Hacker News Reader

Comment by petra | Hacker News Reader

So if every vehicle is the same,vehicles are reliable, how do car companies persuade people to replace cars so often ?

You could more or less argue the same thing about phones.

They all have the same apps that 90% of people use (Facebook etc), they all have the same core features that 90% of people use (texting, internet and calling) and yet.. many people upgrade often.

I expect its just a newer = better mentality that humans share.

What about speed? Camera quality?

All decent smart phones from the last 3-4 years run Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Email, SMS, and a web browser just fine.

The Lumia 920 was released in 2012, and has an 8.7 megapixel camera with an f/2.0 Carl Zeiss lens, and supports 1080p video capture. You are not limited by the camera.

As a user of a 2012 Nexus tablet, I'd say it's more than that - as the OS and apps auto-update, the device feels slower and slower, with inexplicable freezes. The system alone takes half the total RAM, leading to constant swapping out of apps. I refuse to give in to the upgrade treadmill, but there's a clear pressure.

(There's also the fact that for many, the upgrade is effectively "free" with their contract.)

I only upgraded my original iPad a month and a half ago because the screen failed - it ran all of the apps that I used flawlessly.

My use case is perhaps in the minority (I used my iPad primarily to read, watch movies via Air Video, browse the web, keep up to date with friends via social media, bedtime email etc), but still did it 5.5 years strong.

Or you're just seeing a temporary hangover in consumer behavior from the days when there were big leaps from year to year. Once people get used to the idea that next year's phone will be more or less the same as this year's, they'll be less inclined to upgrade for upgrading's sake.

Apple forces upgrades with a devious anti-feature: version-locked apps, combined with no OS updates for old devices.

The system auto-updates your apps, whether you want to or not. Eventually, the newer apps simply refuse to run on older versions of the OS, and you can't get OS updates for that phone anymore.

The result is that to the extent that you care about using any apps, you have to buy a new phone, even though your old phone's hardware is still more than adequate in a technical sense.

I've not found this. My original iPad ran all of the apps that I use on my current one, it simply ran old versions of the apps. I only upgraded it about a month and a half ago simply because the screen failed (not bad for 5.5 years though). Agreed they don't support the OS anymore, but the bigger brand names (Facebook, Twitter, Netflix) still have apps that run perfectly fine on that hardware.

This isn't true for iPhones according to many, but iPads last longer. I wonder why Apple deciced to play it like this.

I discovered this one day on the street as I attempted to hail an Uber on my old iPhone 3GS.

They had stopped releasing new OSes for the 3GS some time ago. The Uber app had been auto-upgraded and now simply announced that it refused to run on such an old OS.

I was left standing there without transportation.

They don't: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/autos/story/2012-01-17/...

People hang on to cars much longer now than they used to.

Not sure if there is a word for it. But it always strikes me that newer models "look better" in some intangible way, as if it's some sort of continuous improvement process. And they don't do it all at once, but drag it along so that they can do it over multiple models.

That, and maintenance. The car purchasing field is so dodgy and rife with weirdness that people are a bit distrustful of the reliability of older cars. Whether that is just a perception thing from false advertising or actual fact, I don't know.

But for me, at the end of the day, I want security and reliability, and the easiest method to that (from what I can tell) is to generally stay at the "newer" side of the market.

Oh you are so wrong go and look at The Alfa Romeo Disco Volante - Sex on wheels!

Car companies persuade people to persuade people to replace cars often.

I'm not a car owner, but I've always felt that many people don't actually want a nice car, but instead the recognition of having one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com