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Comment by delazeur | Hacker News Reader

> Also, iPhones are extremely economical. My iPhone 6, which cost $749 at the time, is coming up to 3 years old.

Uh, what? I'm on my second ~$70 Android smart phone in eight years. It's a tad slow, but we're talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient. I have honestly never been impressed by anything a $600+ iPhone can do beyond what my phone can. The only drawback is that it isn't compatible with Apple group texts, but that is more than made up for by the fact that I truly don't care if my phone gets lost or breaks (I back up my files, so I'm only out 70 bucks). I have no idea why people spend so much money on phones.

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> It's a tad slow, but weren't talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient.

A few seconds of waiting is not "truly inconvenient"? I suppose you're either a zen master, or not doing much with the phone (possibly because it's "a tad slow").

For me, the phone is something I use constantly during the day, in lots of brief bursts. Few seconds of lag may be the difference between me staying in or leaving the flow. It would often make a significant fraction of the length of a single interaction with a phone. Those kinds of frustrations add up for me over time. Avoiding all of that is worth the $700, if I can afford it.

If two to three seconds of waiting (that's on the high end, and only for certain apps) is breaking your flow, you need to work on your attention span. That's ADHD territory.

Edit: For that matter, interacting with your phone for a few seconds at a time is probably an attention deficit issue in and of itself. I admit that it's common, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem.

Or, you're using snapchat, or instagram, or signal.

Or, any other IM program (including text messages). Or getting directions. Or checking departure time of a bus. Or switching a song that's playing. Or turning my Hue lights on/off. Or checking my account balance. Or paying with the phone.

Each of those actions should take no more than couple of seconds (occasionally, a couple dozen). And it can, if your phone is not lagging out after lockscreen or when trying to load an on-screen keyboard.

All these things work just fine on these older devices. The pauses the original message mentioned are mostly encountered when starting or switching between applications. Once the application is running things work as intended. I use Telegram on that Motorola Defy I mentioned, no problems. It runs navigation apps (Navigon, OsmAnd~) without problems. It takes photo's of reasonable quality, those photo's can be edited on the device. I use it to play music on the device itself using Dsub (a Subsonic client) or Apollo, to control remote players using MPDroid (which controls mpd (music player daemon) on remote devices). It plays video from the likes of Youtube and Vimeo just fine. I use it to read books and publications, no problems. I even use it as a telephone every now and then...

It can take a few seconds to switch between any of these apps, especially when there are several of them running in the background. Would a new device be faster? Sure it would. Will I buy a new device sometime in the future? Sure, when this device kicks the bucket or another device shows up which offers the same feature set (good performance (compared to current devices), good battery, waterproof and sorta-shockproof yet still looks like a normal device instead of some prop from a B-movie). Do I feel like I'm missing out on something by using a 6 year old phone? No, I do not.

Well, if you use a 6-years-old phone and it works for you, then by all means, stick to it. I would, too.

In my case it's not about chasing the newest features and highest resolutions - it's about certainty of getting a quality product. I no longer want to risk getting a shitty, laggy phone, or a phone that turns into one after few months. I consider it not worth the frustration it causes in daily usage.

That can be a choice. If you know every interaction with your phone is going to be an exercise in patience, you'll be less likely to whip it out for every random thought or notification you get.

You remind me of a friend who, as an excuse for having bought a mobile with shit battery, used to say: "well this way I don't look at it that much!!!". Bollocks.

"A few seconds of waiting is not "truly inconvenient"? I suppose you're either a zen master, or not doing much with the phone (possibly because it's "a tad slow")."

No, he just isn't possessed by the ridiculous "must go faster, must go faster" mindset that plagues most people today.

A website takes more than a second to load? ARGH it must be down, now my day is ruined!

Just relax, if a small delay is enough to make you "leave the flow", maybe you need to reevaluate your priorities. If your "flow" is interrupted that easily, maybe it wasn't particularly important, anyway.

I would rather use a feature phone than a "slow" smartphone. Responsiveness shouldn't really be a extra feature, at least not for the basic apps(contacts, notes etc).

> A website takes more than a second to load? ARGH it must be down, now my day is ruined!

Delays when fetching data on-line are understandable. Delays for simple off-line stuff are not. Especially unexpected delays - as in, the stuff used to work fast (in the past, or on my previous phone), but now it lags. Hell, I had a crap smartphone that liked to hang for 30+ seconds when trying to answer a phone call.

> No, he just isn't possessed by the ridiculous "must go faster, must go faster" mindset that plagues most people today.

You see, time, not money, is the most valuable thing a human being has - because it's hard-capped. Each of us has a choice on how to spend it; I choose not to let crappy consumer hardware waste mine when I can afford it.

You've made a bad choice in selecting which phone to buy, then.

My Moto X Play is still as fast as ever, the only app I ever experience any slowdown in is Google Maps, and it's always been like that.

Everything else is latency from logging in, fetching resources and so on.

Yes, I did. But then I also saw similar issues on other people's phones (both crappy ones and good, but _old_ ones - the latter probably can be blamed on flash degradation).

The entire computing world revolves around "must go faster, must go faster". How likely are you to stay on a website that takes a few seconds for each action? You're not. EVERYONE optimizes for it. Every 100MS of latency, Amazon loses 1% of revenue, and that's only ONE TENTH of a second. http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/08/radar-theme-web-ops.html

You may have the patience of a saint, but the majority of the world does not.

Well, there majority of the world consists of idiots, so there's that.

> It's a tad slow, but we're talking about literally a few seconds of waiting, nothing truly inconvenient.

Few seconds waiting for what? There's a big difference between a few seconds waiting for an app to load and, say, for it to register that you've tapped a key on its on-screen keyboard.

There's not much to understand why people spend a fortune on phones every few years. These days it's more because of the status of owning the latest and greatest device (nothing wrong with that as people are entitled to do whatever they tf they want to do). Like everything else really.

I mean my wife is still using my iPhone 3Gs (8 years old), so I get there are different needs. That's exactly my point.

Would you make the argument that everyone should be using $200 chromebooks?

If not, then why would one make the argument that anything more expensive than a chromebook is crossing some kind of threshold?

> "I get there are different needs."

What are those different needs? What do the top end phones do that the mid range phones do not, other than take better photos? Battery life is comparable, screen size is comparable, they run the same apps. I'm struggling to think of a single reason (other than the camera) why people buy high end phones anymore. There used to be a big difference in quality, but that gap has pretty much evaporated.

Go to an Apple Store and see them all side-by-side. What makes those devices what they are are the high end devices on the next table over.

The advances very much do trickle down. Whether you would personally buy it or not.

That's a non-answer. I'm asking people who buy high end phones why they pay extra. A phone with faster processor and more memory can't be the only reason people pay extra for these devices, which is all I'd get from comparing specs.

When was the last time that phone got a security patch?

I don't mean to sound utterly petty, but most security threats these days seem to be external to the device you are using.

Yes it sucks when a windows xp machine catches a massive virus from a random website.

But here I am with an iphone 5 that cost me $xxx, it gets updates that slow the phone down and break a lot of functionality, and my ssn isn't keylogged from my device, it's just leaked by someone else!

Now luckily my passwords aren't being keylogged but- wait! damnit!

> most security threats these days seem to be external to the device you are using.

It depends. From the top of my head, the smartphone is the most common second factor, so an attacker that's on your smartphone may be able to log onto most services that have 2FA. Or alternatively, they can DoS your own attempts to log into these services by deleting SMS, or just sending the phone into a reboot loop. (Of course, "targeted DoS" is not in everyone's threat model. But still, I have more peace of mind using a dedicated TAN generator device instead of my phone.)

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