Considering how much functionality and information is on that phone that could affect my life in absolutely fantastically negative ways if it was hacked (online accounts including owned licenses for software, banking), I have little choice but to buy a new phone now, even though the hardware is more than adequate for my needs and even though new phones don't really do much more much better.
Planned obsolescence, or whatever you prefer to call it, really drives this behaviour.
Once it's completely bricked, I'm throwing it out and not getting anything with an Apple logo. Unless something like the EU manages to make them open up.
I get the annoyance, but I just don’t know of viable alternatives.
10 years is a dang good run for a tablet; only thing that really can hope to compete would be actual computers.
I suspect, though, that that’s optimizing for perfection in rare cases rather than doing better overall. The number of iPads that survive to 10 years is presumably puny. The batteries wear out, they get dropped, etc. I would guess that the number of 2-3 year old devices that get replaced simply because the OS updates stop or the UX gets slow is much greater. And, while community OS and firmware projects do exist, they haven’t made it into the mainstream in any meaningful way, so I doubt they make a dent in overall consumer behavior. In which case, perhaps Apple’s way of doing things is a net win (or at least the lesser of some number of evils) compared to others’ in the aggregate.
Hard to say without any hard numbers, though.
(Disclaimer: A couple months back I opted to replace the battery on my 2013 MacBook, which is still going strong, instead of buying a new Framework laptop. That may indicate some bias.)
Important applications like the browser, webview, media players, etc are patched via Play Store regularly so untrusted data is usually processed through those pipelines regardless. Perhaps hardware decode on untrusted content could still provide a vector there, but judging by the practice it's not exactly a large one.
There haven't exactly been worm-grade exploits flying around in the mobile space, even big public things like StageFright pretty much turned out to be non-starters and the targeted attacks are so far ahead that I wouldn't even worry about public exploits - the private ones have you covered already even on the latest OS.
Maybe I'm the minority here, but I wouldn't exactly rush out and blow $1000 over anything short of an unpatched and readily exploitable RCE.
This happened with ES File Explorer.
In a software project this is really a responsibility I think people don't appreciate that they have, especially in regards to package managers.
But for end user devices it's encouraged to have automatic updates on. I think this is a personal responsibility as no-one really has your back on your device, except the highly automated app store verification. Which in fairness to them, likely stops a lot of exploits/malware making it to user devices.
Samsung (and IIRC Google) now promises at least 4 years of regular updates and 5 of security.
- Security: hackers constantly find new vulnerabilities. And depending on the kind of device, it can be a big deal.
- Services shutting down, it can be direct (if the device connects to the internet), or indirect (if some "companion app" is no longer available).
- Or just plain obsolescence. The device may be incompatible with modern standards, irrelevant, unfashionable, etc...
We already do: https://pine64.org/pinetime.
(I like my pine book pro; honest question.)
That's kind of a tenuous link at best. You could make the case that buying more increases the opportunities for those at the bottom.
I'm not even necessarily making a factual statement here, but personally I don't feel that there's anything to reconcile.
I don’t know enough about these things to know whether buying more or less of these devices directly helps enslaved people, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to observe that rampant consumerism does fuel the postcolonial economic machine that perpetrates that kind of exploitation. And I think that those of us who stand to benefit the most from this system would do well to be extremely cautious about how we are incentivized toward motivated reasoning.
A sufficiently technologically advanced human species might be the only thing capable of stopping the next extinction event. Something that will almost certainly occur naturally without any intervention.
So our choices appear to be wait for the bad thing to happen or continue to drive each other to improve and learn, which consumerism does in fact provide great motive and drive for humans to improve (although not the only mechanism, I'm sure, just a large one we understand today). Hopefully we strike the right balance and solve these problems.
Can you confirm this for Apple products? I couldn't find anything recent.
Factually you could argue either way. I suppose broadly you could say that industrialisation is bad for those at the bottom in the short term. But after the hump things get better. Is that pain reasonable? Is it avoidable? Are we morally obligated to avoid it? Are all somewhat open questions.
The GP used the word 'reconcile' which to me is a more emotional metric. Personally I don't make the link (rightly or wrongly) between me buying X and person Y suffering. So personally I don't have anything to reconcile. That is a correct answer. It isn't the answer, but as an answer to the GP, it is legitimate.
I can also see it being a reasonable answer to say that in buying Congolese cobalt you are helping the country industrialise, which in the long term is a good thing. Again you may disagree with the reasoning or morality but it seems to me a legitimate way of reconciliation.
Everyone can reconcile almost anything, practically humanity's superpower. It's rare the person that fails to - on any issue. I think we all do it all the time for most issues.
-Benjamin Franklin
Also being shamed for everything you do as bad for the environment or bad for human right does not work.
I'm not going to buy a new phone today and it sounds like you probably won't either, I'll check back in tomorrow and see how the environment is doing!
With that said, I generally go for 3 years and use the older phone to drive my stereo, sometimes act as a travel spare, etc.
I wouldn't do it personally (see me still using a >7 year old Macbook), but they're likely not dropping anywhere near the full MSRP every year, after they sell the old one.
Meanwhile, I've had three gaming Windows laptops during that same time, and two of them literally fell apart (one I kept using until enough of the plastic frame around the monitor cracked that I could no longer keep it in place with binder clips). The most recent one (ASUS ROG Strix G15) is still doing well, but I've only had it for about two years at this point.
Funnily, when I meet people now with the latest and greatest iphone and they see my old phone they often express they wish they still had one of them.
Is there a term for complementing something that is objectively much worse than what came before only because it's better than what we have now.
Stockholm syndrome?
Watch batteries used to last month's/ years / didn't need batteries at all.
It's the same with phones, they used to last a week easily, now we get excited when they last 2 days.
I loved my Garmin, but I hated the notifications. And I couldn't disable the fitness related notifications. I'm at a point where I hate all notifications though, and have them only enabled for work and my wife. Everyone/everything else can wait.
Phones used to be powered directly from the wire and work even during a power outage and now they have batteries and die, but I'm still willing to trade that feature to have a GPS and text messaging.
Further Casio made a range of smartish watches back in the day. I don't know battery life's but they weren't measured in days.
And those Casio watches were terrible. Even without a comparison to anything else, they just didn't work reliably.
If it's just for telling the time I don't exactly need a watch, I'm almost always looking at or within reach of some device that can tell me the time anyway. A smart watch is useful for other purposes.
Also while weeklong battery lives would be nice, even needing to charge daily isn't too bad, I just stick it on the charger at night while relaxing and getting ready to sleep.
What kind of smartwatch came before it, that had a battery that held for more than a week? And no, a simple watch is not a smartwatch, so that doesn't count.
You probably mean the marvel of mechanical engineering that has zero dependency on the outside world, needs no software updates, and will still continue running as new for years after all the smart watches will turn into useless pucks?
Which features don't work? I'm still wearing a Pebble Time Steel every day with Rebble Services and not encountering problems.
Okay, I guess Apple integration doesn't work anymore, but that's an Apple problem. If Apple allowed sideloading & half of the things you can do on Android, Pebble would still work there. I used to be an iPhone owner (I was one of those queue-on-day-one types that got a standing ovation from the Apple employees as you walked out of the Apple Store), but I am so glad I switched to Android.