Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RajT88 | Hacker News Reader

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OS and device manufacturers don't necessarily want to optimize. Optimization would reduce the hardware replacement cycle, cutting into their profits.

Microsoft gets pressure from their hardware partners to keep up the hardware replacement cycle, and they themselves of course get a cut of that via OS licenses.

Phone manufacturers seemingly invented "Always On Displays" to also cause people to start to think they needed a new phone or battery just a year/18 months into owning their device. Christ what a waste of power for such little value delivered! My wife said her new S23+ would barely last a day - so I turned off the always on display option, and now it lasts 2.5/3 daysish of normal usage.

It's a slightly different story with laptops, where battery life is an important feature. You'd think battery life would be important for phones too.

Huh, the always on display on my S23 non-plus was only a 10% battery hit over a day or so. Still disabled it, of course.

Also nice that they've finally added an option on Samsung phones to only charge to 85%, but it would be nice if it had smarter options like on iOS. Eg, an option to charge up to 100% just before you expect to wake up, so you have the full charge but it doesn't sit at 100% all night degrading the battery.

iOS has an Optimized Battery Charging option that does something like that. You can't set a schedule, though - it's based on your usage patterns.

I could be wrong on the model. It's one of the big ones with a pen. There's so many Samsung models...

I suspect this is why companies like MS are locking down OS releases to specific hardware in the name of security. Apple moving to Apple Silicon also means they can potentially lock down the hardware as they see fit.

Upgrades will be forced via software obsolescence rather than hardware performance.

This is why I think the Linux/Free-Libre software folks would do well to focus a bit more on optimizing performance as there is a lot of room for improvement that will not need to be forced onto people.

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