Want to save the earth then don’t buy that shiny new iPhone
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I have a 2015 MacBook Air and a 2014 iPad which both still receive updates and work fine while my 2017 pixel phone is unsupported and stopped booting recently. My nexus 5X also bricked and stopped getting updates shortly after release.
But all this does not matter much. What's important for me is that if I wanted, I could still develop apps for the Galaxy Note, whereas it's practically impossible to develop apps for discontinued iPhones, even if they continue to work perfectly fine.
Maybe it's just me...but I usually make it through about 3-4 phone releases before I break something and end up getting a new one.
This applies to most of my friends. 5-6 years is a super long run and pretty rare. But Nobody in my social circle gets a new phone ever year, and 2 years is less common now.
But I don't see any Android devices over 2 years old in the wild, ever.
I'm excluding the sad fact that replacements are a common option over repair. I'd love to see longer lifespans with repairs now that processing power is so good. But I doubt the Apple investors will ever vote for that as an option as that's planning to move away from sales numbers and reenter the repair business.
When they replace lightning with USB-C I'll be very tempted though.
Before that, I've owned jiayu on Android 4.4 from 2014.
The only reason I ditched my old Android was the battery couldn't make it half a day.
Meanwhile I have replaced iphone batteries pretty easily myself and the near by store does it for a reasonable price as well
Well, at least one institutional Apple investor has raised a proposal for the right to repair recently. [1]
[1]: https://www.greencentury.com/green-century-shareholder-propo...
I'm (very gradually) switching from a 2014 Android phone to a 2017 Android phone, both secondhand. I'd like something that can run Lineage OS (and wasn't entry-level several years ago), but both still manage most of what I need.
Most people I know with Android phones keep them at least 3-4 years. (Off the top of my head: one switched from his Windows phone a couple years ago, another has an old Samsung one with a physical home button.)
Similar with Apple: I know one person who will not give up his 6s until Apple stops supporting it (and only begrudgingly then); I know a number of other people with the 6s, and one with the new SE.
That said, I'm pretty sure all of that comes more from the perspective of money than saving the earth.
Edit: somewhat unrelated, but I hear a lot of people mention how Apple is much better with OS updates. That's true (although Lineage helps, and manufacturers are getting slightly better), but app support for old versions of iOS is horrendous. I almost never see support for more than 2 old versions of iOS, if that. Meanwhile, ~85% of apps run fine on Android 4.4 and half or so get updates, and just about all do on Android 6.
Mind you, the last Android 7 version was released in Q1 2017, while the last Android 8 version is Q4 2017.
Not Lifespan, but average upgrade cycle of iPhone is roughly 3.5 years. If you consider a not small percentage of user upgrade their mobile per their contract cycle, the median of iPhone usage is roughly 4+ years.
>But I don't see any Android devices over 2 years old in the wild, ever.
I dont know if that is true. Most data suggest Android keep their phone 3 - 4 years as well.
Is this not the case? I mean, we can’t all buy used phones all the time. Somebody at some point in time has to buy a new phone.
My current phone is going to be sold at a steep discount to one of my friends who has a smashed phone from like 4-5 years ago. It’s not like it’s going to the landfill.
I do agree though that iPhones should be more repairable, such that battery and screen replacements are more affordable. That way, my friend might have been able to repair his phone instead of replacing it.
There is tons of cheap tat out there but high end phones are a peculiar target.
As a pure phone, sure, but I don't think it'd be able to run much, even if its OS was still being updated.
My friends who have Android phones seem to upgrade them almost twice as often as I upgrade my iPhone (about every four years). I’m still using my mid-2015 MacBook Pro for work every day, it’s a little long in the tooth so I will upgrade early next year (assuming there is a new Apple Silicon model around the end of this year). That will be six and a half years of heavy use out if it, which is longer than most laptops I’ve had from other brands have lasted…
Generally I just donate to them instead of buying new phones.
There is also a German startup[3] selling second-hand phones with warranty, but I don't see them dealing with outstanding software updates.
Going without and doing with less feels like a great step towards a healthier ecosystem.
After extensive work experience with the iPhone and personal experience with Pixels, I won't buy an iPhone or non-Pixel Android for the foreseeable future.
Disclaimer: I work for a company only some on HN have heard of, and have no affiliation with or direct financial interest in any major device manufacturing company.
This is confirmed as my 2017 galaxy s8 is still getting security updates this year.
Apple is the wealthiest company in the world, and if truly innovators could make their environmental goals a reality. Sadly, it's marketing, like everything else. It's about the fastest and coolest car, and always has been.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news/iphone-12-battery-life-result...
??? iphones have been barely breaking past 3xxx mAh and flagship android phones are breaking 5xxx mAh now.
also seems to me that they sell a lot of refurbs or recycle much of it when phones in decent quality are traded in, but yes that is a lot of their marketing speak
Three years is nothing, honestly, especially since we are now starting to reach a desktop-PC-like plateau in terms of performance for smartphone SoCs.
I admire Apple's dedication to their platform, even with all the criticisms about slowing phones down with each update. For Android projects like LineageOS are life savers for old phones and should be applauded or even sponsored by governments because they enable people to now throw away their phones but keep the for years after the manufacturer drops them.
After I spent a couple of years minimizing my "upkeep", and my spending had already gone down to almost nothing, I started thinking about the "sum expenditure" which goes into new items which I was still buying.
Even something as simple as a bag of lentils is composed of farming, transportation, packaging, transportation for the packaging, transporting of the packaged lentils, and the packaging for the packaging.
If I can get something already manufactured, like this very nice 2008 iMac I'm using to write this, I'd much rather use that than be complicit in "undersigning" all that goes into a new one.
If you instead gave that $1USD/day to whatever carbon ofsetting startup out there you would neutralize your carbon footprint and even go into "negative emissions" territory.
So yes, that dollar could save the earth.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/the-biggest-problem-with-...
Anyone could, thus, opine in the opposite direction and we're back to where we started.
To be fair she raises some valid points but they all revolve around tree-based carbon offsetting.
On the last couple years, there has been an explosion in carbon removal techniques and startups who, as the term says, literally and measurably take carbon away from the atmosphere. I believe this to be the kind of solution that makes sense, and, regarding costs, it is still within the realm of "offset your personal emissions for $1/day".
Citation needed.
I am familiar with the field and can tell you that there's plenty of honest, transparent companies working on this.
I'm actually looking for ways to offset my emissions, so I'd really appreciate some pointers if you're familiar with the space.
One of the most mature ones, though, is Climeworks [1], and you can buy offsets from them already.
Edit: Here is the link. Looks like the price went up, but when it started I remember it being $30/month. https://www.apple.com/shop/iphone/iphone-upgrade-program
But let's look at the US alone. The 2020 census says there are 258 million adults over the age of 18. If all of them followed your model then that would be 95 billion dollars a year. That is an amount of money that could do a lot of good or a lot of harm.
Looking at stuff at the micro level doesn't look impactful. But human behavior at the macro level is very impactful.
The decision to not change personal behavior because your action by itself does not make an impact is a way to rationalizing a death of a billion cuts.
Unless you crack the phone's screen and the battery is shot, there's no point in buying a new one. I'll buy another used one on Amazon, eBay, or Craigslist when I must.
I use a 2014 mobile phone. It has a good camera with Optical Image Stabilization, just like brand new $1000+ phones. It has a high density retina display that displays razer sharp text, just like new phones. It can load all the web pages people read and all the most popular apps, just like new phones.
It depends on what you mean by “cell phone”, and no, we surely didn’t hit the peak in 2015. We’ve had tremendous improvements in cellular technology, data speeds, camera and many other features. If you include Android in this, privacy and good app permissions control was almost non-existent on it in 2015, and has only improved at a better pace in the years after it (incrementally).
It's just like how buying a shiny new car is pointless for most of us: old cars get us from home to the grocery store and back just as fast, they have airbags and crash safety testing, etc. Older cars are also less likely to have broken software updates than newer "smart cars", too. In rural areas farmers pay premium prices for 40+ year old tractors because they don't have the anti-right-to-repair electronic doodads that ensure only dealers can service the thing.
Sure newer phones are better, in particular low light cameras, but most apps outside of latest games still run fine on the S6.