seec 11mo ago
        Yes software bloat and lack of optimisation is the problem. But this is exactly why Apple is full of shit. They pretend to do and know better by forcing updates and locking down your ability to install/manage software as you see fit; yet you do not get any meaningful value in exchange. All the App Store discourse would be moot if they clearly enforced a minimum software quality but they are way too greedy to actually do that. So in the end you are subjected to the same software bloat as Android but you just pay more for the device. Pixels get slow because they have very weak CPUs to begin with. If you had gone with a Samsung the experience would be much better (not too different than that of an iPhone, even though the look is of a different taste).
• m463 11mo ago
  they also added a filesystem to the phone.
• wmichelin 11mo ago
  My iPhones last at least 3-4 years.
• jimbob45 11mo ago
  I feel like there are a lot of iPhone features being slept on. Pairing Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence lets a grandma do some powerful work that she could never have done five years ago.
• qmr 11mo ago
  [dead]
• 1123581321 11mo ago
  You make a point, but it’s hard to square valuing sustainability with that kind of personal replacement rate when the supported life is several years. That said, your old phone is either being resold or parted, and and the valuable materials from unusable parts are recovered through disassembly.
• conradfr 11mo ago
  Years ago the wisdom was that money was in software instead of hardware but for some reasons OSes and their updates became free. If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change.
  • microtonal 11mo ago
    If the incentive is for consumers to buy more devices the incentive change. I think it also has to do with the shift in computing population. It was easy to convince tech people to buy a new OS based on a feature list. When computers became more widely used, it became harder and harder. E.g. when OS X still had paid upgrades, it was very hard to convince non-tech family to buy the update. Buying a new device is easier, because the features are immediately visible to people and carrying a newer devices is also a form of social signaling. At the same time, the internet became far more hostile and running an OS that has all the security updates is important. So, it's easier to get people to update when the updates are free.
• theshackleford 11mo ago
  I use my iPhones for five years minimum, same goes for laptops. I’m unsure what your issue is here. I’m on my 13 pro max now and will be at least for another year or two.
• testdelacc1 11mo ago
  This is absurd. I’ve kept an iPhone 12 for 4 years, only replacing it last month with a 17 Pro. Throughout that time my 5 year old phone got every OS and security update. And it’ll get the OS update in 2026 as well. So the phone released in 2020 gets software updates till 2027 - 7 years. The main issue that makes people want to upgrade is battery life degrading. Good thing Apple offers cheap and quick battery replacements in store. I replaced my battery at the 2 year mark for a small amount of money and it felt like a new phone. What more could Apple possibly do to make their devices more sustainable? The processors are insanely overpowered, so they don’t feel slow. The batteries are easy to replace. The software updates are there. Being a bit cynical, Apple only making small incremental changes each year reduces the need to upgrade even further. If people want to replace their devices every year or two that’s on them, not Apple.