Nokia launches DIY repairable budget Android phone
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
No idea if they work with Android Auto but isn't android auto some kind of mapping plus music UI? The screen is quite small, I don't use it mounted on motorcycle when I ride for that reason.
I bought an el-cheapo, small (really small) one (originally only to manage EU green passes) that (after that use was over) I started using as a "backup" phone when I cannot carry the (larger, heavier) "main" one.
It turned out to be not bad at all, of course within its limits.
The model I got was a King Kong mini, but I believe that in the last two-three years they made some two or three newer models.
The Power Armor 13 takes multi day heavy use to approximately what I've always wanted out of a handheld computer.
I wouldn't call that a niche when most models still have it.
I mean, I know why, but it’s crazy. As soon as I find a high quality standalone watch I’ll start to seriously consider not having a phone at all. Or perhaps just not an expensive iPhone.
Watches cover pretty much every use case I have with a phone.
The other watches seem to come close, but should be topped up pretty much daily (with my level of usage) from what I understand.
Many watchOS apps and features require an iPhone in order to be set up. For example: Oceanic+, Waterlamma, Overcast, various Apple Health features, or Sleep Cycle. That's a pretty wide variety from my own experience so I suspect it's quite common.
Until that stops being a thing, we'll need iOS to maintain our watches. In some cases it sort of makes sense because you're using apps that function sort of like a sidecar to iOS apps, not a standalone app. There are several where this isn't the case at all though, and it feels a lot like unnecessary tethering which limits our ability to use an otherwise very capable device on its own.
I think we'll get there; other manufacturers won't have the same incentive to keep watch apps tethered to phones, and I suspect that freedom will become increasingly appealing to Apple Watch users. I could be wrong, but I imagine eventually that limitation will seem too ridiculous to consumers. I don't expect to happen for quite a while still, though.
I keep mine in Sports mode, which is basically just a smart watch , most of the time
- no headphone jack
- no SD card slot
- all come with ad-ware and un-uninstallable third-party apps like Facebook (except for Google Pixels, which don't satisfy the first two criteria)
Mid range is where it's at. Why pay $200 more for 256 instead of 128 GB when I can put in my 1,000 GB mircoSD card?
It's a shame that Fairphone went with the no SD card trend. I would have really liked to buy their phone...
I use a modern high-end SD card from SanDisk as semi-permanent storage in my MBP. If I copy anything to that card that's not a single file, it takes forever. Overall it feels worse than using an old HDD. I have to actually think about what I store on it (mostly videos/photos), so I totally see the reason for wanting more internal storage instead of an SD slot.
150MB/s is nowhere near SSD speed, but it would saturate a SATA I port.
Mounting without a buffer on a badly chosen filesystem in what could well be the M1's abysmally slow sd reader isn't a representative test.
Hare braned formatting tools will also often offset the filesystem by 512 Bytes (necessitating two writes and two reads for one 4k write) or use blocks that aren't 4kiB
https://web.archive.org/web/20151222043711/https://support.a...
It's like connecting a QLC SSD through an IDE port and complaining it's slow. It /is/ slow but not that slow.
A usb 3 UHS III reader would be able to talk to the card at full speed, then it's a matter of convincing the OS to trim it and buffer as if it's an internal hdd. Kinda expensive and pointless to go to that effort to get 2x hdd performance when there are NVME enclosures for cheaper SSDs that have 100x the IOPs though.
The SD cards usually used for mirrorless cameras, when recording video, have to write at 600 Mb/s. That should be plenty for most apps in phones.
(e.g. ProRes 422 at 4K 10-bit or XAVC-I 4:2:2 at 4K 10-bit)
90MB/s is slower than most HDDs, btw.
Built-in storage is the next limitation, if you get past holding your huge-screen no-grip phone securely (like with a pop holder) and the battery that degrades exponentially f(time).
https://www.gsmarena.com/results.php3?chk35mm=selected&sSIMT...
Ip68 is important. I went with xperia 10, and am positively surprised. Fits all the checkboxes and less undesired software than google. I don't have the mandatory search bar in the front screen!
https://gsmarena.com/results.php3?chk35mm=selected&chkAccele...
Source: https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone-4 under specification/storage -> unfold the block "Storage" and under the main storage is : External storage capacity: microSD up to 2TB (SD 3.0)
Great camera, great screen, headphone jack, microSD card slot too!
My display started failing after 4 months, when I was browsing intensely (and it was hot to the touch but I was using a pop holder), but they wouldn't fix it under warranty because they claimed the software caused the overheating. Screen replacement would have cost 70% of the device new.
That is when I started boycotting smartphones. I have a 7-year-old device (second-hand) and I do not use it for anything security critical.
I don't quite get the appeal of high end phones or of changing so frequently. What works, works.
I just wish:
* The battery was replaceable
* Moto didn't do stupid things such as break VPN functionality when they released the Android 12 upgrade. This was a failure of pre-prod testing that had to be corrected with a further update a few months later.
But also...I think this would be hilarious (in a good way) if this (thankfully anachronistic throwback) repairability really took off and in the next 3 years Apple releases a budget / or premium( prolly premium? knowing Apple hehe ) set of products like a framework style repairable moddable laptop, and a "wePhone" that you can swap parts and mod. Truly I think there's a cool cyberfunk future in there somewhere. TikTokking teens showing off their latest phone mods, builds and hacks (and holoscreens). I mean they already "discovered" the flip phone and went mad. I think this is waiting to happen :) ;p
5: 123.8 x 58.6 x 7.6 mm
12 mini: 131.5 x 64.2 x 7.4 mm
The more important difference is, the 12 mini screen is 5.42" diagonal instead of 4" like the 5. This is maybe marketed as a benefit, but it means I can't comfortably reach the entire screen during one-handed use.
I can't hold phones with >68mm width reliably and drop them constantly. I just wish vendors can make small (or long, like Sony) phones.
For desktop use cases they have the problem that you have to take them off to get up.
Well that and the struggle of finding half decent headphones that fit my needs (decent enough they wouldn't die in a year, but not so expensive i'm going to regret it if they get damaged or lost).
I still hate that I now have headphones that can die, but it is nice to be able to walk around listening to whatever without having to carry my phone on me while I cook/clean/whatever. Not what i paid for them nice....but it's something.
You can use an adapter? Or a headphone amp with a BT receiver, I have one.
Considering the light weight of wireless headphones it doesn't seem like they're actually a significant ewaste issue, especially since earbuds aren't repairable either.
It is good that larger over ear headphones have replaceable cords, but I don't know, people are too enthusiastic about audiophile headphones - the ones they recommend only work well in perfectly quiet listening environments. In the real world you want noise cancelling, not open ear cans.
I think Bose still has wired noise cancelling headphones too.
But worrying about ewaste from headphones and then buying an Android phone with a piss poor history of long term operating system support is looking at the wrong place
Why should I throw away headphones that work perfectly fine (or constantly lose and buy new adapters)?
It's not like removing the headphone jack helped in slimness or battery runtime – the iPod shuffle had a headphone jack and that worked just fine, almost 20 years ago!
I really shouldn’t have had to get rid of all of SCSI peripherals either.
And Apple really should haven’t abandoned the 32 pin connector either on the first iPod. All of my accessories like my cassette to 30 pin adapter that let me pause and play my iPod from tape deck became obsolete
Btw, did you also complain when you couldn’t use your 32 pin iPod accessories with your Shuffle?
Besides, I have an Apple Watch, iPad, phone and Mac. When I start doing something on one, my Airpods automatically switch.
The AirPod shuffle was also not waterproof and running with that and the wired headphones was irritating especially compared to my Watch with AirPods.
There are plenty of Lightning headphones available
https://www.macworld.com/article/668694/best-lightning-headp...
We replaced SCSI with SATA. Or music cassettes with CDs.
But the headphone jack is and remains a standard. My audio interfaces have XLR, 6.3 mm or 3.5 mm jacks. My cameras and Zoom recorders use XLR, mini XLR or 3.5 mm. My AV receiver uses 3.5 mm, 6.3 mm or XLR (or banana plugs for passive speakers).
These connectors remain the standard across desktop computers, laptops, audio interfaces, professional condenser microphones, mirrorless cameras, audio recorders, etc.
I don't see a reason to throw away expensive my Sennheiser headphones nor my IEMs, just because a handful of devices in one industry want to force me into paying more money.
> Btw, did you also complain when you couldn’t use your 32 pin iPod accessories with your Shuffle?
No, back then I complained that “made for iPod” required a proprietary port which wasn't compatible with either mini-USB nor micro-USB devices. I never bought, owned, or will own a device with proprietary connectors.
I'd rather buy 4 of the Nokia and live with the unwanted big screen rather than having the "right" form factor for 4x the price. That's not even a compromise here.
I still have it, and don't plan on buying anything new until I can either 1. get an iphone mini with a usb C jack or 2. find a competitor that's similar sized.
I'm so so sick of these massive phones.
1. Budget:
- Basic processor/camera/space with 6 inch screen
- Basic processor/camera/space with 4.5 inch screen
2. Flagship
- High-end processor/camera/space with 6 inch screen
- High-end processor/camera/space with 4.5 inch screen
There’s perhaps a gap in the $150-$400 range, but used phones can definitely be found there, and I would bet that there are Android manufacturers that sell new phones there.
(All prices are USA and before tax, so other markets will be a bit more expensive.)
Below $150 you only have the cheapest models by brands like Xiaomi, and over $1000 you only have the flagships.
There are plenty of models in the middle, not only Pixels but also a plethora of offerings from Oppo, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, Honor, Poco, etc. Name any [X,X+100] interval in that range and there are phones of that price. Last week I went with my mother to buy one for her, she settled for the Oppo Reno 8 (about $500) but there was the Lite version at about $100 less, the Pro version at about $100 more, and then other lineups from the same brand (Find X5 in Lite/normal/Pro versions, etc., and many, many others we didn't even look at); and that's within a single brand.
So your parent comment doesn't make much sense to me even if it's hyperbolic. Maybe the available offer is really different in the US, here there are definitely plenty of models of all prices. A different story is that all brands tend to make the same decisions and follow trends (e.g. ditch the headphone jack, make screens larger, etc.) so everything is sameish and even if there are hundreds of models to choose from, it's possible to not find a model that fits one's needs. I myself imported my phone (Pixel 6 Pro) from Australia because no brands other than Apple or Samsung seem to sell 512 GB storage models here...
But even if SMS costs money, why not just use free apps like Whatsapp or Signal?
And if SMS does cost money for the recipient, does that mean it doesn't get used for 2FA? I imagine some people would block it in order to prevent unexpected costs.
I had not expected either of those, but I'd imagine if iMessage costs money on Android, that would massively increase the popularity of either Whatsapp or Signal.
It doesn’t sell.
Just look at Apple’s sales and their cancellation of the mini. I’d love it to be the opposite so I didn’t have to hold on to my iphone 12 mini, but it’s just how things are. Most people don’t like smaller phones and would be a waste of resources to make high end ones.
Mini sales were just not enough to justify having to order a miniature display by current standards.
I was an Android guy, but one of the top two reasons my newest phone is an iPhone is due to the small form factor (the other is longer support cycles). If Apple stops making small phones, my next one may well be an Android.
On consideration, capturing a niche market segment like this may be more valuable for Apple than it is for other manufacturers, as it increases the odds of getting them locked into your ecosystem.
It's also a bit challenging, since a powerful phone has higher battery/heat/etc needs and that is easier/cheaper to do in a larger device.
I would also argue that small screens are awful for consuming content nowadays. People with bad eyesight struggle with bigger fonts in a small screen, and publishers tend to try to fit more and more content in each screen. It's systemic.
I wouldn't. Most content is time wasting nonsense and ads.
> People with bad eyesight struggle with bigger fonts in a small screen,
My experience with Presbyopia is that a bigger screen is still impossible to read without glasses. Without glasses my only hope is to pinch zoom or browser zoom which works on both large and small screens.
Also, if you think that most content is not worth consuming, thus smaller screens are “good enough”, perhaps you are not part of the target market anyway. There are still feature phones out there for the minority who holds that sentiment.
There is a very small minority of people who prefer smaller phones, but they make a lot of noise.
No one buys small phones - hence why iPhone mini was abandoned and most Android OEM's smallest models have at least 6.43'' screen
And it will under guaranty for at least six months. The website guarantees a at least 70% of the orginal capable batteryu
That's what I have. Has a jack, a physical home button and back button, a microSD slot. Don't know your expectations but the camera is better than the expensive camera I bought in 2005. I am not ashamed of sending photos to any of my friend. Performance is fine. (Usage: I text, use Google Maps, YouTube and I browse without an issue)
It's a fair bit bigger than my old 2016 iPhone SE, but it's actually smaller than the iPhone Mini.
The same generation iPhone - the 6S just got a security update a couple of weeks ago.
I got the Google pixel 4a 5g and tbh couldn't be happier. Still, if the S7 was faster I would keep using it.
Related - I'm a huge fan of Airpods and only ever want to use my wired headphones with my laptop
All I know is when I want to pass the aux to a newer iPhone, I need a stupid dongle now, which funny enough doesn't work with the old one. And either phone's battery will last all day regardless.
I was on your same boat until I actually owned an iPhone 12 mini. In reality, it sacrificed usability and battery life to achieve that small form factor. I had to bail on the phone because it was physically straining my eyes.
Our phones are basically pocket computers. That's why the screens are big. They're used for everything.
Here's the other thing about the 3mm headphone jack on phones: it's irrelevant to anyone with enough disposable income to afford wireless headphones. I personally own the second generation AirPods Pro, and to be honest they're completely mind-blowing compared to what we thought was possible on a technical level just 5-10 years ago.
Yes, I spent a lot of money on them. Yes, they are perhaps a disposable item considering how difficult/impossible it is to replace their tiny little batteries.
But would I go back to using wired headphones and getting them caught in a bunch of shit? No, not ever. No amount of dollar savings or latency shavings could convince me.
I still use wired headphones on my desktop computer, but that makes a lot more sense in that context. I'm not taking wires onto the train or the bus or the airplane ever again.
The reason budget phones like Nokias have headphone jacks and sometimes even microSD slots is because their customers will not pay for upgraded internal storage or expensive wireless headphones. On the other side of the market, companies like Samsung and Apple can upsell a lot of their flagship phone customers and give them a nudge by removing that port.
It's the same reason why you don't see a number of options packages on a Toyota that you can get on a Lexus that's based on the same vehicle.
Is the removal of the headphone jack a shady tactic? Maybe it is. On the other hand, maybe it's just an obsolete port for that market segment. If I am using an expensive gaming PC, do I need my graphics card to output to VGA or DVI? Of course not. But I might need that if I'm buying a PC to hook up to a 15 year old monitor in a school computer lab.
A sweet bonus would be if they also provided and fully supported de-googled image or at least had an option to download the de-googled image after accepting some disclaimers. Or perhaps even set up a public community for phone hackers to help them build said image i.e. crowdsource the work.
An optional large shell for a bigger battery would be a nice upgrade too. My current phone has a 10,000mAh battery and lasts a very long time after disabling background networking on most apps.
The tradeoff with replaceable batteries is if when you swap the phone loses track of time until finding a cell tower. Fine if in range but a risk when hiking far away, and might also propagate the wrong time to your smartwatch.
Like xda? :)
Otherwise FP works fine with Google Fi and T-Mobile in the US. Maybe not the best coverage but worth it to be able to swap parts easily.
(I've similarly been wanting a FairPhone here.)
[Edit]
It appears that the US doesn't overlap with the majority of the world for most of the ranges, except for one band at the top which overlaps with Japan/Korea.
https://5gobservatory.eu/5g-spectrum/
> Currently, the most used bands are:
- Low-band: 700 MHz (except in US); 600 MHz (US)
- Mid-band: 3.3 – 3.8 GHz (except US); 2.6 GHz, 3.7 – 4.98 GHz (US)
- High-band: 26 GHz (except Japan, South Korea and US); 28 GHz (Japan, South Korea and US)
Anyway, your point reminds me that the my "dream smartphone" would be one with no cellular connectivity at all. I'm still waiting for some company to start producing a keychain-sized 4G (or 5G) hotspot with an eSIM, which (I hope) would lead to more people asking for the return of the iPod Touch and for something equivalent in the Android/Mobile Linux/Windows world.
You mean a PDA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant)? Modern smartphones are basically a PDA with cellular connectivity (this is more obvious with early smartphones like the Treo 650), so if you take out the cellular connectivity, what you have is once again a PDA.
When I'm on the internet, browing maps, reading books, I find a phone screen too small. But I don't want a massive phone.
A dumb flip phone that lasts a week on a charge so that I can camp with it, combined with a 7" tablet that I can throw in my bag, for when I want to read, but doesn't need cellular connectivity so that it lasts without spying on me.
An odd term in this context. No-one has to 'justify' not selling their stuff to Americans.
Small entities can do whatever they want but big corporations should have justifications for not selling a thing.
And the duty to owners is what you said yourself in your other comment, so I'm not sure why you seem to not understand what I'm saying.
I can assure you, for example, that in many nations companies can legally have many reasons for choosing not to export a product to a specific country that don't make any reference to profit. Again: all you know is your laws. Your laws are not our laws. It's a big world out here, not encompassed by the mores of the nation you just happen to come from.
They don't have to maximize profit at the cost of other things. But if they want to ignore a huge sales venue, they should justify it.
Justifying isn't some huge bar. It's due diligence. If you have many reasons, then write them down.
You've been repeatedly arguing against a strawman where I want to force companies to make certain decisions. But that's not what I said at any point.
- Bluetooth for control/signaling.
- Bluetooth for voice audio.
- WiFi AP in super reduced Rx/Tx power mode when not charging. The only requirement here is that signal is strong within a 3ft radius from the hotspot, and acceptable on a 6ft radius. It really shouldn't need more than that.
- WiFi AP in normal mode when charging.
- WiFi AP completely shut-off when the paired device reports that they have access to any other trusted wifi network.
My idea here is that for me at least, mobile data is truly a connection of last resort. Almost anywhere I go there is WiFi available. And the places where there isn't, perhaps I simply don't need an always-on fast connection?
Only some chipsets work with all frequencies and when 90% of the population of the planet all use the same settings why spend the cost to cover the other 10% which would double your chipset costs but would unlikely increase sales.
Americans bully each other over the colour of their chat bubbles because apparently not buying iPhone makes you appear poor. There are lots of justifications to avoid increasing costs to try selling to the Americans.
https://www.hardwareschotte.de/tests/Surfsticks
Sure, having wifi hotspots would be nice, but this way you don't have to worry about batteries.
Can be managed by bluetooth LE.
> remembering to charge it every day
People do it for their smartwatches. Also, making it in a key fob format would lend itself naturally to some nice key holder accessory where you can charge it (wirelessly, even?) or it can have a spring-loaded usb port to charge in your car.
You're overestimating the Volla phone and Fairphone, 1st one still doesn't support VoLTE which I heard is essential in the US, 2nd thing isn't even recommended by UT.[1]
Either go with an Xperia + SailfishOS [2] if you want more than a toy or Pinephone + PmOs [3] if you love to tinker on your daily driver. Both have VoLTE support.
1. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/
3. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PinePhone_(pine64-...
FP2 is the second device on the "promoted" devices page. That feels like a recommendation?
https://ubports.com/supported-products
> Google Pixel 3a/3a XL.
Doesn't support one of the most interesting features to me in UBports, which is display output for convergence.
The FP2 is a very old device lacking some features and probably got recommendation back then because other devices were worse. https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/device/fp2 Otherwise I'd also could have recommended the Nexus5.
On FOSDEM 2023 Ubports developers didn't show off this old phone, either.
In the EU it's common practice to buy without a contract, whereas this is very rare in the US.
In other words, carriers have way more power in the US.
If that was true, then Wal-Mart wouldn't bother carrying every pre-paid SIM under the sun in the same section of the store that sells shitbox Motorolas, nor would Amazon bother carrying the same exact Motorola shitboxen - all unlocked, mind you.
I did buy a newer phone a few months ago, but I'm keeping the S5 around as a spare. In fact my previous S2 is still working as well, but I don't think it receives updates (also it has no battery right now - luckily it can operate with just power plugged in).
Btw degoogling phone almost double battery life.
Just makes me picture Maggie Simpson
But to be actually on topic, supporting custom ROMs in order to extricate android from Google is my top priority when buying a phone.
If this phone gets lineageOS support then it may be the perfect phone.
Well, a really old Maggie Simpson with a buzz-cut. I do jokingly call them onesies. Expensive onesies anyway.
If this phone gets lineageOS support then it may be the perfect phone.
That would work for me as well.
I have an old Nokia smartphone. I barely use it as a phone; really it's just for 2FA, when the provider insists on SMS for 2FA.
An inexpensive Android device which is hackable and exposes GPIO pins would make an interesting robotics platform. If this device supports replaceable CPU, then perhaps it also exposes GPIO.
The best hope here is that this phone's repairability will attract a software hacking community to provide inofficial updates, but what a terrible thing to have to rely on. Besides: Phones by other brands like Pocophone are plenty repairable, being made for the indian market, and have good community software support.
The real next innovation for an Android device maker will be providing at least 5 years of updates (I'm well aware of the challenges involved, but these are not that hard, make it so).
Saying an iPhone can handle 8 generations of iOS updates is a bigger joke. I’m a cheapskate that somehow uses Apple phones, and I’ll let you know after 2-3 major OS updates the performance is always severely diminished.
My daily driver is a 2018 iPhone XS, and it’s about as snappy with iOS 16 as I remember it being straight out of the box.
My mom had a 3yr old mid-teir Samsung phone and tablet (combo deals they always sell) they both became unusable when it upgraded to the latest version of Samsung basterdized Android 2 months ago. But I'm sure Pixels are more similar to iPhone.
Sadly most Android come with vendor crippled software. Maybe the >2yr crippling is the goal for them.
My anecdote: I'm using an iPhone XS that has seen 4+ years of use across iOS 12-16 (5 major versions) and I haven't noticed any real consistent slowdowns. I've seen the occasional clear bug shipped where performance dips from time to time doing certain specific things, but these seem to be resolved upon the next update or two usually.
I think with newer ones, the OS updates are fine.
I just got a whole new phone out of a failed battery replacement for my iphone 8+ - my guess is the OS installation was just too damaged to accept the battery pairing process and it just flaked out, it was bootlooping and refusing to charge the battery. I got a refurbished 8+ in consideration, and it's actually great despite being a 5.5 year old release at this point. It's not the actual performance level of the phone itself that's the problem, they just tend to become worn out at a hardware level and the phone tends to become unstable. It was showing all kinds of weird software quirks (discord "send" button would fail to appear when posting a meme despite the image being in the send box, and you'd have to tab back and forth to a different server before the "send" button would show up, etc) and all of that vanished as soon as I got a new phone.
While I can't prove it, my opinion is it would have come back over time even if I did a factory reset, perhaps even worse. Because I had the same experience with my previous phone, an Android Moto G first-gen (Falcon), which I owned for just about 5 years exactly (early 2014-early 2019). The phone simply got more and more unstable due to bad flash/RAM and perhaps some glitching caused by the weak battery... first I'd have to factory reset once in a while, then the whole OS would need to be reflashed, finally the installs were being corrupted less than a day after a clean reflash.
The practical lifespan of the DRAM/flash in a phone seems to be about 3-4 years in my experience and by the time things hit 5 years they are so damaged they are unusable even after fresh OS installs/etc. The timeframe is identical for both my Moto G and the 8+, I bet if I'd continued to use the same handset for another year it'd have started corrupting itself even after a factory reset/etc. I don't know why that would be - whether phones are writing certain flash cells too much and they're burning out, or what. Obviously PC SSDs and DRAM can be fine for a decade.
I am very onboard with some degree of refurbishment being a critical element of long-term phone repair after these experiences. They start to go janky at 3 years, by 4 years it is becoming a problem, and by 5 years it is unusable. Even with clean software installs (factory resets or OS image reflashes), it just is not stable. The Moto G I could write off as a fluke, it was a cheap phone to begin with, maybe it was just janky. The 8+ failing in the exact same ways on a very similar timeline (about 6-12 months later due to higher hardware quality) says to me that DRAM or flash is just wearing out over time. If it was just battery performance problems then it wouldn't have failed to re-pair after a fresh battery was installed either.
Again, now that I've got a refurbished 8+ in like new condition, I can tell you it's still perfectly fine as a phone/piece of hardware, it's more than fine enough to run discord and apollo and gmail and banking and all the other things I do day-to-day. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's a particular unit becoming worn and failing.
This also goes to show the importance of long-term software support... I have basically a new handset on 5.5 year old hardware. It will probably be 10 years old before I retire it. iOS is insanely good about that, I am still receiving full software updates at this point, although probably not for that much longer. Show me an Android phone with 6-7 years of feature updates, please. Most androids won't even get security updates for half of that. That is what keeps the e-waste down. I'm sure my handset will be diagnosed and refurbished and sent out to someone else for replacement too, or sent to APMA region for those customers, the circle of life.
I paid $725 for the phone originally (refurb) and $49 for the replacement, and I just got my third otterbox commuter for the replacement case, probably will kill a 4th one over the life of this handset too. So all-up I am expecting to be around $900 for all hardware expenditures for this phone for 9-10 years. Not too awful overall.
We should have several decades of support for all cheap electronics at least…
Our stuff turns to trash because everything is built on shifting sand with no thoughts given to supporting it long term and for some reason we like it this way.
Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
But new shiny thing! Alright, that’s great. Is it so much better that you want everyone in the world to throw away their old devices? Probably eventually but you’re daft if you think those kinds of events should be every few years. God can you imagine if we did that to cars? Sorry, Honda dropped support for your Civic, you can keep using it for a bit but in a year we’re gonna change the roads and it will be undrivable.
No. We want modern APIs that prioritize modern concerns, usable with modern toolkits and frameworks and taking advantage of modern programming principles. Even if we had an API intended for longevity, once its creators die we will tear it down completely and replace it with something that suits our newer-therefore-better tastes. For them it was the cornerstone of an industry's worth of innovations; for us it is but a millstone around our necks and must be replaced. I know this because I've seen it happen many times. Once the people who've staked their entire careers building upon $THING, and developed some truly remarkable software, grow old, up rises the chorus of people who are sick of $THING, who can't even fathom how anyone got anything done with $THING, who give talks at conferences about how $THING is fundamentally broken and how we should be using $NEWTHING instead. And these voices grow louder, their chants more thunderous, until it's generally accepted that $THING is a relic and $NEWTHING is the future. Even the things we thought would last forever -- POSIX, C, X11 -- are now, if anything, well past their expiration date.
This is how things are. This is how they must be. There is naught we can do but be like a Japanese person observing the seasons, contemplating, with some sadness, the constant change and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
There's such a thing as lasting too long without deprecating old cruft.
POSIX isn't too bad, but is still kind of a mess. C has a lot of broken features. X11 doesn't fit how hardware works these days and trying to force it with extensions isn't a good fix.
There are real problems with faddishness on the scale of 5-10 years, but there are also real improvements that happen across decades, and if 40 year old tools don't get updated then they should be replaced.
Most Wayland compositors pretty much assume you have a GPU. Weston can be gotten to work -- slowly -- without one.
Many of the required updates to a device are security related, perhaps they could write said software better so that there are never bugs...but software is complicated now; millions & millions of lines or code and dozens and dozens of different chips. It's better to make phones much more recyclable than it is to make them last longer.
But here’s the thing, the complexity isn’t even relevant, the thing that would make phones last for ages is just committing to some basic set of hardware interfaces. You can pull an ancient desktop out of your basement and run the latest Linux on it and you ought to be able to do that with phones too.
pixels starting with pixel 6 have 5 years of updates.
Apple’s update policy (and history) is one of the two reasons I own an iPhone (SE). The other reason being all the unremovable junkware I’ve had on Android phones in the past.
Next time I need to upgrade (hopefully 6+ years in the future), I will take another look at OnePlus.
It may be safer to have another phone without security updates.
Even this nokia phone has a 3.5mm port, why doesn't Google support it anymore?
> why doesn't Google support it anymore?
maybe preserve space for something else inside.
Can I still charge my phone at the same time?
Can I also get it with a larger battery?
Should I just hot glue a connector, a powerpack, and a case to my phone to get an actual usable device out of it?
Looks like you are 0.001% minority, who doesn't pay enough money to draw interest from large manufacturers.
It's only a few top of the line models which doesn't have these features. Devices which are more of a fashion statement than a device.
Just,none of the recent flagships. Flagships used to have the most features, not the least.
The headphone jack is not just for music, it's a versatile industry-standard connector. Being able to swap the same devices between a phone, zoom audio recorders, the monitoring out of my Ninja V, or audio interfaces when editing is a valuable advantage of a standard connector.
And the entire rest of the industry continues using 3.5mm, 6.3mm and XLR. It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
I feel your pain, and I just buy bunch of them so I always have some.
> It's only a handful of phones that try to force you into wasting your money.
companies have marketing department, who probably found that customers more interested in slick design and Ok to use usb-c buds or bluetooth headphones. LG used to produce phones with 3.5 and audiophile signal quality, now they are out of business.
Sadly many don't support all the features of a headphone port, meaning TRRS with control, allowing you to use an external microphone and play/pause/skip buttons as well.
I'm using some tech that actually makes use of that, specifically as timecode reader for AV stuff.
I need my phone to be a modern version of star trek's tricorder, not a piece of jewelry.
Nice. Didn't know this. Got a 7 pro shortly after it came out; spectrum had a $400 discount on them.
I'm curious how much work honestly goes into these updates, though. How many patches do they maintain on top of Android that security updates would cause them to need to fix their patches again? Or how many parts of Android are even changed by those updates in a given month? I don't really have any idea of either proportion. How much money would it require us to pool to get one month longer security updates? One year?
May be something to ask Fairphone, they seem like the type of business that might be willing to share this for the purpose of pressuring the market to offer the support after a successful crowdfunding campaign.
This really should be from date-of-purchase and not date-of-launch as well. Otherwise you're leaving refurbished phones out in the cold too. We should be encouraging refurbishment and not giving those users a worse experience - if anything the law should attempt to favor them, they're doing the thing we want.
Requiring bootloader unlock when support ceases is another fantastic idea someone pointed out - and that one will hit Apple too honestly. But if you're not going to support the thing then at least let someone else do it.
"EU wants to enforce 5 years of security and 3 years of OS updates for all phones"
https://www.androidauthority.com/eu-smartphone-updates-rules...
I don't mind "bundling" service into the initial purchase if that guarantees it'll be there and I also get a premium phone with walk-in service with first-party repair staff and parts (not at+t store or w/e either) etc. I've shifted to (lower-end/refurb) apple devices for a few things and I know the TCO involved and I find it favorable overall given the expected longevity and service levels and device quality.
But there needs to be more than one "gets 5+ years of solid support" option on the market so that shitty point A doesn't lead to a lock-in on shitty point B. At the end of the day competition is what keeps the ecosystems relatively honest and having options if Apple does a dick move is always welcome too.
No other desktop OS works like that. Both Windows and MacOS sunset support for devices. Admittedly - after much, much more time than phone OSes, though.
> You're telling me these trillion dollar corporations can't match the quality of service of Linux distribution maintainers?
I mean, "quality" means different things. There's a reason the "year of the linux desktop" still hasn't arrived.
But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
Yeah, and they suck too because of it.
Truth is there should be no need for them to "support" anything. All they have to do was get their device driver code into the Linux kernel where it belongs. Then everything would work out of the box and the Linux community would support their device for them. If things change, the community will fix their driver for them. If no one does, it's because nobody's using it.
But no, they just need to keep making shitty proprietary software instead. As a result I get insanity like "manufacturer applications" that only work in a single version of Windows to control stuff like laptop fans, power profiles and keyboard LEDs. Software so shoddy it takes over a minute to display a window on the screen. I had to reverse engineer that crap and write a Linux version to make my system usable again. I went as far as my skills allowed me to go and the result was free software that will work forever. That's what quality means to me.
> "quality" means different things.
"Quality" here means shipping software continuously to a diverse set of users and having things not break down just because they'd really enjoy it if we bought their latest flagship phone. I get that on my Linux laptop, why not on a phone?
> But yes - volunteers do things that corporations won't.
Yes, and these corporations should be profoundly ashamed of themselves that they can't match what a bunch of "volunteers" provide even though they're worth billions.
Some professionals. It certainly seems to be the rule rather than the exception with these corporations. The copyright industry literally can't match the quality of the output of a bunch of "pirates" either: while they're streaming to their paying customers some shitty compressed video with artifacts in 95% black frames, "pirates" get blu-ray remuxes in convenient DRM-free formats.
10x more. Windows 10 runs on computers that are 20 years old.
You have to remember billions of people don't live in the west, they live in india or africa where they use equipment much longer.
10 - 20 years is a real lifespan for cars and appliances, it is also realistic for electronics (leaving batteries aside).
The pace of improvement for computer hardware is slowing, so this issue will become more relevant
1. The last Apple phone that lost OS suppose was the iPhone 6. Apple supported that phone for 7 years.
2. I'm skeptical that Windows 10 would run on many Pentium IV computers. Windows 8 only came out 11 years ago. And I remember a whole lot of computers out there that couldn't run that at the time.
I feel a bit vidicated by that video. In the beginning, he basically says that he needed to run the rare last variant of the Pentium IV to get it to work and that most Pentium IVs would be impossible to get it to work.
Pretty impressive that it's possible at all, though.
Should the cellular carriers have never moved past 2G?
Do you? Or do you just say/write/comment that you expect that? Actual expecting would be refusing to buy a phone that didn't provide said updates. Otherwise it's just an HN comment, with no (real, physical, 'economic') role to play, certainly not that of an expectation.
Truth is Android's situation used to be tolerable for me because I would always trash the official OS and run something like LineageOS instead. Unfortunately, that will become impossible due to hardware remote attestation. Therefore, I no longer care about Android phones unless they run postmarketOS.
It would have been better if they offered slightly longer security updates in exchange of only letting you change the battery. Other things probably won't break anyway before the security updates stop coming in.
Swapping out the battery is a great improvement only if the device's lifetime is longer than the battery's, and my batteries tend to last more than three years.
(Writing this on my 5 year old phone that still has the original battery.)
If Nokia is serious about fighting e-waste they need to provide a longer lifecycle of updates.
Or at least changing batteries used to be mainstream. Anyone born before the year 2000 should not be at all intimidated by changing a battery. I can't speak for Gen Z, it's possible they've lost that skill.
I remember having spare batteries for my Motorola, and an external battery charger, because charging via the built in would take ages.
Not going to these were the early ones. I think starting with the S8 or so they stopped letting you replace the battery. I'm on pixels now. And my Pixel 6 doesn't have a replaceable battery...
These days it’s a perilous task that requires multiple spudgers and picks, a screen heater, finger acrobatics to make sure you don’t slash or rip any fragile cables, and then you have to wrestle the battery from its adhesive coffin.
I only have a smartphone in order to use all of the apps that people assume you'll be able to install. If a significant percentage of those won't work on a custom ROM, I may as well not have the device at all.
(It's entirely possible that my fears are overblown, but that I have them is suggestive of how far from mainstream custom roms are.)
Totally. I think ROMs like /e/ OS and CalyxOS are actually getting close to giving the same experience as stock ROMs, though (if you choose a phone that is supported, that it).
Let's hope it keeps moving forward! Repairable phones + long term support with custom ROM sounds great IMO!
It was still in official support at that time but I got burned by my first android phone going EOL within 6 months of when I bought it and I wasn't going to leap again without knowing there were actually ROMs that worked without major feature loss.
It probably would have worked out, being a pixel and all, but I specifically ran into bumps on my previous phone (Moto G Falcon) with features being lost on custom ROMs. Eventually I found one that worked OK but that's just not acceptable to lose official support 6 months after purchase and deal with custom ROMs where random shit is broken.
Try running the Samsung S23 ROM on a Nokia 7 plus and tell me how it goes: that's the same problem.
I have been using /e/ OS on a Fairphone for 2 years, and it is absolutely great. I just use it like a normal Android, no need to fiddle with it _at all_. Some apps don't work because I'm de-Googled (no Play Services), but you don't need that (or you can accept that some apps don't work).
One week, apps started throwing an uncaught null pointer exception on startup because their network permission was revoked.
Even without that, random apps (especially for charging EVs and parking, and especially if it was raining) would just plain break for a few weeks, then start working again.
It would be nice if there was a commonly-used android compatibility suite for developers (of apps and of roms), but there isn’t, so everything is flaky once you are slightly off the beaten path.
Most of the issues I have (which is not a lot) are because I'm completely de-Googled, but you don't need that.
I really think that there are alternative ROMs today that are great, if your phone is supported. Hopefully repairable phones will be supported (at least Fairphone is great for community support, I find).
Because custom ROMs usually update to the latest Android version ASAP, which moves tons of things around all over the OS, and breaks a lot of stuff.
It's super annoying to update custom ROMs.
And frankly some people just want their phone to work most of the time, not to have the responsibility to install and maintain some pocket-sized server. That's also a reason against using custom ROMs.
That's not entirely true. There's plenty that bundle a custom kernel.
Browse some device-specific development topics on XDA developers for examples.
Meanwhile, my mom was just reminding everyone in my family that Android security updates stopping means they have to replace their phone more often than they would otherwise like to.
The architecture has been arm64 forever, memory and storage slowly increases but not in any way that really matters for an OS. There are specifically optimized apps to get the most out of the camera hardware and such, but if OpenCamera can handle all phone cameras on the market decently there's some level of API standardization and not that much to it. Some kernel drivers or wifi chipsets or something they can't be arsed to keep supporting? I really don't get why one couldn't theoretically just keep updating to the latest Android into perpetuity or why it's even an option not to do so.
Yup, there is no documentation for these chips, you probably gets some SDK with an old version of heavily modified linux kernel in a big ZIP file (so no version control history, no diffs), sometimes you only got some random binary blob. Because every chip manufacturer thinks (maybe right?) that with a good mainline driver or at least with good documentation all their competition advantage would disappear. (Some gigabit Ethernet phy chip manufacturers do the same even if 1 GbE is more than 20 years old...)
Imagine the same issue as the GPU card support as it was a few years ago, just multiply it by ten and apply for every insignificant peripheral device. (And nobody will start to reverse-engineer it, because you will not be able to buy the chip half a year later.)
I do not think this will change without an open chip (do no think it is possible, it would have too much NRE cost, maybe if some government use it to spin up local semiconductor manufacturing?) or some heavy regulation (eg. force compatibility between vendors).
We need to legislate that the user has a legal right to precise documentation of any hardware they bought.
Including any spying activity it might be enabling.
The lifecycle of a distro release is about how long you can get security updates without feature updates. But when a release goes EOL, you just... have another update, but this time it will include new feature releases of applications and operating system components as well as the usual security fixes.
You also don't really need an LTS for this. In the past I've run installations of Linux for much longer than 5 years on distros that don't do any kind of LTS releases at all.
"security" is just used as an excuse, in practice there's very little in the way of remotely exploitable vulnerabilities. In fact the "security" of newer devices seems to be squarely aimed against the user, so make of that what you will...
So really, you've made an absurd comment. If the phone is to be usable past 3-4 years it must have security patches. Otherwise there will be a pool of devices which are still in use and easily targetted.
There already are, and the world hasn't ended yet...
It's your paranoia that's absurd (and what these companies are relying on to keep the masses under their control, so keep drinking the kool-aid...)
The fact that so many here are going on about updates and support, when in fact there's plenty of people who don't give a shit and the world works fine for them, just shows what a corporate-authoritarian shitshow this cursed industry has become.
Just goes to show, you can lead a horse to security patches (or vaccination, or the effects of climate change) but you can't make him apply them.
I don't agree with the poster but he has one thing right - our industry is a shitshow.
The soviet government handled Chernobyl better than we handle security.
Its impossible, even for most proffeshionals, to tell if a device is secure It would be easier for me to measure radiation.
The british government had Mi5 check Huawei source code and even couldn't be sure.
Practically a fully patched iPhone or Pixel without sketchy apps is a very hard target and exploits have a limited lifetime. There is a vast gulf between that and a phone running a 5 year old release without patches.
Why are governments so bad at mandating security? Paralysis in Congress and the EU?
Re Huawei, they were sure there were exploits that could be used against it, and they could never be sure it was exploit-free. (We know that major vendors like Cisco have bugs constantly, so it only requires early access to the code to discover them to produce a ready stream of exploits.) Which is totally what we would expect.
Yes, those are two well-known quantities, and possibly best in the world.
Now try to tell security of something random - if I take a random Linix server, or a wifi-connected bosh dishwasher, ir smart TV, and I ask 100 IT proffeshionals, which one is insecure, how many of them can tell?
> Why are governments so bad at mandating security? Paralysis in Congress and the EU
Why are corporations so bad at securiry?
My internet provider ships a router so obsolete, first google search explains how to PWN it, eith instructions any 12 year old can follow
The problem is the whoke industry is engaged in deception, "we are taking security seriously".
If they were selling garage locks, there would be lawsuits seeking conpensation for stolen car due to negligence in design and lying to the customer
Just goes to show, you can lead a horse to security patches (or vaccination, or the effects of climate change) but you can't make him apply them.
Many of us would rather continue fighting for our freedom instead of advocating for and cheering on the rise of dystopia.
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5116
Fortunately, this was patched. Not sure if there are newer ones
Not surprisingly, it's another JS one.
I use JS whitelisting not only on my PCs for that reason.
The majority of Android devices will have updated Chrome and web view soon after the Chrome team released a fix.
I just checked and all resources I've seen puts the typical lifespan around this. I don't know what the distribution looks like though.
I bet the distribution curves change if you bucket the pricing points.
3 years is ok. After you buy it, they've made 100% of the money they're going to make in the transaction. They need money to come in to support such an effort
At this point I consider Apple's commitment to long term support to be a key element of my loyalty to them.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/9472/ios-update-slows-iphone
Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices. Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.
Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions. We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.
Alas, Apple also supports some highly anticompetitive business practices (App Store exclusivity/tax, EMS/iMessage) which I do not want to support.
The two or whatever year cycle certainly shouldn't be forced by design.
I'm personally comfortable with it because I'm sold on newer and better features and my current phone is starting to get dog eared by then.
Probably the "right" thing to do would be to have a new "durable" tier for those who value lifespan and do not feel tempted by increases in hardware capabilities.
I also buy mid range. I can imagine being sour if I'm buying the high end over $1000 devices and see the same cycle
There's no reason outside of software updates why a 3-year-old phone can't continue to be used—mine is now 5 years old and works fine, and I only upgraded from my now 7-year-old phone because my brother had one that he thought he'd bricked that I resurrected. Neither phone is fast, but they're perfectly serviceable.
What I don't understand is why these updates aren't a solved problem. Desktop hardware manufacturers sell equipment that continue to be supported for 10+ years by Windows, and they manage to stay in business just fine. Why is it that a 3-year support window is considered normal in the mobile world?
Google sunsetting my Chromebox and Chromebook models has ensured I will never buy hardware from them again.
By not updating Chrome past a certain expiration date they make them worthless doorstops that suddenly can’t even stream from sites like HBO Max because the version number isn’t high enough.
> The Nokia G22 will cost from £149.99
It's unsustainable to put the costs on the backend, so phone's price would have to be raised to cover those extended security updates. But, that won't happen for a budget phone. There just won't be enough people willing to pay after three years.
That's the problem with purchasing a budget phone. You get what you pay for, a phone that will go away soon.
Which is why this reads as kind of a stunt. A repairable phone is great, but if it becomes unsafe to use then what's the point? The software needs to be "repairable" too.
Laughs in Microsoft
How about 20 years?!
I have a laptop built in 2006, it runs Windows 10 and will be supported untill 2025.
It can also run software compiled in 1999! What platform can beat it, an IBM mainframe?
Microsoft is the gold standard! Its a shame they never get credit for the one thing they do well.
And there still isn’t a coherent native desktop-app dev story for Windows. Even MS is using Electron for their own software.
One step forward, two steps back.
It's just 5 years old now, and I have a funny feeling it'll be more than powerful enough for a while yet.
Of course, then I looked into what windows 11 provided and decided I'd wait a bit either way.
It was something like 5 or 6 BIOS expeditions before I had all the right features enabled.
Windows 11 is meh... They fixed some of my issues with 10 and created new ones. I wouldn't rush anyone to adopt it, it's a Vista/XP/ME style release. I'm expecting Windows 12 to be the keeper.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/where-to-buy-tpm-2.0-for-w...
Win11's line in the sand requirements aren't nearly as "bad" as Vista/XP/ME in terms of disruption. Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
That's a non-starter because Intel upsell ECC as an "enterprise"/"prosumer" feature and regular, non-high-end/workstation/server processors don't support ECC. Sadly Intel is still the CPU market leader, so that would have meant Win11 not being able to run on most existing hardware at launch.
AMD's CPUs have ECC support but the motherboard manufacturers don't support it.
Intel has been shipping TPMs in CPUs for a while. That begs the question, is Intel dictating requirements to Microsoft or is Microsoft dictating them to Intel?
Oh dear, why is Microsoft upgrade assistant and documentation so misleading? I just got a new CPU!
I can go into the UEFI settings and enable fTPM on the system. It still doesn't make it see the system as supported.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi...
It is only 2nd gen Ryzen and up.
P.S. By reverse logic, I have disabled (f)TPM to block the upgrade on some machines.
PC hardware can be supported indefinitely because it's documented, more or less. Windows uses a hardware abstraction layer so the old drivers can be used with the new Windows. Hardware only stops being supported by Windows when Microsoft decides it, not Intel or NVIDIA or Broadcom.
The Linux community writes open source drivers, or the hardware makers do themselves, so they can be updated by the kernel developers when they make changes to the kernel and continue to work. You can put run the latest Linux kernel on a PC from 1995.
But for phones the hardware support comes as an opaque binary blob tied to a specific kernel version, so when that kernel falls out of support, the hardware is slag unless someone has the resources to reverse engineer it. Which they might if it was just the wireless or just the storage controller, but it's not.
What do you expect to do with it? The 2010 first generation iPad that came out 4 years later could barely handle modern web pages by 2011.
I have a windows license I paid for like 10 years ago, I upgraded windows 7 to 8 to 10 and now to 11 for free.
The mobile phone business is very different. (But you may argue that that's the problem.) The HW manufacturers sell the SW bundled with the HW. As soon as they have sold the HW, the software is just a liability (while for MS it's a recurrent revenue!). Not only that, but the longer and the better the SW works, the less likely you are to buy new HW from them. (And since that's the only thing they are selling, it means the less likely they will see a revenue from you.) Now this may imply that the business model is flawed and maybe it will change as the market matures and people will stop buying newer and newer phones every year. Just like it happened to desktops and then laptops. (I'm typing this on a 7+ year old Thinkpad and the only thing I miss is +16GB RAM.)
It's really the opposite problem. Essentially all of the relevant phones run Android; the monopoly doesn't help. And PC/workstation hardware was supported for just as long back in the days of Novell Netware and proprietary Unix. Some of the hardware from those days is still supported now.
The problem isn't the lack of a monopoly, it's the presence of one. The majority of the SoCs in phones are from Qualcomm, and they provide neither documentation nor source code, even though the market is clamoring for the longer support lifetimes that would allow, because with limited competition they don't have to.
There was some hope that Samsung would do better, and they might increase their market share quite a bit if they did, but a duopoly still isn't much competition. Samsung is already a big enough player that they have to be weighing the increase in market share against the longer repurchasing cycle. The have to decide if they want to be the heroes and capture that much goodwill from the people paying attention and making recommendations to others, or not. So far so fail.
We need more competition.
I was running an arm laptop, emulating a modern x86_64 chip, emulating an old i386 chip, interpreting a qbasic program unmodified from 30 years ago. Sound, graphics modes, input events - all of it worked perfectly. I didn’t try running it on windows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just worked there too without even needing dosbox.
Backwards compatibility on phones is a joke. Decades of phone software is totally lost to history, impossible to download or run anywhere.
The web isn’t much better because old websites go down. But at least modern browsers will still happily render webpages from the 90s just fine.
Is it not possible to emulate phones in the same manner?
Perhaps these are bad examples and the real reasons for Apple to not support something is not so neat - I don't know about them - but FWIW my experience from working at Nokia was that compatibility was a big drag to being able to implement improvements and it's a huge effort to maintain it that doesn't come for free.
The two most ready examples of this sort of thing are that (I think) 32 bit apps aren't supported any more, and that the HID guidelines specified the fixed pixel dimensions that iphones were. That isn't something you can assume any more.
But if I want to run an ancient version of flappy bird, I don't really need it to run on my modern iphone - just like I don't need modern windows to support 1991 QBASIC in order to run my old qbasic programs from when I was a kid. We need two things:
- Access to old versions of iOS app binaries. I have no idea how to get these, if they're available anywhere in the app store (or can be backed up), or if apple deletes them.
- Access to an early iOS simulator / emulator to run those apps on. Apple has had fantastic iOS simulators going all the way back to the first app store releases, though I think they only ran ios apps compiled to x86.
It'd be great if there was a way to run old ios games and apps and things. I don't want those heady days of early ios apps to be lost to history.
The switch to App Stores and the too fragmented OS updates made everything just a mess like this
It doesn't make sense for Apple to support devices that aren't even going to be able to run the apps that users want. Not many users are going to want to be using a 6-7 year old device when hardware is advancing and therefore the software is becoming more resource hungry.
People who want to play video games on their phones will need newer phones, but even they benefit from being able to sell their old one to the people who don't need that instead of having to throw it away.
Aside from that, I'm not sure that even web browsing would be very enjoyable on an iPhone 6s today considering that the performance demands of web pages are getting higher and higher.
I'm kind of surprised that isn't more popular in general, because the hotspot lets you connect all your devices with one plan for <$10/month if you don't use a lot of cellular data, e.g. because you mostly use it in your car and spend most of your time connected to some other WiFi.
A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. Computers changed leaps and bounds in the first 20 years just like smartphones have.
Sure my 2010 Dell Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM can run Windows 10.
But a computer bought in 1997 couldn’t run the then current Windows OS in 2010.
Linux can do something very similar. You can run the latest version of Gentoo Linux today on an Intel 486 from 1989.
The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later.
> A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone.
It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music?
Why not connect the USB and turn it into a NAS or a doorbell camera or any of the things anybody would do with a Raspberry Pi?
What could you do with it in 2012? A 2010 Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop can run Windows 10. Browse the modern web, mine had gigabit Ethernet, could run the latest version of Office decently and had a 500Gb hard drive.
> It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music?
Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage.
Even back in 2004 - 3 years before the iPhone. I had this
https://www.lacie.com/support/multimedia/classic-hd/
It was a much better NAS than trying to repurpose an iPhone with very bad Wifi.
You are going to “read text” on a 3.5 inch 320x480 Poot resolution screen in 2023?
And you want Apple to continue supporting a “phone” that can’t be used as a phone anymore?
Now you're arguing against yourself. An original iPhone is much more capable than an i386.
> Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage.
But as you point out, the storage is quite small. The hardware could perfectly well stream over WiFi, until you take away security updates and the ability to install the app.
> It was a much better NAS than trying to repurpose an iPhone with very bad Wifi.
A modern one would be better still, but I'm trying to use the thing I already have sitting in a drawer, not acquire something else.
And sometimes the performance is irrelevant. If I'm just using it for automated backups I don't much care if it finishes in one minute or ten.
> You are going to “read text” on a 3.5 inch 320x480 Poot resolution screen in 2023?
Maybe I wouldn't, but some kid whose alternative is having no device at all, sure.
> And you want Apple to continue supporting a “phone” that can’t be used as a phone anymore?
It was never just a phone, but hotspot + WiFi calling and it still is a phone. To say nothing of Signal or similar.
Your argument comes down to "newer things are better," but that isn't the same as older things are trash. Until you stop updating them and refuse to provide the documentation needed for anybody else to do it.
I’m arguing that my 2010 Dell Core2Duo that had 8GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 display has specs that in some ways are equivalent to a computer you could buy today and has hardware capable of running the latest browsers, the latest version of Office has enough RAM, has wired Ethernet that is still capable of completely taking advantage of my gigabit Ethernet and has wireless N.
A 2007 iPhone has a crappy display, not enough memory or processing power to run a modern web browser and can’t actually function as a phone. My old first gen iPad crashes repeatedly on modern web pages. Of course I have newer devices.
The earliest iPhone that has any decent hardware to handle the modern web is the iPhone 5s. Apple just a released a security update for it recently but
What are children going go do with it if it can’t even use the modern web? They would be much better off getting one of the many $40 unsubsidized unlocked phones you can buy on Amazon.
And from working with different educational institutions, I know for a fact that they think old computers are more trouble than they are worth and would much rather have a bunch of low cost ChromeBooks.
If you want to help a child, give money to the organizations instead of junk computers.
> It was never just a phone, but hotspot + WiFi calling and it still is a phone. To say nothing of Signal or similar
The first gen iPhone couldn’t support hotspot functionality nor could it do wifi calling.
Again, why try to keep an old half functioning phone when you could buy a much more capable $30 Android phone.
Even in developing countries the average phone user has a much better phone than the original phone. The phone penetration rate even in the poorest countries is 80-90%
And on top of that, Apple only sold around 10 million first gen iPhones. How many do you think are still in the wild?
The Core 2 Duo is so old they don't even test it against the modern benchmark suites, but the Pentium Dual Core is the same chip with a different amount of L2 cache:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/65?vs=67
The difference between these and modern CPUs is stark:
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2693?vs=2911
But the Core 2 Duo is still useful for many of the things it could do at introduction. As is the original iPhone.
> A 2007 iPhone has a crappy display, not enough memory or processing power to run a modern web browser
"Modern web browsers" are more efficient than old ones. It's modern web pages that are resource hogs, but that depends on the page.
> What are children going go do with it if it can’t even use the modern web?
I hear the kids are into texting.
> They would be much better off getting one of the many $40 unsubsidized unlocked phones you can buy on Amazon.
The ones that aren't actually unsubsidized because they're full of crapware?
> And from working with different educational institutions, I know for a fact that they think old computers are more trouble than they are worth and would much rather have a bunch of low cost ChromeBooks.
Google designed ChromeBooks as a mechanism to get people into their ecosystem. They allow the administrators to externalize the cost of that onto the kids, and they're under enough resource constraints that they're willing to do it, but that doesn't make it in the best interest of the kids.
Given the choice between Chromebooks and "Core 2 Duo laptops" running some Debian derivative, the kids would get more out of the latter, even if they're slower. And have higher administrative costs because the kids can mess with them -- that's how they learn about computers.
> The first gen iPhone couldn’t support hotspot functionality nor could it do wifi calling.
You don't use the phone as a hotspot, you use a hotspot to connect the phone to the internet via WiFi as a workaround for its obsolete cell modem that Apple chose not to make replaceable. And WiFi calling is an app, not a characteristic of the hardware.
> Again, why try to keep an old half functioning phone when you could buy a much more capable $30 Android phone.
Less crapware, less e-waste, save $30 (recurring, since the crap Android phone will probably be out of support again in a year).
> Even in developing countries the average phone user has a much better phone than the original phone. The phone penetration rate even in the poorest countries is 80-90%
But many of those devices don't have significantly better hardware than the original iPhone...
> And on top of that, Apple only sold around 10 million first gen iPhones. How many do you think are still in the wild?
Not as many as there would have been.
But even if they don't want to support it themselves, what's their excuse for not publishing their hardware documentation so someone else can do it?
And that doesn’t obviate the fact that I know from personal experience that it could run Chrome, Windows 10, the latest version of Office365 and it could be used as a Plex server to serve standard definition and low complexity high def video.
> Modern web browsers" are more efficient than old ones. It's modern web pages that are resource hogs, but that depends on the page.
Modern web browsers are much less memory and resource efficient than old ones.
The first gen iPad from 2010 - 4 years newer can’t handle modern web pages except for HN. It had 256MB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.
> Given the choice between Chromebooks and "Core 2 Duo laptops" running some Debian derivative, the kids would get more out of the latter, even if they're slower. And have higher administrative costs because the kids can mess with them -- that's how they learn about computers
Yes because the ROI of old Linux devices that aren’t centrally managed without standardize hardware or any MDM solution is going to be much easier to manage.
> You don't use the phone as a hotspot, you use a hotspot to connect the phone to the internet via WiFi as a workaround for its obsolete cell modem that Apple chose not to make replaceable
So yes. There is nothing else that you need to do with an iPhone with a 400Mhz processor, a really slow bus, 128MB of RAM and a total of 4GB - 8GB of storage except make the modem upgradeable.
> Less crapware, less e-waste, save $30 (recurring, since the crap Android phone will probably be out of support again in a year).
So instead, Apple should keep supporting the original iPhone that sold around 10 million in the first year…
> But many of those devices don't have significantly better hardware than the original iPhone...
This is a $70 phone from Amazon.
Are you really going to say it’s not any better than an iPhone from 2007, with a 30 pin iPod connector, 128MB RAM, a low resolution camera that couldn’t do video, 4-8GB storage, and a 400Mhz processor?
And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
> Modern web browsers are much less memory and resource efficient than old ones.
Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers. But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.
> Yes because the ROI of old Linux devices that aren’t centrally managed without standardize hardware or any MDM solution is going to be much easier to manage.
You're telling me why Google was smart to make their "get 'em while they're young" tech appeal to administrators, not why this is better for the kids.
> So yes. There is nothing else that you need to do with an iPhone with a 400Mhz processor, a really slow bus, 128MB of RAM and a total of 4GB - 8GB of storage except make the modem upgradeable.
Nothing else you need to make phone calls.
> So instead, Apple should keep supporting the original iPhone that sold around 10 million in the first year…
Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.
And the only reason they're the only ones who can support it is that they don't publish sufficient documentation for anyone else to make drivers for it. They could do that once at the end official support and no one would have any complaints.
> Are you really going to say it’s not any better than an iPhone from 2007, with a 30 pin iPod connector, 128MB RAM, a low resolution camera that couldn’t do video, 4-8GB storage, and a 400Mhz processor?
You can get a Core i5-4590 PC for less than $50. Are you really going to say it's not any better than a Core 2 Duo with no AVX, a max of 8GB of RAM and USB2?
That doesn't make the Core 2 Duo useless.
I dusted off my old iPad from 2010 - a device that was four years newer a couple of years ago. It couldn’t handle many web pages.
I also dusted off my old 1st gen iPod Touch a couple of years ago it had the same hardware - except for the cellular modem - as the first gen iPhone. Do you remember that with the first gen iPhone, it didn’t have enough memory and processing power to hold an entire page in memory? If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard pattern while the rendering caught up. The iPhone couldn’t even handle what was the modern web then.
It definitely couldn’t handle inline video. It didn’t even have enough memory to allow you to have a background image on the Home Screen.
> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
Texting and SMS always goes over the carriers network. The carriers don’t support their 2G network anymore.
> Nothing else you need to make phone calls.
You remember that whole problem that the 2G original iPhone works on a network that is not supported anymore?
> Why not? Their OS is portable.
The “modern” version of iOS is not “portable” to a phone that only has a 400Mhz processor and 128GB of RAM. iOS 5 could barely run on the first generation iPad that was 4 years newer. The original iPhone struggled with iOS 3.
> 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.
> Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines
They are “more efficient” because they have multistage just in time compilers that cache the pre compiled code. Caching takes memory - modern iPhones have 3GB - 6GB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.
A modern iPhone also has multiple cores. Some of those cores can be used to do JIT on the JavaScript code while other cores are used to make sure that the UI is responsive. The original iPhone had one slow 400Mhz slow core compared to the 4-6 multi GHz cores.
> and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers.
Desktop operating systems have swap where they can swap memory to disk and they also have a larger 64 bit memory space. The original iPhone didn’t have swap and it only has a 32 bit processing space.
Even today, Safari will unload pages when it runs out of memory and refresh it losing context. But do you remember that whole issue that the original iPhone couldn’t keep the graphic context of one entire page in memory?
> But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.
That’s not true on mobile even today.
> Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices.
Back when the iPhone was introduced, Jobs said he wanted to capture 1% of the cellular market by selling 10 million devices. The iPhone only made up 1% of the cell phone market as it existed in 2007. How many users do you think were still using an original iPhone in 2010 let alone 2023?
> That doesn't make the Core 2 Duo useless.
The Core2Duo is not useless precisely because it can do what a modern computer user wants to do - run the latest OS, run the latest browser, use a decent wireless network standard (802.11n), mine had gigabit Ethernet which is still the highest speed commercially available to most consumers, run the latest version of Office365. It has a front facing camera and a nice screen. Low end computers today still come with 8GB of RAM. The average low end computer today still comes with less than 500GB of hard drive space.
The original iPhone can’t function as a phone. It has 40-60x less memory than a modern iPhone, 8-16x less storage, an outdated wifi technology (802.11g)
I've also a laptop built in 2006, it runs [any flavour of Linux I want] and will be supported indefinitely.
Sure we have abandon-ware that requires a Windows 95 desktop or a Windows 2000 installation, but bringing a piece of actively developed Windows software forward through the version in the past 25+ years has been relatively easy.
I picked Linux/Unix and languages like Python 20 years ago, so it's a little late for me, but if I could go back in time, I'm not sure that Windows and C++ wouldn't have been an equally good choice.
We need a good standardized phone and bootloader system so that software comes back into the control of users on cell phones.
Those are from the release date of the phone, but I think they're doing roughly annual releases on that line.
Edit: Samsung also planned for longer device life - there's an option to turn on a battery saver feature that caps charge at 85%, which should significantly increase the years of service from the battery.
This is their current security update list (not os updates) https://security.samsungmobile.com/workScope.smsb
"... And select devices launched in 2019 or later will be supported with firmware security updates for a minimum of four (4) years following their global launch, while select newer devices will receive up to five (5) years of security updates."
It's a good start I'd say, considering that Samsung is a major player in the android phone space.
As the first 64-bit phone and the first phone with a proper Secure Enclave (TPM+biometric auth) it's received a lot of love from Apple.
I have a PC that I build myself over 9 years ago and run linux on. I upgrade hardware as needed but I will never have to worry about security update nonsense.
And it's not a fair comparison either, an iPhone which isn't updated is a big security issue due to everything being so coupled to the OS, on Android it depends of the security flaw affected itself.
I'm not defending the poor upgradability to Android but they worked around that a lot.
I don't think that's remotely true. People who buy budget phones are not typically the tech enthusiasts who buy new phones every two years. Instead the market analysis has likely shown that people are way more impressed by "repairability" than by "long security updates". Otherwise we would long have Android phones with security update durations similar to iOS.
How does it work Android in this regard?
I guess it’s not like Windows where if my hardware is supported I can install the latest supported version?
I suppose it’s somewhat interesting in the industry difference between supporting hardware with updates as if it’s firmware, and supporting software with updates like an OS. (Not advocating for windows for anything at all BTW)
So, say your phone has old Android version x. You're fine until a security hole shows up, or your banking app says "Our app needs Android version x+1. Please update your phone.". Oops, not offered by phone. Install a custom ROM. Banking app says "This device is not certified and for your own security, we refuse to run on this phone."...
It's complicated with Android due to closed-source drivers, someone needs to create an installer for the specific phone model. The installation process is also more complicated than installing a new OS on a PC, but it's perfectly doable if you can follow written instructions. I recommend checking your phone's forum on XDA, you'll see what the community made.
A iPhone 14 costs ~1000 EUR where I am. If you expect to get 7 years of security updates out of it (I think that's what Apple says? Not sure, someone please correct me), then it'll be 142 EUR per year.
Three times the price, if you calculate it per year.
After three years of having this Nokia phone, you can buy the new model, have it for three years again, and repeat this in a total of 6 times (900 EURs, for security updates during 18 years), and you still didn't pay as much as you paid for the iPhone.
So with all of this in mind, seems to be a pretty OK guarantee, timeline and price, at least compared to the "flagship" smartphone that Apple makes.
You still get the same amount of years of security updates though, if you buy the cheapest model from Apple or not.
It’s a bummer that this is normalized.
It seems like people's wants and needs change with whatever the hell Apple decides to do.
If you have a 5 years-old never-patched Android, probably a student can go read disclosed security issues, pick one that they understand (or for which they found a tutorial online), and hack you. It's not the same thing as saying that your patched iPhone can be hacked by NSO, though.
Whose sales pitch would that be? I haven't noticed that, I believe security is mostly seen a source of cost.
Also we tend to change phone frequently, which is the same as a security update. But if you keep it for 5 years, it starts to matter more.
> Would I have been hacked if I stuck with my Pixel 3? Hard to say.
Everyone should fasten their seat belt when driving a car, but it does not mean at all that if you don't, then you will have an accident. But if you did, it is an established fact that the seat belt would probably help.
People do get hurt by security issues. Remember NSO Pegasus? Would you want that to be out in the wild, such that a kid in your daughter's school could get access to her phone/social media/camera/pictures?
I am pretty sure you do want some level of security.
And for those, you need security updates.
My Nexus 5 still working ok, some problems started when apps started to drop support of the Android version, and that happens several years before it stopped receiving OS updates.
Don't want to downplay that will be great that OS updates should be longer that the current standard, but sometimes tech minded people here in HN thinks that a day after stopped receiving updates the phone is a useless brick ais not the case.
Speaking about batteries, what would be nice if they added a setting that allows defining charging limits, e.g. like what we have on Lenovo Thinkpads. (You can specify both the upper threshold and also the lower one, so that charging doesn't start if the battery is above that level even if you connect the device. Which you may do to a phone even without wanting to charge, e.g. if you use it as a modem.)
This is what I see online, but this hasn't been my experience for any of my devices. My current phone is on year 5 with the same battery, and it's still very decent. I charge it every day to 100% and often plug it back in while it's still at 50%, so it's not like I'm being more careful than usual.
There's a cynical part of me that thinks that these kinds of numbers are put forward by the industry to feed the narrative that these gadgets need to be replaced regularly.
I had an iPhone 6s that I used for about 5-6 years before upgrading and giving it to a friend to use. I replaced its battery at about the 4 year mark, and as far as I know it’s still going strong. I wanted to upgrade it earlier than that, and I could afford to - but why bother when my phone already did everything I needed it to do?
3 years of security updates is a joke. The hardware easily lasts over a decade if you want it to.
When I bought the phone the battery was one downside I thought about but thought "it will probably be OK". I was wrong ^^ And due to its aluminum unibody construction you must remove the display to replace the battery, nothing I would want to risk on my daily driver device.
But if you think about it, it doesn't even work here. First of all, no one can tell you that your battery has a poor capacity, because you test it daily. And people are pretty sensitive to this issue, because we have tricked the manufacturers to create phones that have just enough capacity. (By requiring faster phones, larger, better screens and thinner phones. And not requiring a battery that lasts much more than a day.)
Actually that 'narrative' has the opposite effect: there are a lot of articles online that tell you how to enhance the life of the batteries. (Whether it's really needed or not doesn't make a difference.)
Regarding charging it from 50%: this is not something that hurts Li batteries. Actually it's better than allowing it to drain (or go into some unspecified low percentages, probably below 20 or 10). Charging to 100% is said to have a negative effect. I mean it probably wears faster than if you charge to just 85%.
Like Samsung Battery Protection? It limits charging to 85%. I would personally have used the 80% threshold, but after 2+ years of heavy use, the battery has held up quite well on this Note 20.
If they wanted to make a truly repairable phone, they'd release the source code for all the binary blobs to enable the folks at LineageOS to continue to release fixes past the manufacturer's notional end of support period (which does not correlate with the possible lifespan of the device).
For some reason, hardware manufacturers have decided that their manuals are secret.
Of course, if you ban distribution of your product manuals, then only criminals that pirate your IP will be able to properly implement drivers for your product…
Man, if they put out a more modern piece of hardware that was designed on the same principle, I'd bye 5. (one backup and the others as gifts for skeptics.)
And I'd promise to say at least one sycophanticlly positive thing about Nokia for a year!
(sigh)
PS
I do realize that this in no way am actual response to the previous. I thought someone who might have an unbidden spasm of hope at the thought might have a better day if reminded of that one brief moment when an engineer's device made a brief appearance on the market's mass :)
Sorry, but can you explain this a little more. It's coming off as pretty offensive.
Most poor people do have the skills to take their device into a repair shop to have it repaired?
It makes a big difference to the price of the repair if the device is designed to be repairable. Even better if it’s something a user can do themselves, such as replace the battery in a Nokia 3310.
This is simply not true. At least in my country, poor people generally have interest and the skills to repair their devices (or to pay someone to do so, as it's cheaper than buying a new one)
Nope, you don't.
It's just that somehow techies seem to have gotten this meme into their heads that an unpatched life isn't worth living. Can't update my phone within 1 microsecond of a patch being released? I guess I might as well just die. Much safer than risking the << 1% chance of getting malware on it, and everyone knows malware is worse than hell.
> The repairability sounds nice, but it is very irrelevant compared to the limited software updates.
I had an Android phone that didn't have OS updates for several years and... it was just fine. I was only forced to finally upgrade to get better reception on other bands it didn't support. If the hardware could keep pace I would've easily kept it with its current OS for another half decade, until apps just got so bloated that I couldn't use it anymore.
> Imagine buying a Windows laptop and only receiving three years of security updates
That's a bad analogy for so many reasons. Android's security is WAY more hardened than Windows's, your phone's apps (including your [likely] Chrome browser) would still get security updates, and even with Windows this isn't as horrifying as you're suggesting. (I've done much worse.)
Many people would buy a phone that will never receive a single update. The software it came with is the only software it'll ever run. And they're fine with that. They see software updates as an annoyance and I fully understand them.
I you look at that data then you can see that the oldest version with any significant usage is v8.1. But even that is quite low, and you might do quite well in not supporting anything older than v9.0.
How do you say this without any knowledge whatsoever about the type of app they work on, or their target audience? v6.0 alone is almost 2% of users based on that chart. In fact if you include everything before v8.1, you seem to get something like 8% of users. What if their app, say, provides the poorest people access to public transportation? Would you really just drop 8% of people on the floor in any scenario?
Is it a pain to support old SDKs? Yep. But that doesn't make it inherently a waste of time to do so.
But most of that can be done with polyfills and transpilers, which the android gradle plugin does automatically nowadays.
But the apps still work and get updated and that for her and most people is enough.
It's not ideal and as she is not tech-literate, the day might come where she clicks on something which exploits an unpatched vuln :/
Malware can indeed be worse than hell. Have you ever had your bank account hacked? Or your email account broken into? Or your identity stolen and had to deal with dozens of credit cards being registered and then hit the limit under your name?
I’ve had friends (and family) deal with such things, and you know what? I’ll do anything to minimize the risk for myself, including throwing away an expensive gadget that can no longer receive updates for some totally arbitrary reason.
I've never been to hell (I think?)... I suppose I can't assume you're the same, but I'm pretty confident I would much rather deal with, say, a stolen identity, than go to hell.
Most people's risk-tolerances including many life-threatening dangers they face on a daily basis... like getting hit while jaywalking, having their phone igniting in their hands and burning their homes down, dying in an earthquake, etc. If you can't tolerate the same risks as most other people, then great, you have lots of alternative options to choose from. It's not like Nokia is preventing you from imposing your will on yourself or your family.
To be honest - as an older-phone user, that's part of why I never access email on my phone, nor my bank account. I see my phone as something that's basically insecure, and take into account (no pun intended) the possibility that other people will be able to access its contents.
I realize, though, that many old phone users don't hold this view necessarily.
This collective delusion is the main justification for SaaS which is what the tech industry in current year is dependent on .
Do you wish to hear the endless stream of CVE numbers that allow remote exploitation, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module vulnerabilities that don't even require an active Internet connection?
Have you ever tried to expose a new server to the Internet and watched the endless barrage of probing requests coming seemingly within seconds?
Have you been a target of DDoS coming from unpatched appliances and modems?
The only place for an unpatched phone is offline, within Farady cage.
It's a dangerous life given phones are now used for everything from banking and 2FA.
That's the funny thing. Security? I don't want updates and my phone is over 6 years old.
But the app developers usually threatens and holds my data ransom until I update. Some have the audacity to update upon any internet connection in direct contravention of my "no background data usage" policy on any connection.
Funny that.
Support seems to vary even between models though, so there's no guarantee support for continue as long for any others.
I guess tech people are way too much worried about security/software updates.
I am so sick of the whole smartphone crap. Google monopoly (well, there is Apple, but it's worse), unhandy sizes, electronic waste years too early.
However, you can run alternate Android versions and get security updates even longer, outside of security updates for component firmware.
Previous versions of the Fairphone also weren't available in the US due to as I understand it hurdles posed by FCC approval (and I would assume the Canadian equivalent).
On parent’s point, the Nokia g22 is 180 euros, the iPhone 11 at same capacity was 700 euros at launch. You can’t expect Nokia to contractually promise 8 years of OS updates at that price point.
To note, iPhone also don’t have 5+years of OS support promises, we’re just looking at the trend and assume that it will continue. I’d also expect this Nokia to have a bit more than 3 years of support time, we just don’t know how much.
This is not a high standard in the year 2023.
My Samsung S10 5G is turning 4 in a few months, still receiving regular security updates.
android doesn't require google services to work
The goal behind efforts like the Librem 5 or PinePhone is not to create yet another Android phone, which Open Source or not will strengthen the Duopoly of Google and Apple in the Mobile Phone Operating System market. The goal is to create hardware that can jump-start the development of a true GNU/Linux Mobile Operating System.
With its real world use case, it has brought great advances to Mobile "Desktop" Environments like Plasma Mobile or Phosh by motivating developers who could finally use their creations and improvements on a real phone.
Desktop OS allows to use desktop apps on the phone and enjoy convergence: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....
Android still runs the Linux kernel and the only reason you can't have shell access on it is user-hostile restrictions, which an open-source build wouldn't have.
I think it would be a lot easier to add desktop apps capability to Android for the minority that actually wants to run Linux apps on their phone than building a touch-optimized userspace from scratch.
If your desire is to run Linux desktop apps on Android I bet you can already do it if you find an X Server APK and got your Linux app to use it as your X display - that would've been a quick, pragmatic solution to satisfy the "Linux desktop" requirement while taking advantage of Android's mature & battle-tested touch-optimised userspace.
I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-convergence-pureos-is-co....
That's kind of irrelevant because they are currently developing a lot of apps to replace the functionality they'd get in Android for free. They'd save an insane amount of time and actually deliver a product competitive with mainstream phones right now, which would give them funding & marketshare to continue refining it down the line (potentially replacing it with non-Android components one at a time).
> There should be no difference between a phone and a desktop, except for the screen size
And the input method, which is a massive difference - touch and mouse are completely different, and so are the contexts in which phone vs desktop apps are used. If you try to merge the two, you'd look like the idiots who gave us Windows 8. So there's still effort in making specific UIs for different mediums.
> I can connect a screen and keyboard to my phone and use it as desktop
I'm not sure there's an actual need for it? This has even been tried by large companies such as Samsung and Microsoft and didn't go anywhere - in practice this isn't a problem the vast majority of people has and seems like an absurd thing to start with for a resource-constrained company in a very competitive market.
This is not true. They are stuck with hardware-specific things like power management, camera, and LTE calls. "Calls" application itself was developed very quickly, for example.
I don't think using permissively-licensed Android components wouldn't compromise user freedom and would actually increase it because it would put a non-user-hostile, freedom-respecting, usable phone in the market right now. You can just patch out or choose to not include the user-hostile bits (though most of those wouldn't be part of the open-source release in the first place).
Of course, this only applies if the objective is to deliver a usable, competitive product rather than practice effectively useless ideological bikeshedding similar to the war on systemd and refuse the admit that the typical GNU/Linux userspace is at this point prehistoric and significantly lacking compared to other alternatives (whether proprietary or open-source such as Android).
You should not run desktop apps on a phone, because smartphone have much less power. This is an important design feature. This is why smartphones OS are built differently.
And even then, I don't see how android "restricts" things. It's software. Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
You imply that having large power consumption is fine as long as the app is designed for desktop. I disagree: All apps should be as lightweight as possible to fight with the climate change and slow UI. I am using desktop Firefox on my Librem 5 just fine. All desktop plugins work, too.
> Android does not "restrict". It's an OS.
Android is designed in such a way that you cannot run desktop apps, despite the original Linux kernel.
What exactly do you mean by "desktop apps"? Of course it's not going to support KDE or GTK or QT or win32 or some other windowing API. But it's an OS, it can run software. And since it's open source, I don't see any reason why it would not run something.
Of course you would need to use the android API to do something, but it makes sense because it's a different OS.
It doesn't behave like a desktop OS, but as opposed to what, exactly? Desktop apps are a subset of software in general, desktop apps are not everything there is about software.
If you mean "I cannot run desktop apps because I need to redesign them so they can work on a phone", then yes, indeed, but a phone is not just "a small desktop".
Why not? It's a general-purpose computer, isn't it? Why intentionally design an OS in such a way that you must rewrite all software for it from scratch?
Yes, the UI is very different, but changing the UI is much easier than rewriting the program from scratch. Why is there no full Firefox on Android? It was already adapted for GNU/Linux phones and runs fine there, but not on Android. Same for LibreOffice AFAIK. Isn't it due to the design on this OS?
> Why not?
As I said, much less energy thus less processor cycles, much less L2 cache memory, no x86. The main reason it's entirely different is to force developers to make an app that doesn't drain battery, which is why it's very much different: it can do a single thing at a time, the software must be pause-able at any time, it can only run when the OS is okay with it, it can only animate in certain way, only use a very small subset of opengl capabilities, etc
The ways smartphones' OS work is a fundamental part of how it can save battery. It is painful for developers so that in the end, batteries last longer. Desktop software is millions years away from being energy-efficient, most of desktop or server software is generally ruled by the law of Wirth: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster."
Of course it's a big constraint of how developers can make their software work, but they don't need to rewrite "everything", they just have to adapt.
Why is GNU important? toybox's coreutils is a good enough replacement. If you really wanted you could install GNU's core utils. 99% of users don't want to be messing with command line tools anyways.
Android already brought Linux as a mobile operating system to the mainstream.
The boot loader will probably be unlocked sooner or later. It should be open, but I think it's reasonable to expect either update support or unlocked booting, not necessarily both.
In a gook device, that is. You have to remember that most consumers do not want to know how their phone works or to become expert in its configuration. They just want it to work.
A compromise here would be to have an option to unlock everything, but with the understanding that by doing so you opt out of warranty service.
Is your iPhone's boot loader unlocked?
Reducing cost and making it more repairable is a step in the right direction, but there is no reason why shouldn't get 5-6+ years of life out of a mobile phone.
Seemingly battery replacement can still be done "in 5 minutes" but this still makes pop-out/on the road battery swapping unpractical. https://www.trustedreviews.com/reviews/nokia-g22
The way you could buy cases that replaced the back cover meant for a much thinner profile phone than the typical metal case wrapped in silicone.
Replaceable batteries are glorious. I never plugged-in my phone, just flipped the battery with one from the charger when I left the house. Instant 100% battery. Travelling? Just take a few charged batteries at a fraction of the weight of a power-bank and much more convenient.
The back cover coming off accidentally has never happened to me.
Ah, the memories of classmates playing soccer with phones in high school... phones could run MSN, browse websites (without JS! The .mobi site owners were just forced to make sites lightweight), play Java-based games, had replaceable screen covers, honestly what more should we want? That it's now open source Android instead of proprietary Symbian is great, but slap a touchscreen on it for web browsing and upgrade it from GPRS to 4G or so, and theoretically we could just have nice things.
How often do you need to replace your battery? Maybe twice in 4 years? What percentage of people keep a phone for more than 4 years? 5%?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hIoyb9L5g0
...but then stopped making removable batteries after that.
Cant stop laughing thinking about it, luxurious homes with all the trimmings then have the whole family gather around the extension cord. Like on a construction site. Imagine guns worked like this. We can glue in the cartridge and you'd be able to shoot people for many years? 6 shots should be enough for 3 years when the software expires.
So it has fallen out of style. There is no market for spare batteries and using them as range extenders is not common use. It seems like an outlandish thing to do now.
I think I went through three batteries on my Galaxy Note 2 (first Android phone) before upgrading. Apps dropping support became a problem... nothing wrong with the hardware at the time where I felt forced to trash it. Anyway, carrying an extra battery for long travel days was not a weird thing to do. I also remember non-tech people having spare batteries for Nokias (when they became more capable; not when the only use was calling your mom to say you were going to a friend's after school).
I and tens of millions other people used removable back cover phones for years before the sealed phone became the norm.
Edit: Can anyone explain why they think that this is wrong? I am genuinely interested.
I really used user-removable battery phones for close to a decade. I found no issues.
I suspect it is this: > Only forced obsoleting by the company. No other reasons exist.
While companies do want you to buy the newest version every year or two, it is more likely that cost-benefit analysis tells them to build the way they build; they know they must release newer better phones periodically because the competition will do this also. But to support older phones has a cost, and at some point those old phones don't generate enough revenue to justify the cost of supporting them.
And then you can’t think of reasons for the downvotes?
I see a pattern, maybe?
But then thickness and aesthetic "cheapness" is a secondary one.
A removeable cover and battery is always going to introduce a little bit of thickness, which on a thin phone is noticeable even if not major.
And then whether you have screws or the ridges for removing the cover, it just always feels a little "cheap". You can't get the same kind of rounded smooth glass or aluminum backing that wraps seamlessly around the edges.
And when people are comparing two phones in their hands, the one that feels more "premium" is often the one they'll go with if they feel they're already paying a premium price. This is an object they hold in their hand all day long. And if you live in a major city, it's really not a big deal to get your battery replaced after 2 years at an Apple Store.
Samsung Galaxy S5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1MDGQzNMYI
It's a thin, twisty rubber gasket held in place by a flimsy plastic back.
And in my experience with anything involving thin rubber gaskets, they degrade and just flat-out break incredibly easily.
E.g. with wristwatches, it's common knowledge that as soon as you replace the battery in a water-resistant watch, you shouldn't consider it water-resistant anymore. You might get lucky once or twice in recreating the same seal it had at the factory, but you should probably assume you didn't.
https://3dnews.ru/assets/external/illustrations/2014/03/25/8...
https://mobi-center.com.ua/image/cache/data/Jiayu-G5S-MTK659...
That phone was waterproof but had a special ridge around the back panel.
Spare batteries can only be used with the phone, whereas power banks are standard and usable with many other devices if needed.
Also, small phone batteries usually don't come with a carrying case. They're fragile and you could accidentally short them.
Not exactly the same thing, but I have a Garmin heartrate chest strap with a replaceable battery (no charging) -- in the US the cover swivels open to change, but in Australia it requries a screw, for child safety rules. I Thought that was interesting
I'm not sure if any countries have similar regulations related to larger Li-ion rechargeable batteries.
This is one of the delights of the Moto z series phones because they have magnetic batteries that can be swapped on and off with your bare hands without even having to open up a battery cover or power off the phone.
Custom ROM from day 1 may delay the need to replace the battery.
> available for five years through ifixit
this is not the win-win it's touted to being vs a high quality phone that just works for 5 years.
Otherwise it'll be bogged down with bloatware and will be useless as soon as security updates aren't available anymore.
But if so, very nice :)
Based on some superficial Googling, this phone's predecessor, G21 also comes without an unlockable bootloader.
Cool thing about 6.1 is that it's officially supported by LineageOS
The parent comments weren’t specific about whether this phone’s bootloader can be unlocked, but when they talk about this phone’s locked bootloader, I think unlockability is the issue they are really talking about.
I'm actually excited for this. My family tends to shop in this price range, and you've got a lot of fairly interchangeable phones out there. It ends up being sort of frustrating because there's no obvious right choice.
Now you have a simple argument. You don't have to deep dive explain to Mom the difference between CPUs or manufacturer update policies, just "If this one breaks, it can be fixed without a huge production number."
There was a time when one of the (admittedly secondary) arguments for buying an iPhone or Galaxy S (as opposed to a cheaper alternative) was that the local fix shops had a lot of dead scrap units and could arrange for a cheap quick fix, while if you bought a Nokia or Umidigi, you were waiting weeks for them to get parts and it was probably twice the cost because they didn't want to work on a phone they weren't wildly familiar with.
- nearly indestructible
- well priced
- back pops out
Nokia is doing the most sensible thing to reuse these as its differentiator.
I understand people taking about the OS. But Nokia has little control over the software and it has also never been its selling point for me with Symbian, and later Windows Phone.
I sure miss their wonky phones with weirdly arranged buttons and their random quirks.
Or have they always just done design - like Apple - and someone else manufactured them?
Now HMD make them, I think.
And yes, I know some of you probably also do that.
Maybe I'm just a penny pinching old man
There are loads of premium refurbishment outfits like refurbed.at (Austrian) who will sell you a second hand device in mint condition.
There are also high-street tech repair shops that usually sell second hand devices, and one chain here (webuy) that work a little like Gamestop but also buy back electronics. They underpay and overcharge just like Gamestop, but it still works out way cheaper than new, and they provide a warranty.
I've bought from all three sources for myself and my family. I only had an issue with a device from webuy one time, and since it's local I was able to go back in and get a refund the following week.
Well, most used phones are sold rather than destroyed, and get well past their last update. So maybe a quarter the phone-time in the world is post-end-of-update. Plus, many manufacturers offer brand-new phones which cost under 100 USD (look for Doogee X95 for example - 80 bucks or so).
A search for g22 on nokia.com yields zero (!!) results. https://www.nokia.com/search/global/en/G22
I'll be shopping for a new phone soon and am interested in this model. But wow, they've missed a huge opportunity to capture that interest and let me know when I can buy!
Update: "Lo sentimos, algo ha salido mal. Comprueba la dirección de correo electrónico y vuelve a intentarlo."
OS updates also very short so this phone is quickly going to end up on LineageOS.
Phones are a tiny amount of waste. Trying to get a few extra years out of one is a microoptimization in reducing one's waste output.
Can you elaborate on that? Seems completely wrong to me.
- Sent from my Xiaomi A2 Lite (released 2018), currently running Android 13
Heck grapheneOS stops supporting devices shortly after google because they can't really offer full security coverage.
The amount of privacy abusive traffic was astonishing. Stopping it made the phone basically unusable. I hope some day a real open source, user rights focused OS can accompany something like this.
Third party repair shops told me it takes $100 to fix the USB C port, almost 1/3 the phone price. Needless to say I didn’t do that and the phone died shortly after only because it couldn’t get charged anymore. Switched to other brands and will never buy Nokia again.
Not exactly top-tier hardware-wise. But the Librem is running a mainline Linux kernel, so it will have a decade or more of software support and security updates.
Users can’t do board or component level repairs, and Nokia isn’t making schematics, diagnostic software and access to low level firmware that will be needed to independently repair this phone available.
User replaceable battery is nice, however every other component is reliant on a supply on parts being made available for the long run which is unlikely to happen since there will never be a healthy supply chain for niche devices.
I’ve serviced multiple iPhones replacing a battery and broken screens with no equipment other than what came in the kit (and an hair dryer) and not the Apple one.
Yes it’s a PITA but honestly they open easily with a hair dryer and a suction cup.
What is far more important on the “right to repair” front is long term software support which the lack of bricks far more devices than any hardware failures, a healthy supply chain and not DRMing components.
The former 2 is something that iFixIt always seems to ignore especially the first one the latter is something I that should be the focus of RtR legislation together with a guarantee for parts being made available for a period of X years from when the devices officially stop being sold just in the same way that car manufacturers and in the past appliance manufacturers were forced to.
The problem is with manufacturers. Encrypting parts, so simple part swap does not work. Or replacement screen for $300...
Apple is really really bad when it comes to repairability!
Apple isn’t that bad, and being able to find parts for 10 year old devices and actually having nearly a decade of software support makes up for it.
Ofc it would be better if they didn’t lock down parts further at least the screen and battery aren’t locked down yet.
I replaced a screen on an iPhone XS not even a month ago with a £30 kit from Amazon that came with everything needed including a new liquid protection seal.
Apple should definitely get flack what what they do but this pathetic attempt is just that pathetic this isn’t a way forward in any practical manner.
If you really think you’ll be able to find parts for this phone in 5 years then well I got a bridge to sell you. And not for nothing it will turn into a paper weight after the 3 years of software support period will be over.
And driving up the cost of repairs. If I want to turn off the thing that bricks the identification features, there's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to do that- my device follows my orders, not the other way around.
Yes, but Apple provides low-cost replacement parts. Like the cost of an iphone battery via apple store or apple self-service is objectively reasonable, so yeah, you can't use amazon batteries and who cares?
> If I want to turn off the thing that bricks the identification features, there's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to do that
The reason is because it encourages the resale of stolen goods, which encourages the theft of goods.
"Why shouldn't my dollars do what I tell them to, they're paper in MY wallet" well if what you're telling them to do is buy a hot stereo out of the back of a truck, that's illegal and society is going to discourage that because we don't want our stereo to be stolen next. And stereos are going to be built with things (like serial numbers) that help prevent that. Even if you feel that infringes your privacy (serials are the root of all this tracking after all!) tough shit.
That's always the problem, the people complaining pick out specific elements and whine about that one thing being unfair and ignore that they're specific elements of an overall system that includes elements to compensate the unfair parts.
Yes, iphones will only accept signed parts because that discourages theft, because the phone can't be stripped and sold as parts. And then Apple provides subsidized services (their service division runs at a loss) for people who want repair service, and at-cost OEM parts to anyone who wants to service their own phone. That's also why you have to buy parts individually - because they have to be paired to the phone. Yes, this is inconvenient for third-party service vendors who can't just keep a backroom of parts, but it's not infeasible, they just have to have users order their own parts. This is not John Deere where nobody but techs can even order parts, everyone can, they just don't want to have to.
The big-picture e-waste and service picture of iphones is completely fair overall for consumers. It's less fair for servicemen who have to deal with subsidized services and OEM parts being sold at-cost and losing revenue on selling those parts (rossman is not selling you a screen at-cost), but, that's what auto service centers had to learn to live with when RockAuto showed up in the picture too. And none of that is bad for consumers.
If you're just making a moral stand that you have a god-given right to put a $20 battery in your phone every 6 months instead of a $40 battery every 2 years, and you think that justifies unwinding anti-theft provisions and increasing e-waste to do it... just use the repair/service chains from the vendor like a normal human being, buddy. In the meantime we can all enjoy not having our phones stolen and stripped.
Or maybe a better analogy is removing immobilizers from cars. I have a god-given right to just have a normal metal key without needing to take it into the dealer to get it programmed, right? It's my car, why should I have to pay the manufacturer just to replace a $2 metal key? But in aggregate we're all better off not having well-developed criminal networks built around stealing and stripping cars... so people have just learned that they need to keep at least 2 spare keys at all times to program the immobilizer if they lose one, or else you'll have to take it in to a dealer and have the key programmed. It's just not that big a deal to most people, and actually the opposite is true - not having your car stolen is actually a huge deal to them.
Could you build a car without an immobilizer? Sure. Would it be more expensive to insure? Yes. Does anybody actually want that, apart from a few weirdos? No.
You're dodging the question.
If I buy a replacement Home button, I expect the fingerprint sensor within to work. The fact is, that expectation is objectively right; it neither breaks your arm or picks your pocket.
That's the entire reason why we're getting right to repair laws, for that matter; society agrees with me, and not you (and so you're wrong, by your own rules).
FaceID devices don’t have that problem since the front camera including the FaceID IR camera simply move from the old device to the new one.
It also was technically possible to move the old Touch ID sensor just a tad harder.
Apple doesn’t lock down screens and battery replacements (currently at least) as I’ve done both on 6-7 devices for F&F in the past decade or so.
Apple has by far some of the cheapest 1st party replacement services of the major brands, and also the cheapest OEM parts now Samsung charges far more at least in the UK.
3rd party parts are also much more readily available.
I’ve just recently replaced an XS screen with a £30 kit from Amazon for a Galaxy S10 which came out about the same time IIRC the cheapest replacement screen kit on Amazon is more than £200 and Samsung does no longer offer repair services despite the fact that this device isn’t even 5 years old.
Apple does a lot of shitty stuff and whilst it’s about as far from being a right to repair champion as one can imagine in reality the long term support they offer for their devices and the fact that they release only a limited number of SKUs each year whilst moving extremely large volumes of them makes that in practice their devices are the easiest to repair whether you are using 1st party, 3rd party or doing it yourself.
It pains me that TouchID sensors can't be reused/it's harder, because of the waste, but as a protection measure, I don't see any way around it.
Also the screen can be still easily reused and the rest of the parts can be salvaged for components that end up even in Apples own supply chain I suspect.
If your iPhone is stolen it will be in an electronics chop shop in China within a week.
EDIT: 3.5mm headphone jack too! Wow.
They wanted a barebones, no effort to catch up to top competitor phone, with more practicality, and everyday convenience in mind than putting in 10ghz CPU inside a phone.
We went for a year, and bang... Google probably seen client's PR, and banned Android phones without a superfluous gycoscope/accelerometer/etc stuff. We spent close to year on it.
I was fuming.
Going without a gyro or accelerometer is fine under normal conditions because you've got 2-of-3 so you can synthesize the output from the remaining sensor (my phone had synthetic gyro). But once you lose GPS fix you've lost your last degree-of-freedom and the only remaining sensor is the accelerometer, at which point the system goes into gimbal lock and the platform loses its fix.
It's on the level of a 2017 Google Pixel 2. I mean not bad but it' also £150/200€. For that much I'd rather get a used iPhone 11.
Also it's better because it has a physical keyboard :) Just IMO obviously :)
Recently got spare parts for mine such as battery and new charger port circuit. The manufacturer posts Youtube videos online on how to DIY it. Totally amazing IMO.
They couldn't get Android 13 in time? Seeing as it's already a major version behind, and 14 will be released in August 2023, you're really only getting another six months of software support (plus security fixes).
I'm not an Android dev but my understanding is that a lot of work has been put into making Android easier to upgrade major versions (eg, core functionality being split out into separate services). It doesn't look like that is translating into longer upgrade support, which is a shame. But I suppose that's why we're getting 5 years of security updates? (which is probably most important)
12 was easily the least stable Android I've ever used, and that's including three years of constant beta (sometimes nightly) use while I did Android development.
When I read the title I thought it was going to be a phone that costs <200€ and really just plug'n'play with all the parts. I was thinking of buying it just for the sake of supporting the movement, but now I'm just disappointed...
Was I expecting too much? I mean any repairability is better then none, but still this feels a bit too little...
That would be an opportunity for specialized boutique suppliers and probably for some innovation, even as a relatively niche market.
I have not seen much evolution in this space during the last 5-7 years, and I think the form factor is pretty much settled. Longevity and repairability are things we should prioritize, but ownership and customization are also important.
All of that could be built on standardized hardware, something close to the Raspberry Pi or Arduino.
I would not mind too much if the device was slightly bulkier/heavier in the end, I think we could achieve much better value.
Every mobile android device I've used through a desert summer has ruined its own battery from charging in the heat. It's basically a yearly replacement schedule if I stay through summers. Sometimes more often if I require the device and it's entirely useless with a swollen battery.
On top of that it comes with modern design, USB type C port, large battery (can easily last two days of moderate use) and fast charging (20W max).
What I've always wanted is a phone with swappable batteries and a tiny lipo that keeps the phone on for the few seconds it takes you to exchange batteries. Unlimited battery life without rebooting as long as you have charged batteries lying around.
Let's bring back the glory days of Nokia phones that stand the test of time.
Given that there are underlying standards for many of these components, I wonder if we might see the emergence of industry-standard de-facto form factors, at least for Android phones.
Bought Nokia 7.1 after it came out and it was a great phone
However, because of a chassis design flaw the charge port had excess leverage applied on it practically no matter what - had to replace charge port 6 times & battery twice over ~1.5 years.
Before that I had a Samsung Moto X Pure for idk how many years (got on release date), which I only had to replace an aged capacity battery once - no charge port issues to speak of (so it wasn’t me being excessively clumsy with the Nokia)
Swore off of Nokia after that experience along with a few other flaws in the phone… and I really wanted to like that phone.
Currently using 13 Pro Max as first Apple device & have been loving it.
Hopefully Nokia can make themselves look good with this phone, but it will probably take many years of good faith from them for me to ever reconsider
Also: I’ve been waiting on Nokias Withings watches to release their medical applications in the US for years now.
They could perhaps not get folks with medical issues hopes up if there is any reason something could be delayed for multiple years…
Yes I’d like a 2mm thick phone with 6 cameras I can replace every year. I’d like my phone to get closer and closer to toilet paper clogging the pipes of this planet.
That teardown is almost exactly identical to a Moto G30, and probably dozens of other budget smartphones with plastic cases and screws.
Parts availability was (and still is) great on the G30 too.
I could get one of these, add that to my laptop and a full frame mirrorless camera I bought recently. I could buy all of them for less than my daughters new iPhone. A proper computer, a proper camera and a smartphone!
i get that android is infested with malware. however, if people, even companies, can choose to stick with older versions of windows despite going out of support, regular folk who don't install random apps should have no issues with this.
also, not to disregard potential community rom support if this takes off.
I recently went though some frustration to root a Samsung handset - it required sorting through endless blog posts linking random executables from megaupload or google drive. Fragmented instructions on various forums; many incomplete or incorrect.
Which Android handsets best support rooting/jailbreaking by the vendor which provides a supported way to both unlock the bootloader and provide root access?
Size issues can be solved by sawing off protruding areas from back cover and duck tape (or 3D-printer). Thus you can have cellphone with swapable Lion AAA-cells for example.
Probably not, for that you need Nokia 1100 made in Bochum.
By the way: In 3 days iPhone battery replacement price will go up by $20, not such a good deal anymore. I can buy a budget phone at this price point.
If the camera on these is less crap… I probably still won’t buy it, because it has the same 3 years update policy as most Androids do.
But hey I might think about it harder.
edit: conversely, if fairphone ever ships with camera that’s better than 7 year old iPhone, then I’m game.
If your motherboard died... well that's unfortunate, but I believe it's not supposed to be the norm.
I, for one, am super happy with my 3+.
That is such a let-down! If Nokia is serious about sustainability, it needs to make it 5y+.
I get it, it is not easy. But with the proliferation of malware and exploits, after 3y (since release, not purchase) this phone is nothing but a liability.
In other words, updates are much less important on android than they are on the iPhone.
How do I determine which, if any, of these is fixed via the Play store update mechanism?
I'm on a Pixel 1 with Android 10. Last security update it got was from October 2019 which is about three years after the phone was introduced.
Is this supposed to be different on newer Android versions?
It started with the browser component many years ago, and has grown its coverage with each version. The limitations are mainly in the kernel, but they now even do graphics drivers this way (though that requires vendor cooperation, unlike everything else), but you wouldn't have that with Android 10.
This capability has steadily grown to cover more of the OS over time, particularly recently, so unfortunately, Yes, Android 10 does have much less of this ability then later versions.
It is called "Android security patch level", that is not a full firmware update. It may still be something else than you have in mind, though. (How) can I check the patch level of the security updates you are relating to?
I don’t know what comes through Play Store, only thing it tells me is that specific app was updated.
All I know is that my cell phone vendors tells I am not getting more security updates.
Consumers should not understand CVEs to feel safe.
So, while I see this as positive, I'll just wait a few years before I praise anybody.
But only 3 years of software support The bar isnt even low in this industry, its in the damn basement...
Wow, I remember when that was 5 seconds, and came standard on Android.
gsmarena says this g22 will have a 3.5mm headphone jack too.
They get as much credit as Apple gets for switching to USB-C to ensure legal compliance with that EU mandate: zero.
Doing it 5 years ago would have been brave, you don't get brownie points for complying with a legal mandate you opposed and fought.
So, after a year of use the cost of replacing a battery and the screen will be close the market value of a used phone. A lot of people will go for a new phone.
149.99 / 67.98 = 2.206
So the new phone costs >2x.
Also, why do you need to replace the battery after 1 year, let alone the screen?
That’s how consumers usually think about the benefits of a new phone I guess. Very few people care about sustainability.
I think much of the new phone-buying, Apple fanboys aside, is that carriers make it easy to constantly upgrade with "$0" upgrade plans (where you basically end up paying the full cost of the phone anyway.) Legislation to ban or shape this kind of advertising could be beneficial to reduce e-waste.
I have never had to replace a screen before, but I have bought new batteries to replace on my own. An easily replaceable one would be nice.
This definitely isn't going to be for everyone but, for what they're trying to do, IMO the numbers seem reasonable.
You were supposed to destroy the Sith not join them!
Nokia has been really great to work with. Their engineers genuinely want to make this phone easier to work on.
While hardware repairability is a pillar, it's only one of two and nothing without "software repair". Sadly even the ecodesign draft proposal (in the EU) goes soft on this topic and criticism of it (by eeb.org) still thinks only in "update duration" instead of the real ingredient of sustainability: software sources and ability to build it.
So, after three years either you will be lucky and it will be supported by someone else (read LineageOS and friends) or it will be seen and a security problem.
We don't need just hardware repairability, but also software support.
How original...
They have outsourced all the repair stuff to iFixit...
And that's why I stick to iPhones for long-lasting devices, those two major versions are a joke. Apple has the crown with seven on the iPhone 6S. When will someone make Android phones other than Pixels with non-abysmal software support? Yes, I know you can install alternate ROMs on your phone, but this is not what the general public does, especially with a phone at this price point. The average joe will definitely change his phone after three years when they cannot install whatsapp or messenger or their banking app anymore.
That said, kudos to Nokia for entering this market, I genuinely hope it will be profitable enough for them to keep it up!
Edit: not sarcastic, 100% serious.
OK.
But surely banks ought to. If you care about having a banking app, then you ought to care transitively.
If you buy something in a store, you have no certainty that your CC number doesn't end in the hands of store personnel.
> Besides, if someone gets your credit card number and purchases something, you can charge it back.
You have to keep an eye on it. It is easy to overlook if the amount small is enough.
All in all, I wouldn't call this good security practice.
But it is not much of as a problem right now. They definitely try to push people towards more secure and up-to-date systems, but as now, you still can bank from insecure systems as well, and allow your account to be stolen.
It’s some real “serpent eating its own tail” sh*t if I ever saw it.
That belongs on https://twitter.com/shituserstory
I want to buy a new phone when trying to access to my money
So that an IT manager at the bank can put a check mark next to a policy OKR
I have 5+ year old Android phones that have no issue with banking apps. I'm not sure where this rhetoric is coming from, but it doesn't align with my experience on Android.
Capital one/wells fargo requires android 8+. Citi bank 7.1+. (I stopped looking it up at this point). 8 was released in 2017. So assuming 2 years of major OS updates, that means roughly phones from 2015 can still work with it.
Also... even if the app stops working, you can use a web browser still.
Phone batteries die off long before this becomes a reality.
My local bank requires 9 or above
>Also... even if the app stops working, you can use a web browser still.
It's not uncommon at all for banks to have a website that's virtually impossible to use on mobile browsers.
This thread is discussing a phone with replaceable battery. For at least 5 years.
I think the relevant question is whose phone lasts 6-7 years? Because you might well replace the battery a couple times over the life of the phone and that's fine.
Anyway I just got a whole new iphone 8+ out of a failed battery replacement and it was showing all kinds of OS and application glitches, just as the moto G I had before it did too. The flash and DRAM doesn't last forever, the practical lifespan of the handset itself is about 3 years for complete stability, 4 years for moderate glitchiness, and 5 years for complete unusability, same pattern across both phones.
But yes, this means I will be using a 2017 phone for another 4 years, so the software lifespan probably needs to be close to a decade, and Android's lifespan is absurdly far from that level.
I would not surprise if we'd gradually get longer software support on future phones as time goes on.
I know it sounds extreme, but it's time to send the signal that it's not ok to force people to throw electronics to landfill because of shiny new APIs.
The bottom line is I don't think this is solvable with technology. Google should have gotten much tougher with OEMs once Android got widely accepted.
There are too many benefits for the OEMs to dump phones on the market and not update. No reason to care otherwise so far, sadly.
The Android team is the one to blame, several times on Android Fireside sessions they have answered that they rather have the fragementation of the ecosystem where partners are allowed to experiment and come up with new ideas.
Well one of the ideas is to sell newer devices instead of free beer upgrades, with Google's complacency.
I still rather be on Android, because even with them screwing up Sun and leaving it to implode, I like that they push a managed OS no matter what.
Those that unaccept it and keep diving into the NDK with GL based UIs, always get a few scars in the process.
Only nice thing on Android is the aftermarket ROMs since it's AOSP. Sadly from my experience the aftermarket ROMs for newer OS iterations arent polished or miss features that the OEM roms had.
The Google Pixel receives new android versions and security updates for a longer period of time than any other android phone, but that's fewer than the equivalent iPhone
In fact running across that old phone is what convinced me to switch.
I usually get the latest and greatest from work every 2 years. Then I pay a nominal fee to get it for myself (because of taxes or accounting or something).
I get a new phone from the company, my old one goes to my SO. Their old one goes either to my kid or to mine or my SO's parents, depending on which part of the lifecycle they are at.
Can't do that with Android, the 5-6 year old ones would be so bad and out of date that I wouldn't want to be the one doing tech support for them.
I only change phones when they die in some form, so 300 euros every 5 years on average is more than enough, I am not buying phones with laptop prices.
I have anyway access to Apple devices via project assignments in consulting projects.
Not really, and definitely not with more modern ones. I have an iPhone 11 from 2019. It was released with iOS 13. It is now running iOS 16.1.1. It is as snappy as the day I bought it. I'm considering a phone upgrade, but that's because of the improved camera, not performance (or even battery life).
My old iPhone 8 (2017) is still getting updates, and now is moderately pokey with nontrivial apps, but the OS is fine. And I get it with regards to apps, as the perf and battery improvements between the A11 and the A13 chips was pretty significant.
As you tell yourself, the iPhone 8 isn't its former self with its original iOS version.
Even if that weren't the case, a six-year-old iPhone 8 has out-survived the useful, secure life of, what, every Android device not made directly by Google? Hell, a 3.5-year-old iPhone 11 has out-survived the useful, secure life of the overwhelming majority of Android devices, too. And, further, given that A11->A13 was the most significant period of perf improvement and energy reductions (the A14/A15 are moderately faster but the tail certainly appears to be here), that bodes well for its continuing usefulness.
Apps or OS doesn't matter, they are interwined.
I mean.. that is (on average) roughly 2.5 years old. If your phone was expensive and is still fairly new, then it's not going to be affected by the stuff that pertains old, mid-tier phones, before it gets even older than those.
That's not an Apple/iPhone property but I find it fascinating, that they are able to sell it as such.
And when you slot that against Android options, 3.5 years is a lot for a usable, secure life of a mobile device. I can safely assume I'll get five years of good, secure perf out of any Apple device from the last five years and another 2-3 years (at minimum) of tolerable performance, and that's pretty hard to argue with in this market.
Don't get me wrong, it's not enough and I'd like it to be better; I'd like all hardware reusability to be better. I'm pretty big on it; I still have an iPad 3 and a Nexus 7 in use as house kiosks (which sidesteps the security issue that phones necessarily have). But if I am maximizing useful life, buying Apple devices has been less fraught for most, if not all, of my adult life.
Did you actually daily drive one? Because I did use an iPhone 6S for its full software support span (7 years) and yes, by the end of 2022 it was definitely the fastest kid on the block. But to run messaging apps, play music, grab quick pictures and scroll memes in the subway, it's more than fine.
Ok. Sure Jan. I think the majority will take that slow phone in a heartbeat.
Most people will access all facets of their life on their phone, from social, to financial, to work. If anything, the risk is only going to increase as time goes on.
Second is even if an android version lagging behing on security features from later versions, play store enforce enough harsh policies on app submissions requiring access to external data and collect user data, that you can trust most of it. Sure some apps can slip under their radar but play store bots can eventually catch up to them.
As long as the apps they use work ok I'm not sure the majority cares about updates security or otherwise.
If people could choose a longer period of updates, I don’t really expect any to refuse.
Only rich people care about iPhones, or those that buy everything on credit.
Minimizing a group of people does nothing but stroke your own ego. There are many reasons to buy an iPhone. There are many reasons to buy an Android. Buying one or the other says nothing about you as a person and implying otherwise is absurd and childish.
We’re not on Reddit; this is supposed to be adults having conversations not preteen fanboys blindly worshipping a mobile OS.
Price is a clear advantage for Android phones. Does that make me an Android worshipper now?
IIRC, there was only one prominent case of that happening (slowing down noticeably), I think it was iOS 7 on the iPhone 4 but I might be wrong about that. And I think they fixed it a bunch in 7.1, so it wasn't even for that long.
But ever since then Apple really hasn't pushed updates that slow the phone meaningfully. Instead they gatekeep new features to newer models that can support it, which makes sense.
Hyperbole much? That's a ridiculous claim. I've been sporting a "renewed" Samsung S10E since early 2021. There's still nothing it can't do. Prior to that I owned a Galaxy S7 since 2016! That's a 5 whole years without any phone issues on an Android phone. I turned on the S7 a few months back and after an update, all the apps still work.
not that iphone are any better. you have zero idea what you get on a new ios for old devices since the binaries are not the same. only thing you can be certain is the extra slow down loop
Google moved the web browser component to the Play Store because Android's OS updates are so bad. They had no choice but to do it.
Apple could do it too if they wanted to but they don't need to because they actually provide OS updates for a decent period.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-android-updates-114...
My point was that old Android phones "not working" after a few years is complete bs. The S10E was launched in March 2019 and still going strong.
EDIT: Looks like the S10E is still getting monthly security updates too: https://doc.samsungmobile.com/sm-g970f/xeo/doc.html
Never used it though, my last 3 phones were all from Nokia. It's pretty much the only manufacturer that still releases new stock (Android One) models regularly.
(Excluding too-expensive-for-my-taste Pixels and some Motorolas I could never find in my country).
Hm? Writing this on g30 and Motos aren't popular here for years.
Edit: like I bought the cheapest Samsung last year and the experience is night and day.
Android One = nearly the same stock Android you'd get on a Pixel, no (non-Google) bloatware, no custom UI.
It was never quite popular, but if you scroll through the Wikipedia list of devices (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_One), you'll see it's pretty much only Nokia nowadays.
Some Motorola models as well, but I couldn't find those specific models back when they were still new and I was looking for a phone.
And instead of talking about that, there are a series of threads about how an iphone costing 5 times as much and is famously difficult to repair is a better phone than this. Get a grip! Can we not have a least one conversation without Apple fanbois wading in?
I'm recently on my 4th Android smartphone in 12 years (Galaxy S, Moto G, Pixel 2, Pixel 7) and would be still on the Pixel 2 if not for lack of updates, as it's still completely fine hardware wise. I guess if I had been an Apple fanboi, I would've had at least 1 fewer phones in that time period. Really made me think this last time. Hoping my eventual 5th smartphone will have very long support and very good repariability.
Of course, adding such a notification would've prompted many users to seek out battery replacements (and a lot of non-Apple-authorized repair shops would've been happy to meet this demand) and give a new life to their devices, where as silently slowing down their device would prompt those users to eventually upgrade once they get tired of it.
How so? Apple iPhones have one year warranties, are notoriously difficult to repair, and Apple charges an arm and a leg to "repair" them (usually by basically forcing you to do a trade-in and buy a new phone). Apple products will also quickly degrade over iOS upgrades.
For example, my iPad Air 2 can barely browse the web with no other apps open.
I think your parent was talking about OS support.
In regards to longterm OS support, iPhones have been getting better and better[1]. 6-7 years is pretty darn good for the last batch to fall out of support (6+, 7, and SE). It'll be interesting to see when the next batch (8 and X) of iPhones falls off the cliff.
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1. https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
Does Google offer something equivalent to AppleCare for Pixel phones? I guess there's think like Best Buy extended warranties but I've never had to use one for a phone. I'm curious how it compares.
Maybe in 2 more years…
As for hardware repairs should I need them… there are 3rd party shops. Dont care what Apple says about genuine parts or approved parts or whatever.
But... it's not really Android's fault anymore than this is Samsung's fault. The phone itself is in a good condition. The battery holds the charge for almost as long as it used to when bought. Maybe I'm not a typical user, or have very modest use patterns that allowed this phone to survive this long. Whichever this is, it shows that it's not really a problem of Android (I don't like the system for other reasons).
Before replacing, I'm going to try to install LineageOS on it, and, we'll see, maybe I'll get another couple years out of it.
At the same time span, my wife burned through 4 smartphones. All of them died for reasons unrelated to the operating system they have (i.e. were dropped, stolen etc.) It's possible that being, in general, cheaper and more disposable, Android phones don't live as long as iPhones, but this doesn't mean they shouldn't or cannot live just as long.
It kind of is though because Android allows for phone brands to tweak the stock OS and stop updating even if the OS itself is getting updates.
If Android forced all manufacturers to use the stock OS with updates, the phone could still get updates, no?
Also the top tier Samsungs are more expensive than iPhones nowadays
Yup, and the OTA updates with Tesla are also better than you'd get on a car that's 1/10th of the price. Isn't it just a little bit over-entitled to bring up any iPhone in a discussion about budget phones?
Newsflash: the vast majority of the planet can't afford to drop $1000+ on a mobile device.
I'm really embarrased by this (I've been a borderline Apple hater basically my whole life) but also acknowledge reality.
Q: For all those hundreds of millions of people who have paid less than $150 for their phone, how many of them even gave a second thought to the support duration when they decided what to purchase?
Until those ecosystem issues are fixed, dumping on a $150 phone for concessions that a $800-1000 phone doesn't have to make us pretty ridiculous.
Again, that is my point. No company has any incentive, or has made any moves to, fix the ecosystem. They're happy how there are no standards or documented APIs, how everything is a closed binary blob that changes from one insignificant version to the next. They don't demand any kind of support or openness from hardware suppliers, they don't form any standards or demand adherence to them, despite their massive market power (if Samsung wanted open or standards-compliant hardware, they'd get it), because they directly financially benefit from the broken status quo they created.
> concessions that a $800-1000 phone doesn't have to make
You can spend 2x that on an Android phone, and the software situation won't be any better. This is deliberate.
What do you mean? Wireless cards on PCs are dirt cheap and have fantastic forwards-compatibility with future OS releases. There's no reason mobile network cards should be any different.
> you still need a separate packaged image per phone model
Only if you insist on packaging the image yourself. If you don't lock bootloaders and provide API/ABI documentation on how to interact with your hardware (through a binary blob if necessary), the community will often do the rest.
The Android update dumpster fire is a self-inflicted problem.
We haven't had an IBM PC-level of openness from a phone hardware platform. Not one. Shitting on incremental improvements (like the serviceability of this Nokia) is counterproductive.
On Android, that’s fractured: Qualcomm wants you buying a new phone every year or two because they only get paid for CPUs and Google doesn’t want to subsidize them with Play purchases.
This is amplified because the architecture prevents people from doing their own support. A PC user can run Linux even if Microsoft gives up because the boot loader isn’t locked to prevent it, although driver support does show there are still problems here for the fraction of hardware without robust open source drivers or documented firmware.
My ideal fix for this would be legislative, requiring mandatory minimum support lifetimes (say 7-10 years for at least prompt security updates) and some threshold for requiring boot loader unlocking. The only Android device I had was a Lenovo tablet which they never updated to the OS version released a month or so _before_ the hardware, and which became unsafe to use on the internet many years before the hardware failed (we used it as a white noise generator for a baby). That’s a ton of e-waste which could have been avoided if they weren’t allowed to just walk away from support because they didn’t sell enough units to care.
If price was the reason, we'd have phones with longer term support at a higher price point. The problem is that support is cheaper than making new stuff, but the companies would rather sell a more expensive good if they can prevent customers from buying the cheaper option.
Support is cheaper for customers because companies providing support have to invest into something customers want, but doesn't create the same competitive advantage in the market where stakes are always rising. I.e. companies are incentivized to replace rather than support because they need to amortize the cost of R&D that goes into making phones with more memory / storage / cameras / hoo-hoo-ga-ga. If instead the effort is diverted into support, that effort doesn't generate future revenues as much as the effort spent on, well, future technologies.
So, the customers don't get good service not because it's impossible or prohibitively expensive, but because of the lack of a free platform (equivalent to Linux on PC), and a lack of regulation that would make it necessary for manufacturers to provide longer term support to their products (which would've leveled the field, because everyone would have to provide similar length of service, and so the competitive edge would stay the same).
As long as the manufacturers are in the rats race for the fraction of the future market, they'll cut every corner possible to get a bigger slice. The cost and the price today aren't as much of a concern for them as the survival in the next few years.
Needs a newer underlying linux kernel though, so all the outdated 2.x kernel ports won't be compatible.
But I agree with you in your general point. Android OEM ROMs are a joke when it comes to support and they usually are out of date within the first year due to lack of maintenance on the vendor side.
I wish there was a more generic platform approach to this where drivers could be just packages instead of this whole statically built images mess that is also unusable for most endusers.
It used to be called CyanogenMod and it was easily hacked by the UK authority's.
There's a bug where location services don't work (and require a fix). Then my latest phone where I've installed reboots randomly one or more times per day. Both bugs are reported, and affect other users.
The camera app of LineageOS 19 was terrible, and wasn't able to handle the two cameras of one phone where I've tried it.
I will use it in order to make my phone last longer, but I don't have high hopes (and I'm not a big fan anymore).
0: https://github.com/SebaUbuntu/android_packages_apps_Aperture
Seems like you might call that “software repairability”
Might not matter to some.
Repairability is more that once you buy it, you actually own it.
Apple does not support this model. Real repairability is when you can hack all components of hardware and software in your domain (which precludes hacking against cell towers, ISP telecom equipment, etc.).
It’s not “fanbois”, it’s just reality. HN isn’t the one that needs to get a grip here.
In other news my Ford is not as comfortable as your Rolls Royce, and my Sekonda watch is not going to last like your Rolex....
They could! And in fact, do.
OP, however, is complaining about the existence of the Apple comparison, which is simply unavoidable. I'm just responding that instead of complaining about it, move on to the discussions that float your boat.
No one tell my Timex! This thing's running for life
(Yes Fairphone have excellent score too, but they are basically ancient)
Fairphone is a repairable budget phone. You can't compare budget to flagship on performance or modernity of the hardware. That makes no sense.
All that said, bend it whichever way you like and this Nokia’s value is impossible to beat.
Buying a "budget" phone that has no guarantee of long term parts availability, OS upgrades, etc is certainly worth comparing to Apple's lowest cost devices factored out over the sheer number of years they offer support/service for. I appreciate the aspect of right-to-repair on this device and I'm not saying the device shouldn't exist, but it's the height of absurdity to think it wouldn't get compared to Apple's devices at some point in the conversation.
Hell, even conversations about the Fairphone end up drawing these same comparisons since Apple's recycling program is pretty good.
On the other side of the coin, all Apple devices have an expiry date. Many Android phones unlock their bootloader and enable community support after the vendor has thrown in the towel. Nothing similar exists on iOS, and it's a damn shame - it forces Apple to depreciate usable hardware. In a world where reuse and reduction is preferable to recycling, Apple should stop pretending like it's free recycling program is a replacement for serviceable design and open hardware. Until Apple stops being a necessary step of the recycling process, recycling iPhones is no easier than disposing of Asbestos.
People (rightfully) get pissed when others shit on camera-shy companies like Nokia or Dell trying something repair-friendly. You're like the person who's saying that nobody should buy the Raspberry Pi because your 1u rackmount has better performance-per-dollar. You're not wrong, but it's an apples-to-oranges product comparison.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I agree with your sentiment but think we overestimate how much people value right to repair. This is some proof.
After all this time, perhaps it's more stockholm syndrome?
There's at least weekly Apple worship thread on HN, about laptop speakers, icons they did 20 years ago or other largerly irrelevant thing, that Apple apparently did kinda well. It's always full of people exclaiming that "Apple is so ahead of competition".
Really it's face-palm worthy.
..but even so, it’s still a valid concern.
I've heard way more Android users disparaging iPhones than vice versa. If anything, the fault of iPhone users is not even knowing or caring anything else exists.
Statistically speaking, you’re probably of about average intelligence and just have delusions of grandeur relative to “modern Americans”, perhaps based on a fundamental misunderstanding about their thoughts, intentions, and motivations. Do you really think that people “really really really despise” choice in the market? Frankly the most impassioned and vitriolic view…the one that I’d say involves “really really despising” something, or someone, is yours.
This is cool, but it shows how bad the Android world is. The hardware is only half the picture.
Iphone just happens to be the obvious comparison.
I'm asking as someone who way back when had a nokia n900, did some android rooting, then when that got unrewarding essentially switched to "whatever is second cheapest at Best Buy at the time" and have had zero major problems doing pretty much all the regular life things (and this includes e.g. Pokemon Go with the kids?)
The n900 was from an actual Linux era. Versus Android which was a sideways port of Danger's mobile OS onto Linux, & unlike Maemo ignoring the entire Linux userland/freedesktop stack.
Aye. Almost like we shouldn't have a conversation about Android without mentioning the spyware and telemetry that both Android and IOS collect being more than enough reason to use Purism and other open alternatives.
#stallman_was_right
This is at best an out of the box marketing gimmick by Nokia to sell some phones.
People that - especially in 2023 - make your argument, are tying technology choices to personality just as much (and quite likely way more) than any current “Apple fanboy”. I’ve got no doubt that your ego is tied up in your technology choices. You’re on Hacker News for crying out loud. Your impression of the “other team” is just particularly…outdated.
I agree - upvote
I disagree - leave a comment
But to buck the trend - go Nokia, a phone like an x86 is a great thing for hackers and to break monopolies, fingers crossed it finds and connects with a large consumer segment
I'll never understand this brand loyalism/consumer mentality, and to what lengths Apple folks will go to promote, justify, and defend their purchase decisions.
There's also some individual differences, i.e. from what I've heard you won't ever be able to run something like the Xen Hypervisor as Apple didn't fully implement the Arm spec s.t. some opcodes are missing.
If you want to go outside the walled garden of apple, even windows is better. Old software, incompatible software, weird software? Nope. USB->rs232? Good luck finding that kext, but it just works on linux, and the cd in the box has the windows drivers. Some weird vpn setup? Good luck. Need a non standard hotspot setup with wpa enterprise? Good luck.
So yes... if you just need a browser, sure,.... if you need anything more, as many people here do, then macs might not be the best or most flexible choice.
This sounds like a really outdated opinion about Linux.
If you make a little effort selecting decently supported hardware, everything should work out of the box.
I actually use Linux (NixOS) because for my particular usecases, maintenance burden is lower than macOS.
These include the kernel and kernel modules such as drivers, which was the OP's complaint.
I’ve honestly got no idea what things are like in this space post-ARM-transition. I don’t really care, either. Historically though, there have been enough people claiming that the hardware quality of a MacBook is so good that it’s worth buying one just to run Linux on it, for it to be considered a ‘serious option’.
Are you sure that “promote, justify, and defend their purchase decisions” isn’t just code for “liking something that I don’t like”?
The undertones of this mentality are so gross and elitist.
I think you're off base about "trolling" in this and similar cases. From my perspective HN readers just like different things and have different opinions. I didn't see any trolling or manipulation in the current thread for example. Internet users are orders-of-magnitude too quick to jump to such conclusions.