5.3B Mobile Phones Will Become Waste in 2022
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I honestly put off upgrading my phone as long as possible now, they’re like tires for my car - I need em but man I hate hate hate replacing them and spending the money.
It would be nice if phones could converge to absorb laptops somehow. Fold or roll out maybe?
I was using an iPhone 8 until last year, and it was functionally fine until I replaced it.
This is one area where Apple is unambiguously leading the pack on mainstream manufacturers. The iPhone 14 is winning accolades for its (relative) ease of repair-ability, as well. It is not inconceivable that if you buy an iPhone 14 today, it will receive software and hardware support until 2029 - or even 2030 if you're lucky.
Batteries don't fly across the street if you drop a phone: that is a dumb rationalization. Same with flashlights and other portable devices with batteries. If you insist, have the battery cover held down by a screw. There, no flying off.
There's also MagSafe battery packs, which would disconnect in case of a fall.
The battery, or the battery cover? Do you recall which model?
Is this trade-off the same for every user?
Offer one model with a replaceable battery and let the market decide.
As the context of this debate is ewaste, giving up water resistance can reasonably be assumed to increase ewaste.
Sacrificing repairability on 100% of phones causes more waste than the tiny percentage of phones that cannot be repaired after water damage?
Current phones are water-resistant in varying degrees by IP rating, they are not waterproof. What's the number one remedial action that people took when their Nokia or Blackberry fell into water? Remove the battery to avoid an electrical short. This mitigation is not possible on an iPhone or Pixel.
Quite frankly, seven years is pathetic, and no company should be praised for that tiny support period.
I have a seven year old phone, and the one and only thing that will cause me to get a new one is the OS vendor ending updates, effectively forcing me to dispose of a perfectly working phone. The hardware lasts far, far longer than the software, which is totally asinine and backwards. The glorious free market is failing to solve this problem. No serious phone OS vendor provides long term security updates for their devices.
As a user, I demand at the very least basic, no-frills security-only support for as long as the hardware functions. This doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable.
Edit: rephrased to not be unnecessarily offensive.
And remember that Apple was the one throttling iphones with a bad battery. What would be the first reaction of 90% of the users, replace the battery or replace the phone because it's now slow?
Don't fall for Apple's greenwashing, they are like or even worse than everybody else. See the "no charger included" campaign.
software maintenance costs money.
>And remember that Apple was the one throttling iphones with a bad battery.
They weren't throttling as part of some conspiracy to sell more phones. They were doing that so phones with weak batteries won't randomly power off because the battery couldn't deliver enough current.
This is symptomatic of a larger problem, which I don't feel like getting into - but I do think that we need legislation around this to force these companies into doing the right thing.
Well, it's complicated. The baseband is the biggest obstacle, because it's generally not made by the manufacturer and has a lot of arcane requirements that prevent them from having a great negotiation position, but yes, things could be better. Smaller manufacturers have a serious challenge with this, especially since they can't negotiate as well as Apple, and these kinds of things slaughter their margins. This is partially why Apple is the best at this and also partially why I think we need legislation in this area.
>And remember that Apple was the one throttling iphones with a bad battery. What would be the first reaction of 90% of the users, replace the battery or replace the phone because it's now slow?
They were doing that to extend the lifespan of the device, and communicated it poorly. Now, iOS informs you that you need to have your battery replaced, and Apple does it for a relatively reasonable cost.
>Don't fall for Apple's greenwashing, they are like or even worse than everybody else. See the "no charger included" campaign.
Apple is doing more than anyone else. They _should_ be doing better, but they certainly _could_ be doing worse.
I would love legislation that suggested that all new phones sold in the US must have 5+ years of security updates /from when the model of device is last sold/. It would raise the price of phones, but there are already subsidy programs in place that could be (slightly) expanded to fill that. Actually, I'd prefer 10 years of security updates ;) but the bar is already tragically low.
Never preface your talking point with an obviously wrong statistic.
But then I realized that I've got three laptops. One for personal use, and 2 for jobs.
And I think I have my previous two phones in a drawer.
New cell phone sales are under 2B/year. Industry hoped they would continue rising after 2016, but they've plateaued around 1.8B. Of those about 200M are still flip/dumb phones. Ownership time (in the pipeline) is increasing not falling.
I don't believe 5.3B became waste unless many B people suddenly decided to do without (in 2022). That seems unlikely unless it just some random definition of watste. Sure there might even be (8-9 years of production) 16B phones laying around somewhere outside of landfill so why did they become get trashed in '22? Can we blame 3G?
https://www.sellcell.com/how-many-mobile-phones-are-sold-eac...
Don't forget that includes almost a billion children under the age of 8 who typically get hand-me-downs phones from their parents. And people in 3rd world countries. And old people.
We're currently at around 50 million metric tons of e-waste every year globally. By the 2050s solar panels (average lifespan of a panel is around 2 decades) alone are expected to be around 50 million metric tons of waste
Unless we start taking seriously right-to-repair and full life cycle analysis, the move towards electrifying everything is just more of us kicking the can down to road
There is every likeyhood panels guaranteed for 20 years are still in use decade(s) past their warranty.
Is this satire? 80% efficiency is definitely still worth keeping around. You may want to replace the panels, but they also recycle well in that case. I'd rather keep around 20-25 year old panels than necessarily have to replace them if I didn't want the cost of a new installation.
Panel installation is not free. Neither are permits and any other part of the process. Things are NOT getting cheaper at this point, they are becoming more expensive (and possibly more capable, but that's debatable). There is no Moore's law for solar.
There is a huge difference between 50MT of feces or food waste or other organic matter that could easily decompose and e-waste. Even outside of organic matter, we often at least have solutions for recycling many things. We simply don't have the technology currently to completely recycle solar panels though. There is only one facility in the world (a tiny facility in France) that can completely recycle a panel and it's unlikely that it is actually able to do it in an economically feasible way. In addition, e-waste in general often has to deal with very hazardous or toxic waste
Which would you rather have near your backyard, a landfill filled with plastics (at least the non-compostable kinds so you don't have to worry about microplastics) or a landfill filled with e-waste?
E-waste is simply much more difficult and expensive to deal with. And much more so if we're being honest about the environmental and health impacts and what it would take to resolve those as well
Not perfect but 100X better than before, only getting better each year. In 20, 30 year will be in such an abundant and green environment mostly because of all that tech.
Take a look at Tony Seba on the solar revolution.
Which again pales in comparison to things like cars.
Phones are tiny and lightweight. Yes let's try to recycle them better, but they're just not a very noteworthy source of waste at all. A lot of people throw away more plastic food packaging in a week.
This includes places with serious income from tourism, such as Bali.
My wife's situation is even worse.
Why can't these mother fuckers still make at least one non-touchscreen phone with a chiclet keyboard??!!!!!!!! Even "old people" like to fucking text. They could sell it for 300% profit. Hell, even 1000% profit. People like me would pay. Toss 5G onto it so they do a manufacturing run once, and continue selling the same model for 10+ years until their stock runs out.
This can be done, and done profitably. They just don't care.
Imagine if Smart TVs just used old Samsung Galaxy boards instead of custom hardware? (yes I also prefer dumb teevees)
Could the Raspberry Pi even survive a market of rooted boards?
From a security point of view it's sad that that fixes & new software go hand-in-hand. There is no LTS iOS, or LTS Android available.
And then I have this brand new iPhone which isn't actually faster in browsing than a 5 year old one.
Windows suffers from the same. My laptop has gotten a LOT faster over time, yet sorting by CPU on task manager literally takes 3 seconds on Windows 11. Why?
Sure there's postmarketos and others, but they only support few devices, and it requires a huge amount of work to add new ones.
Perhaps manufacturers should be forced to release at least the kernel and essential drivers source for obsolete devices, which would reduce the effort required to make them useful for other things.
And some other issues, like allowing them to still boot with no battery, broken screen, stuck buttons, etc.
They don't seem to consider Android phone and it's footprint. People have to keep buying phones because they can't support old phones.
The chips are fine, or at least they are as fine as they were when they were bought, so it is not a chip problem. It is a Google problem.
The drivers for the SoC are closed source. Qualcomm refuses to update the drivers, meaning more sales.
The modern Pixel uses Google's Tensor, not Qualcomm's Snapdragon.
This is all Google's fault. They are the ones who develop most of the software. They are the ones who decide what to deprecated and what not. They also set the rules about what is acceptable and what is not ('open' handset alliance my ass).
Uh, what? I just bought a new Pixel 7 (after my perfectly good S7 was deliberately obsoleted by carriers discontinuing some 4G cell service (and the FCC allowing this!)). The Pixel's official software updates are slated to end in less than 3 short years, and the security updates are slated to end in less than 5 short years, leading third party distributions Graphene/Calyx to project ending of their own support in 5 short years as well. This is most definitely not "fine" ! If the various drivers required to get the device running were actually upstreamed into the mainline kernel, and Google stopped churning Android major versions like it was fashion week, then my phone could happily function for 10+ years just like my laptop and desktop.
Plenty of manufacturers also promise updates and don't deliver because they're at the mercy of Qualcomm providing driver updates. The last Nokia I had got a couple months of updates then nothing for over a year, yet was in the Android One program.
Like I said: it's fine. If replacing the phone in 3 years or 5 years time is going to be a problem then perhaps you should have bought a cheaper phone and replaced more often, IMO. The cost of ownership per year assuming 3-5 years is the price of a piece of crap that gets updates for a few months to a year.
By the time year 2 hits on most phones, the battery is mediocre versus what it used to be. Google has a trade-in program that gives pretty good credit towards the next device.
It's a cellphone. It's not a desktop computer. They aren't built to last or assumed to last. Buy it, use it, trash or trade it in, get the next one. Sure, I wish that there was an ATX-like standard for cellphone chassis and parts, but there isn't, and the support is much better than it was.
Cellphones are garbage versus what they used to be in build quality and durability, but they also do much more than they ever did.
Maybe an iPhone would suit you better? Hell, I didn't even use a phone for quite a few years as I shared your sentiment, but I aged out of it and found other things to worry about, and a few hundred bucks every few years is whatever to have one less problem with something I use for a good chunk of every day.
My modded ThinkPad T440p is still going strong. The missus's X201 is still going strong too. I use 30-50 year old tech elsewhere because it still works, I love the design, and/or it's easy to service. I get the sentiment.
I wholeheartedly reject the narrative that cell phones should be considered throw away devices. It's not about money, and making even more e-waste by buying cheaper devices even more often is certainly not what I want.
As I said, my Samsung S7 (released 2016) is perfectly fine. Solid physical condition. Battery life is fine (I continue to play games on it). Honestly I would have kept using it data-only but as far as I can tell both AT&T and T-mo have blacklisted the model by IMEI.
The average cellphone doesn't last as long as us nerds on HN can make them last though. People end up smashing them, they wear out, or they flat-out just need an upgrade to run the latest x app or piece of hardware, or stay up to date with security vulns as a workplace mandate.
Right to Repair is a step in the right direction, but maybe a "Right to Firmware/Driver Source" or similar would be a good possible next step. I get the sentiment, but the hardware's largely junk unless you're buying an iPhone, and I'm not even saying I think the iPhone is well-made or that I like the modern iPhone. Repairing the back glass now apparently requires the use of a laser. I can only laugh.
Never heard of blacklisting non-stolen cellphones. I would contact your carrier for further info and report back, because if so, that's shocking.
Well consider yourself having heard. The AT&T MVNO I was on at the time kept sending me SMSs telling me I had to upgrade, until eventually the phone went no service. I recently tried sticking a T-mo MVNO SIM in the phone, which didn't work either. You can read about this if you search for "non-VoLTE" or "3G shutdown". The S7 was a 4G phone that used LTE data and UMTS voice, so the LTE data would have continued to work without the blacklisting - in fact I think I even used it for a month or two after they shut down UMTS voice but before they forcibly kicked it off the network.
> People end up smashing them, they wear out
Sure, this has happened to phones I've owned. But in this case it didn't - as I've repeatedly said, I was perfectly happy with the condition of the hardware.
> they flat-out just need an upgrade to run the latest x app or piece of hardware, or stay up to date with security vulns as a workplace mandate
This is exactly the software issue that we're discussing, so it's not an argument. Sure, people get encouraged to just go with the flow of needless software churn, and use it as an excuse to buy a shiny new thing. We're discussing the (lack of) justification for that churn to begin with.
You've shotgunned a heap of half-arguments that fall apart under examination. Replacement parts are readily available from donor phones on eBay. Google certainly has the power to dictate to Qualcomm that kernel sources must be released (per GPL2), and this is irrelevant with Tensor. Regardless of what it took to get Linux running on any given device, it can be kept running without reverse engineering.
The primary reason that Google et al get away with artificially short lifetimes from software churn is that it doesn't help their bottom line to do otherwise. And so it seems the only things we can do are shame and/or legislate. And I don't see the point of detracting from that energy just because Google is slightly better than the rest of the terrible industry they had a large part in creating.
That's certainly an option if your only concern is the cost of upgrades, but, in the vein of the OP, that's not at all desirable from an e-waste perspective. That's worse, in fact.
In the past, maybe you'd never get security updates because Qualcomm wasn't guaranteed to provide the driver updates, ergo a device might not even make it to the one year mark. I bought plenty of tablets that were insecure out of the box. That is bad in terms of e-waste (and arguably not of merchantable quality, but that's a Brit-centric consumer legal issue).
If you go by the assumption of 1 year becoming maybe 5, that's 5x improvement, and thus potentially 5x less e-waste. If someone uses it for 3 years then sells it or trades it on, I'm sure someone else will get it to the 5 year mark.
I agree that 3 years of major OS upgrades is frustratingly short.
(Edit: See end of post for correction; following paragraphs are incorrect.)
But really, complain to Qualcomm. They're the ones who refuse to support their chipsets and keep moving on to the next new thing. It took years of negotiation for Google to even wring 5 years of security support out of them.
The only alternative is a new SoC vendor that can beat (or at least compete with) Qualcomm on price/performance/heat/power consumption. Good luck with that. For whatever reason, Samsung's Exynos seems to be constantly behind the competition, and Samsung even doesn't use it for all their phones. If Samsung can't do it, with all their resources, what chance does a new upstart have?
Really, I just wish, for the good of humanity, Apple would open up their chips to third-party buyers. Of course they never will, and I get why, but it's still frustrating.
Edit: didn't realize Google's Tensor was the main SoC for current-gen Pixels; for some reason I thought the Tensor chip was a co-processor paired with a Snapdragon. In that case: shame on Google for only offering 3 years of OS upgrades and 5 years of security upgrades, when they likely have the ability to do more.
Pixel is 1 year warranty in the USA.
> didn't realize Google's Tensor was the main SoC for current-gen Pixels; for some reason I thought the Tensor chip was a co-processor paired with a Snapdragon
Hah. I thought the exact same until someone set me straight in an HN comment. Which is actually what led to me buying the Pixel 7 (I'm dead set against the probably-still-insecure Qualcomm baseband+application processor combo; my S7 is an Exynos).
IMO, the Qualcomm software support problem could be fixed with sufficient right to repair legislation.
Google is a corp that is bound by the laws of the USA. If they were to reverse engineer a SoC by Qualcomm, they may infringe on their intellectual property rights amidst other issues. Not to mention, it's much easier to make their own chip, which they have done.
Third-parties sometimes write alternatives like e/OS and LineageOS, but the devices they're written for are seldom functionally complete, just like Linux isn't in terms of hardware support a lot of the time.
Google isn't responsible for the support agreements Samsung, Motorola, etc. make with their suppliers.