Hacker News Reader

Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Its not just about repair-ability, its about software support too.

Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use. That is because while my android phone (asus) has a battery I can replace in under 1 minute, the software support probably won't last for 5 years like my daughters iphone5 which after a new battery is a perfectly functional updated device. So if you want to do something about the throwaway culture, minimum support periods might be a good thing to look at too.

View on HN

The durability of an iPhone seems way better as well. Within 48 hours of me getting a new Galaxy S8+, the screen had gotten scratched to hell just from being in my jeans pocket. By itself. Now I can hardly read 20% of the screen in direct sunlight with the brightness all the way up, and I'm wondering why the hell I paid $650 for this. Before this, I had the jet black iPhone 7, which was supposed to be very prone to getting micro abrasions, and yet its in better much better shape than the phone I've had for just a couple weeks.

If it were affordable, I'd just have this fixed and put a screen protector on it. Unfortunately, it's not, so I guess I'll be buying another iPhone in a few months...

Yeah, at least for security bugs. I'm still using a Nexus 7 (2012) with Lollipop and it works fine, including the apps, even if their developers hate my guts for having to stick with older APIs :)

Mine is a humble Galaxy S3, bought when it first came out, now running Android 7.1.2. Since neither Android nor the handset maker has a chokehold on me, I can choose to upgrade/downgrade, muck around in general. It is my device to do whatever I wish. Plus the lovely external SD card to put whatever I want and not rely on any @#$% cloud.

Just keep in mind, any binary firmware (e.g. WiFi/radio) you have isn't getting security updates and can't be patched by your ROM provider.

For example, my Nexus 5 is vulnerable to Broadpwn (CVE-2017-9417), but since Google stop supporting it I'll never get the updated Broadcom firmware. LineageOS can't patch this, so I either need to live with the fact my device is vulnerable to WiFi takeover or switch to a supported phone.

I'm seriously considering picking up an iPhone because of this.

And Apple is well known for installing updates that kill their devices by way of ram and cpu exhaustion. I've been called too many times, because Apple update, one of, destroyed machine.

In reality, open hardware is also what's needed, so we can patch firmware ourselves when vendors cant or wont. That too is a massive uphill battle.

I doubt that they're doing this intentionally. If your development target is modern hardware with a cutting-edge CPU, that's what you'll optimize to and that's what will perform well. I guess the fact that modern versions of iOS don't work well on old iphones shows that they're not optimizing for old CPUs. That's disappointing, but that's not planned obsolescence.

Also, realize that if we do get repairability laws, the incentive to target and optimize system updates to brand-new hardware will only grow.

If they're developing for the cutting-edge device, but also releasing the same software for the older CPUs, it's hard to say that they're not doing it intentionally. They know exactly the experience that they're giving to the customer.

Adding new features to software to run on yesterday's hardware is harder than running it on tomorrow's hardware. That's work that needs to be done - and its work that won't make Apple any new money. Choosing to do that optimization work is choosing to spend money on customers that aren't paying for the update.

And you'd rather not get security updates?

Is this really something they're doing intentionally? Or is it just something we notice on Apple devices because you can actually update your 4 year old device?

Given that they control the hardware and software, I believe they know full well what they're doing when they put out a new update to devices that cannot handle it. They could provide a warning "During testing, your device may not run at full speed, due to age of hardware and new features added." and offer to install.

With Microsoft, I give them a bye primarily because aside their Surface line, they don't control every possible configuration, and have to deal with a wide ecosystem of hardware.

Even then, since Vista, most versions of windows tend to run about as well on the same hardware, sometimes better.

I could upgrade as well (I already run ClockworkMod, in fact), I just don't have the patience to deal with eventual problems.

As for the external storage, I can use any flash drive with an OTG micro-USB port, which are common and cheap nowadays (or a regular drive with an OTG cable). But I rarely need the extra space.

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure newer S8 have locked bootloaders or I could be wrong.

> Its not just about repair-ability, its about software support too. Apple, when compared with the android phone manufactures is probably a better choice for long term use.

Meanwhile, I can still run Linux pretty well on an old i386 machine.

Uh, 386 support got dropped with linux ~3.8 IIRC.

Besides, you don't really want to try and run a modern kernel on anything less than say a pentium3 due to RAM constraints. As someone who tries this kind of stuff in an effort to keep some older hardware running, even when you do get it up, the experience can make it basically unusable. Waiting 30 seconds for a login prompt/whatever isn't "usable". Sure, you can disable 95% of the kernel, but all kinds of stuff actually have hard-coded dependencies on things you normally never use, simply getting the kernel up isn't the same functionality that was achieved (full X/WM/browser/etc) on the same hardware a decade or two ago.

There have also been conspiracy theories about Apple nudging users to buy the latest devices by slowing down old devices through irreversible software updates...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com