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Comment by adeelk93 | Hacker News Reader

I’m wondering, do you share this frustration with car manufacturers?

Each new car is incrementally a small upgrade, but accumulated over a few years, makes for a worthy improvement. Those incremental upgrades I don’t buy don’t make anything worse for me.

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That’s not really true. Model year changes come in 3 forms: new generations which are pretty big changes and happen about every 6-7 years, facelifts which happen once per generation and are usually just aesthetic changes, and minor years where they only fix usually pretty minor issues.

It’s not a set of incremental upgrades each year that eventually get to something new. The only time things change significantly is with new generations.

Within that analogy the iPhone X could be considered a new model, the 12 it’s facelift and every other post-X iPhone a minor issue release.

The difference, I think, is that your car can still run on today's gas. The update cycle for modern electronics is planned obsolescence and therefore forces you to participate in the incremental updates. If you don't, eventually all your favorite software will stop working, especially if it is cloud connected.

It's probably worth discussing the reasoning behind a statement like this. I don't pay attention to low-end Android phones - maybe they really do this to you. But it seems really unlikely.

Do you have examples?

I know many people complain about battery degradation. But really, these phones are using about the most advanced batteries that are available in the relevant price range. They are degrading because you are using the device a lot. You really are. Are there any credible claims that batteries are degrading faster than "normal" given usage patterns?

Your car still runs on gas and your phone still runs on electricity.

I think this statement is overly generous to car manufacturers, who rarely provide software updates. Is that not motivated by an analogous planned obsolescence?

This is a common claim but I rarely see it supported. My iPhone 6S from 2015 is fully supported by iOS 15[1]. I know plenty of people whose cars had day 1 drawbacks in the on-board software which were never fixed (or required paid upgrades in the $500+ range) — and that includes things like “the entertainment system will crash every time you connect your phone because you have more than a small number of songs / contacts” — and most people I know who own cars upgrade them more frequently than every 6 years.

1. https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...

Cars are not something anyone would buy every year. Even those buying every other year are few.

Not that I like the amount of resources we are wasting that way, but a whole lot of people buy a new version smartphone every year.

I have to say this really surprises me, smartphones now are so good that you could easily keep one for 2 years or more and not notice the difference.

My personal cycle is about 4 years, and I do my best to take care of the battery so that I don't even have to replace that during that time.

Do they? Anecdotally I can only think of a tiny handful of people I've known that buy the latest model every year. Most people I know used to buy every 2 years when smartphones first came out but now it seems like most people I know buy a new phone probably average 3 years or longer.

> Even those buying every other year are few.

I think this is true but for the opposite reason you do. The number is few because most people upgrade _less_ often, not more.

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