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Comment by throwaway22032 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway22032

The whole ecosystem around Apple products seems to be a commitment to producing e-waste in the short-term. It's really bizarre.

A 20 year old PC still works. It might be slow, but as long as it's 64-bit, you can run modern software. If it's older and 32-bit you might be struggling but it's at least theoretically possible.

By contrast Apple seem hell-bent on creating this environment in which they control the software environment so completely that as soon as they stop supporting it, that's it, you now have a brick.

I feel like this is the angle that needs to be pushed on harder. The payment processing thing is just one aspect of a wider system which is that they're selling a subscription to a device rather than the device itself because they attempt to control your use of the device end-to-end and will eventually remove your ability to meaningfully use it.

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> A 20 year old PC still works

A horse and buggy still work, that doesn’t mean the only purpose of cars is creating waste.

Well, my 20 year old car still works.

There are 50 year old cars on my road - our cars could probably go on forever (though they won't, within 10 or 20 years my city will probably mandate electric drivetrains).

I think that newer cars are more likely to create waste for many of the same reasons.

Of course we can't extend the timeline out forever, but we can at least take steps to not _artificially_ cause obsolescence, this is distinct from the way in which a car is inherently far more useful than a horse and buggy.

Planned obsolescence is the entire backbone of the American economy. We could get rid of it in one fell swoop, but then basically every company in the country would go bankrupt and then the world. A sad state of affairs. Perhaps incremental improvements and clawing back of Right-to-Repair etc. can give us some semblence of not being facebooters, but also allow our shit-tier companies to adjust.

> Planned obsolescence is the entire backbone of the American economy

Your response to a comment about decades-old cars still working is to pitch a planned-obsolescence conspiracy theory?

Let me know if your 2011 car lasts 20 years.

So you're betting on Hacker News still being here in 2031? How come you're so sure this site doesn't fall under the great obsolesence plan?

I have to admit this thread is the first time Ive ever heard someone calling planned obsolescence a 'conspiracy theory'. I thought it was pretty well understood. Live and learn I guess, couldn't let the tinfoil hat folks have all the fun!

It’s a well understood phenomenon. But to claim it manifests at large across the American economy is to claim every producer is intentionally crippling their products. That’s a conspiracy theory by definition. It’s also unfounded. Yes, there are industries which promote fads to make their precious products less desirable. But that’s different from designing them from the start to fail early for the purpose of selling a replacement (versus designing cheaply for a consumer who doesn’t care for longevity).

I think a horse and buggy and a car are different classes of technology.

A better comparison is old cars and new cars. Creating waste is not the only purpose of cars, but manufacturers sure do like to push newer models for the sake of sales, disregarding the waste problem.

Right now my 40 year old car still runs just fine. But that's because public infrastructure still supports it. With tricks like manufacturer-specific garages and forced software obsolescence, a car I buy today might well not be usable in 40 year's time.

> Right now my 40 year old car still runs just fine

But it doesn’t have modern safety features, to say nothing of its fuel efficiency.

> that's because public infrastructure still supports it

Public infrastructure supports old computers fine. Just like with old cars, people value the new things being brought to the table.

That doesn’t mean every new feature is wanted. But on the balance, most people upgrade their phones and computers out of choice.

Computers and phones are in fundamentally different categories because one has open software and the other doesn't.

Whether you or people in aggregate choose to do things is distinct from whether they are effectively forced via planned obsolescence. That's what makes it planned.

I know that my old car has lower fuel efficiency. It's actually not that bad, my 20 year old car gets about 45-50 UK MPG, a new one of the same shape etc would get about 60-70. The distinction is small enough that scrapping the car and making a new one would be worse overall from an emissions perspective.

But again, that's my choice. New phones have better cameras than mine. I don't care, I have a real camera for that.

> Computers and phones are in fundamentally different categories because one has open software and the other doesn't

I have a grandparent who uses the same phone we got her a decade ago. It runs entirely on closed-source software. It works fine. Same for the Windows computer we got her five years before that. Meanwhile, my friend who runs AOSP on his phone has a new device every six months.

And I switched from an old phone ('13 model) to one a single year newer so I could run open software on it.

(Just counteracting your anecdote about the friend...shrug)

I have an iPad from 2013 that works just fine. It only runs iOS 12.5.5, so some modern apps using newer APIs one cannot install. But many things run perfectly ok, just a tad slow. And, if an app doesn't run, the App store offers to install the latest version still compatible with the OS, if available. I don't see how that's compatible with your claim that:

> as soon as they stop supporting it, that's it, you now have a brick

By contrast, your computer from 2013 is a computer from 2022 but a bit slower.

The fact that you view "some stuff is broken but like, it's old" as okay is in my view an enormous concession. It should fully work, there is no reason for it not to other than them locking it down.

It's fair enough that an original Motorola Razr isn't a smartphone because there are physical constraints. If the only thing preventing it from working is that they've gone closed source, locked the bootloader and told you to get fucked that's planned obsolescence and I'm gonna call it out as being bullshit.

I’d be surprised if your 2013 computer can install the latest version of Windows.

It can, but you have to work around the new planned obsolescence built into the newest version of Windows...a requirement for TPM 2.0.

At least from what I've heard, you can bypass the installer's check, and guess what, Windows 11 can still run even without TPM 2.0.

I have a counter example, my ipad mini is effectively a brick, I can't install a modern browser on it because it's too old. period. Allowing external stores could definitely help make it work again.

The original iPad can still browse the internet - when it doesn’t crash because it only has 256MB of RAM.

Yes my 2009 Core Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop with 8GB RAM and a 250GB hard drive can run Windows 10 fine and most modern apps. Many low end configurations still come with 8GB of RAM today and smaller but faster SSDs.

A 2009 iPhone had 128MB of RAM and 4-8GB of storage, along with a 320x480 3.5 inch display. Currently iPhones have at minimum 3GB RAM and 64GB of storage. Not to mention that 2G cell phone service has been cut out by all the carriers and 3G is on its way out. Your phone would still be useless.

But using your car analogy, the Apple //e came out in 1980 with 64K of RAM and a 1Mhz processor. 10 years later by 1991, processors were 30x faster and computers came with 40x more RAM. You now see smart phone performance increases slowing down and phones are useful a lot longer than they were a decade ago.

How many 20 year old PCs are 64bit? AMD didn't introduce Athlon 64 until 2003 and good luck running IA-64 with anything resembling a modern OS.

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