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Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

I think this should put price pressure on the phone manufacturers. With the price tag of the phone out in the open, customers will now realize the actual cost of the phones and start selecting lower price models. Most people do not realize what the retail price of a phone is since it is so heavily subsidized by the carriers.

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It also means people won't wastefully buy new phones every two years. Under the contract system, customers were given the chance to upgrade their phones every two years for free or whatever small additional fee particular phone models would cost (e.g. iPhone would be $100, but a cheap Nokia would be free). It was a waste not to upgrade, so oftentimes perfectly good phones would get replaced just because you had to upgrade. It also meant renewing the contract, allowing carriers to force customers into new terms every two years.

What an abusive system. For all of T-Mobile's faults, I'm glad I switched to their no contract plan years ago.

The trouble is, most flagship phones are made these days under the assumption of a two year use. I bought a HTC One M7 two years back because it was the best Android phone available then, but it's now barely usable: I have to charge it twice a day, the camera has this ridiculous purple tint, the latest Android is bog slow on it, and its out of warranty.

I've been using the same PC for five years with no problems, so I bought my phone at full price from HTC thinking I'd use it for a similar lifetime, but it's really a PITA to use now.

I think the manufacturers intend the phones to be obsolete after two years, but there are perfectly good phones that will run for years. I've had a Nexus 4 since early 2013 and it came out generally in 2012. Still runs just as well as the first day I got it, Lollipop and all. The only problems I've had have been with the software, but that can happen on any hardware. I thought about buying an iPhone last year and will think about it this year again and likely keep it at least another year or two unless I give it to someone else who will use it also for that period of time. Five years isn't bad for a phone.

That being said, I would not buy a Google hardware product since they will not fix software bugs that affects their two year old hardware even if that bug is that phone calls don't work. I can see that from other manufacturers, but since Google owns Android, that's inexcusable. The hardware itself is tough as nails though.

For sure, but it varies. My experience is from the iPhone camp, so I'll speak to that. Some iPhones certainly became obsolete after two years. But some of them were troopers. The 3GS, for example, had a very long life, as did the 4. My 5 is starting to get wonky, but it's good enough that I haven't upgraded yet.

My boss has been using the same Android phone for a few years now, so I know a similar pattern exists in the Android market.

The point is that you can choose when to upgrade, rather than being more or less forced to upgrade every two years. This is especially helpful to those with tight budgets, which I think composes the majority of people.

That's been my experience with Android phones. When I bought an S4 when it first came out it was barely usable with all the bloatware from AT&T and Samsung. The battery should run down within 8 hours. I flashed the Google edition and it helped but I couldn't stand it. Same stuff happened after 12 months, decreased battery life, slow and sluggish.

Switched backed to an iPhone 6 when it came out and haven't looked back. It's been great and the past 8 months nothing had shown down and my battery still lasts a full day of browsing and Spotify.

iOS8 battery life on pre-2014 hardware has gotten worse with each update. Hopefully iOS9 will remedy the situation for pre-2015 hardware.

I have heard quite a bit about that and I've no doubt it's the case. There's just no priority for Apple to support their older hardware, although I think it got somewhat better between 8.0 and 8.2.

If you're inclined to do it yourself then I recommend trying to replace the battery. You can get a high quality one from ifixit for around $20-25 and it does make a nice difference.

I've an iPhone 5 purchased in January 2013 with a new battery from iFixit from this past February and there are just certain apps that absolutely kill battery life regardless of which release of iOS 8 I use.

Though Apple has made their new software versions for their new hardware I think overall performance since early iOS 6 releases has been consistent on iPhone 5+ with the various exceptions for bugs. The problem I see is with devs for large deployments (Google, MLB, Yahoo, etc.) ONLY take into consideration the new hardware. My MLB.tv subscription which includes At Bat app has become such a drain on my battery since the start of the 2015 season. Even streaming radio broadcasts will use 50% of my battery after 5 or 6 innings with the screen locked as in NOT DISPLAYING ANYTHING! 2 years ago a Red Sox/Yankees game (4+ hours) would use maybe 20%.

Weekdays, I get a couple hundred emails plus 10-30 calendar notifications per day from personal and work Google managed domains. Easily that takes up 20-30% over an 8 hour workday with all the fetch. Previous employer with Exchange and push using Active Sync was maybe 10% usage per 8 hours. Weekends of course I rarely see the drain at all in regards to mail.

Point is, I know I'm at EOL with iPhone 5 but I at this point can't really blame Apple as stock (and on weekends unless streaming a ball game) battery life is as consistent as the day the phone was purchased.

This is a very interesting dynamic because it is absolutely true that the phones are designed to last about 2 years. But the carriers also depend on this because in order for them to introduce new features and functions or to get new spectrum opened up for capacity, the count on the entire user base of phone essentially turning over every few years. If that pace slows down, it will be more difficult and take longer for them to turn up new spectrum.

nope, most of the price is the patent costs for the telephony transport used..for example the LTE chip is more expensive than the 3g due to patent costs alone..part of that cost is also the fact that firms like Qualcom can only produce so many chips

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