Hacker News Reader

Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

I have the concern that - as the pace of tech development increases - the timeframe of designers, planners, and stake-holders shrinks. The advantage of this trend is obvious (why invest in tools that will be greatly improved upon in coming years?), but the pitfalls are less apparent and less exciting. The perspective needs to be broad.

Honestly, some rudimentary technology (physical infrastructure, financial instruments, computing solutions) is rather effective and oftentimes elegant. Why not lean into these artifacts and design around repair/maintenance/continued-use?

View on HN

It also leaves less time for reverse engineers and hackers to work out the device. By the time you have worked out the 300 step process to replace the power button on the latest iphone without triggering the security chip its too late and no one has that phone anymore.

You mean tech companies want everyone to buy almost identical phone every two years?

If anything pace of tech development plateaus after technology gets commoditized.

Up until recently mobile devices had been getting ludicrously massive performance gains year over year, much like traditional PC's had before ~2012. Going from my iPhone 6 Plus to iPhone 7 Plus two years ago was an absolutely massive leap in terms of even day-to-day performance, meanwhile outside PC gaming I'd have a hard time justifying a replacement or upgrade of a mid-range or better laptop or desktop made in the past 6 years.

Times have changed however, had my iPhone 7 Plus not died on me I wouldn't have bothered to upgrade to an iPhone XS (I had an extended warranty through T-Mobile and got the device swapped just to trade it in for a $300 credit) - it was still stupidly fast and I certainly wasn't missing any of the gimmicks in the newer devices. This is probably why T-Mobile is now testing 3 year financing options with the iPhone XS and Galaxy Note 9.

I really don't understand why phones needed those performance gains. What on earth are people doing with their phones to make use of multiple cores, anyway? The form factor makes their utility so fundamentally limited that increased compute capacity doesn't seem to change anything.

Have you seen the code people write for mobile apps lately?

No, I have no contact with any of that ecosystem, and I use very few mobile apps since most of them seem like pointless skins over poorly designed websites. What do you have in mind?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com