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Comment by axod | Hacker News Reader

I think the last one is a very good point. Why not go the whole hog though and make the mainboard upgradable?

The phone could just be a really nicely designed and well built 'shell' to hold the main board + display etc. Then every 2 years, instead of buying a whole new phone, you just get an upgrade to the internals.

It seems a little silly to pay too much attention to the external design of phones since most people only have them for a year then change.

I'd sort of like a beautifully designed custom phone shell into which I slot the latest internals with the new chips etc. Having the same phone shell for 10+ years, but seeing the internals upgrade would be nice.

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> I'd sort of like a beautifully designed custom phone shell into which I slot the latest internals with the new chips etc. Having the same phone shell for 10+ years, but seeing the internals upgrade would be nice.

Maybe we treat our phones differently, but unless it was made of diamond it would be beat to hell well before 10 years passed. Not to mention that mobile changes so quickly that internals will be hardly recognizable in 10+ years (at least 5G and god knows what else).

I think most people keep the same wallet/card case/key rings etc for 5-10 years at least. So I don't see why a mobile can't survive either.

I'd actually quite like a metal/leather one. And no, a case/protector just isn't the same.

Do people here remember the Nokias where you could buy different facias, backs, etc - They kinda separated the case in that way which I thought was a step forward. And if the facia gets scratched you just bought a new one and slotted it in.

Reminds me of the Sandbenders computer from William Gibson's "Idoru":

...he used to tear up her hardware, the designer's, and put the real parts into cases he'd make in his shop. Say he'd make a solid bronze case for a minidisk unit, ebony inlays, carve the control surfaces out of fossil ivory, turquoise, rock crystal. It weighed more, sure, but it turned out a lot of people liked that, like they had their music or their memory, whatever, in something that felt like it was there... And people liked touching all that stuff: metal, a smooth stone... And once you had the case, when the manufacturer brought out a new model, well, if the electronics were any better, you just pulled the old ones out and put the new ones in your case. So you still had the same object, just with better functions.

Replacing just the internals could work. But don't forget that both the battery and exterior gets worn down quickly.

It would require a modular antenna assembly to cover future needs as well.

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