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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

I doubt many people will buy a $649 phone with run of the mill specs and only 18 months of updates even if it was made by Google (whatever that means).

Google might not remember but nobody bought the Chromebook Pixel or the Pixel C.

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All(?) of the top-end Androids in the Verizon store are priced at $650 and above.

In countries where we have the joy of buying phones without contracts, the majority of the customer, doesn't go above the 300€ line, when paying the full price out of their pockets.

The last few years I've not been offered a contract, but the ability to finance the phone. An inversion of the prior contract model, it's more what you expect. There are separate fees for the service, and for the monthly payment for the phone. After X number of months (choosable on purchase, affects per-month phone payment), the phone is paid off and is no longer part of the bill. It's much more straightforward and easy to reason about, and you don't have to immediately try to upgrade when your contract is up so you don't feel like you're paying for more than you're getting.

That is the old model we had with pre-paid in Portugal back when mobile phones were introduced, however they were locked to the provider and it was a fight to get them unlocked at the end of the leasing time.

Eventually our version of FCC got around making it easy to complain if an operator would make someone's life hard regarding unlocking.

Verizon has at least broken the phone payments out, so a customer can compare the upfront price and a purchase contract. I guess the others have also.

Their advertising is still ridiculously misleading. They say the "Verizon Plan" starts at $35 a month, but that's before activating a device (which is $10 for a tablet and $15 for a phone) and taxes/fees. Cheapest phone is going to be ~$55 per month, it's ridiculous that they emphasize the $35 in their advertising.

That's great, but they arent buying top-end phones then, and they have lots of optona, so new premium phone announcements aren't interesting.

Cause people be sane.

That's what people buy - whatever is in the carrier store and whatever they see on TV ads. Besides isn't there a monthly plan most carriers offer?

I mean with Project Fi the Pixel phones could be a equally attractive deal for Regular Joe but they would still have to advertise it heavily and offer better value through extended updates.

Why 18? Nexus line had 3 years of support and still continues to receive security updates after that.

Where do you get that three years of support figure from? The only official numbers I've ever heard was 18 months, which lines up roughly with my experience.

I have a N5, which came out (just) less than three years ago, and it is not getting Nougat, which was released a few weeks ago. The last major update it got was around a year ago.

AFAICT with Google you're guaranteed to get the next OS version, if you're lucky you'll get the next next one (like N5 did with MM), but that's it.

Which, compared to iOS, feels pretty stingy.

Two years of major-release support, and three years of security support: http://www.androidpolice.com/2015/08/05/google-announces-new...

Right, so still pretty bad compared to iOS: iOS10 just came out and supports the iPhone 5, which was released 4 years ago. I presume if they had some massive security issue they'd backport it to versions of iOS older than 10.

(I am no iOS fanboy, but honestly I'm sick of the android expectation of getting a new phone every 2 years, and they seem to be the only ones who are even pretending to give a shit with their old phone support. They still don't give as many shits as I'd like, but I cannot find their better).

Don't look at it from the time the phone started being sold, look at it from the time the phone stopped being sold. Android and iOS are very comparable then. The difference is that Apple keeps selling old models (at high prices) for three years.

I get what you're saying, but it doesn't help practically with the idea what I don't want to buy a new phone all the time.

If I wasn't so wed to Android the right thing to do would be to buy whatever iPhone was new at the time and ride it down until they stopped providing updates. Especially because (anecdotally, of course) iPhone battery life seems to last much better over time than Android, so not only will I continue to receive updates for longer, but it will actually be a usable phone for longer.

I don't care when my device stopped being sold. I care when I bought it, how long it lasts. I appreciate that I get even more life from my phone if I buy it when it is new

I don't think Apple typically releases security updates for older versions of iOS, although they do for the Mac. I don't see any iOS 8 updates available after 9 shipped, for example:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201222

I believe your overall point remains valid, though. The most recent hardware that can't update to iOS 9 is the iPhone 4, which shipped five years before iOS 9, and was last sold 3 years ago.

And for the official source: https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/4457705?hl=en#nexus_...

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