France is fighting to save your iPhone from an early death
wired.com
wired.com
Many Android devices are supported for timeframes practically measured in months. Meanwhile my iPhone 6 from 2014 still gets updates…
Ultimately, it's easy and reliable enough for someone who's interested in tech and likes to tinker, but I cannot recommend it for (to use the canonical example) my mother.
The camera is of course the biggest drawback but apart from that, everything is fine.
The Galaxy S5 was one of the most popular phones and I especially bought it some years ago, because LineageOS support was supposed to be good. And it did run kind of ok, but certainly not "as snappy as a modern device just bought from the store".
And no, it does run as snappy as a modern device with the latest Android flashed to it, I can make a video if you don't believe me. Ironically it's even faster now in Android 13 than it ever was during its prime era.
You definitely would have much less luck with a random huawei.
You can have a look here on how it looks like for me, I do consider it snappy
How does browsing works?
Apps are opening quickly, animations are fast, typing doesn't lag, yeah I do consider that snappy.
Sure if you start a game, it will just destroy the poor gpu and the camera is garbage by today's standards but that's expected.
That's not too significant yet but I'm expecting the amounts to increase
on a laughably small subset of devices
>and install LineageOS or something to keep getting community updates indefinitely.
false and only partially true for an even smaller subset of devices
For the lineageos support, you usually need to wait a bit but that's not really an issue since it's likely the manufacturer is still making updates while the device is pending support.
Fortunately it never does. There have been some mistakes in the PC lines, but iPhone has always been rock solid from the first.
Unfortunately it's the end of the line for that era. My SE (the iPhone 6 internals) just got cut off with the iOS 16 update last fall. Sad times.
And there's storage: Storing things in warehouses costs money per year. I've heard figures well above $1 per part and year. If you use half a warehouse for storing things that will eventually not be used, you're wasting that warehouse and spending money to do it.
More importantly, the issue of serialization prevents reuse of parts already in the wild, such as buying a broken phone for parts, often in an on-demand way.
I've heard that it also prevents fake parts, ones made in a similar way to what you can read about at https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022
Would you say that's a bigger or smaller effect than not being able to use parts from a broken phone?
I look at this cynically: Child safety is the pretext to removing encryption, yet low-hanging fruit to protect children from these harms is not enacted.
Easy repairs are the pretext to removing secure hardware, as if normal people are just lining up to do at home repairs (which are already available contrary to the slant of the article, as well a simpler device construction which iFixIt themselves state as easier to repair than earlier models.)
The cynic would say that Apple doesn't give a damn about privacy, only about control. Locking down their devices is only a pretext to prevent competition and abolish general-purpose computing so that they can continue to enact their rent-seeking on their captive population of digital serfs.
Also malware statistics don’t lie.
You think it’s about “freedom”, I think it’s about making computing enhance lives of everyone, instead of serving a microsegment of enthusiasts. A dogmatic segment that wont admit that some of their ideas have been and continue to be utter failures.
The average consumer doesn't buy a phone based on a deep understanding of its technical characteristics. The average consumer buys a phone based on "my sister's husband got a new iPhone and it takes much better pictures than my four year old Samsung, and all my friends use iMessage". The world is too complex for anyone to make all their decisions based on a deep understanding.
Many people don't have even a shallow understanding, as Epic Games discovered when trying to get people to install Fortnite outside of Google's store.
No we should, because apparently one is a naive digital "serf" according to the prior comment in the chain. As if people who purchase these devices are unaware that the app store exists, and that their desires for simplicity, protection or privacy are frivolous curiosities that should be hand-waved away. As Ogilvy famously said "The customer is not a moron. She's your wife".
You can't argue in good faith that consumers are both lacking specialty knowledge, but also possessing the know-how and desire to open their hardware and swap componentry for certain 3rd-party unsupported hardware. Either they have deep knowledge of the device and its limitations, or they don't and the need to order official parts for replacements has no affect on them.
The average consumer does not want to learn how to open their hardware and swap componentry for certain 3rd-party unsupported hardware. The average consumer wants to pay a random local repair shop $50 to change the battery in their phone. Feel free to substitute "battery" with any other component and adjust the price slightly to make it reasonable.
1. A person with no 'specialty knowledge' bought an iPhone, and
2. This person wants to have it repaired, but doesn't want to use Apple's repair service which is available in stores or direct-to-home through couriers, and
3. This person also doesn't want to use a 3rd party apple-approved repairer, and
4. This person also doesn't want to use a repairer who is using Apple's self service repair programme, and
5. This person needs a component repaired that includes a security feature such as faceid or touchid. Which rules out 3rd party component suppliers, such as those available on iFixit.com and similar for speakers/batteries/ports/etc, and
6. This person can afford an iPhone, but can't afford an official replacement part for a component that includes a security feature such as FaceID or TouchID.
The result is that this person can still have the repair made with an unofficial part and the security feature (FaceID/TouchID) won't function. That's it, that's the compromise. The device can also be repaired later with an official part to reenable the security feature.
The proposition you're making here is that the cumulative points 1-6 are somehow likely and burdensome. When it seems much more likely that the consumer would just take advantage of one of the many endorsed routes available, which also maintain the integrity of the device (e.g. camera alignment, drop strength & waterproofing). The idea that the consumer would trash their device to landfill and buy a new one doesn't hold water, not only does that produce the maximum amount of cash expenditure, but it also requires that the consumer didn't take advantage of the trade-in, buy-back and recycling schemes available.
I find most arguments about this topic fall over because many aren't aware of the breadth of what's available. So when it comes back to the article about the French government being "concerned" about paired componentry for "environmental waste" reasons - it really does smell like b/s, why aren't they looking at the myriad of brands which have no waste handling processes for phones. Instead they just happen to be fixated on the hardware which enables a high level of personal security.
Apple devices become fancy paperweights over time.
Apple put security into iPhones to make them much harder to sell after they have been stolen. iCloud Activation Lock makes it very hard for a thief to resell a stolen phone, thereby making it less attractive to steal in the first place.
So, the thieves that I was in jail with told me they continued to steal the phones then just took them all to the phone repair stores who would break them all down for the spare parts and give them cash. They would then use all the stolen spares to repair other people's phones.
Now that the parts are serialized this channel is closed and it again makes it less attractive to steal the phones.
So, I for one am OK with the serialization, BUT there needs to be a balance. I realize Apple now hands out repair tools and instructions, with a system to reserialize your authentic parts, but what to do with a mountain of half-broken phones that could be legitimately cannibalized for their working parts?
Besides, I'd rather that my stolen phone is useful to someone (even if not me) then thrown away by me after a year. As long as the software made sure nothing of my data is recoverable.
No, I'm sorry but this tactic is nothing but anti-consumer and anti-green.
There are, of course less anti-consumer options than requiring active first-party involvement in any parts replacement. One would be keeping a registry of stolen phones and having the OS phone home after detecting a new part. Of course, that would cost Apple a bit of money (I think they can afford it) and only work with a locked-down OS (not to my taste, but I see no signs of Apple changing it), but it serves the legitimate goal of disincentivizing iPhone theft without raising the barrier to repair and creating extra e-waste.
Thing I was trying to say is they are using "theft" as a way to "build in" planned obsolescence and preventing us from repairing things.
I don't like Google either, but I've had several Galaxy phones since then and every one has lasted until I was ready to replace it on my own schedule. My current one is 2.5 years old and feels no worse off than the day I bought it.
Certainly major software updates can break things, but that is why you can (though not always quite easily) downgrade for a while after an update.
I switched to Android for several years after.
Not really relevant to modern iPhones, but they wouldn't know that if they've sworn off iPhones since.
The phones still typically work fine.
Designing them to last 10 years doesn't make a ton of sense when shit happens -- being left behind in a cab or being dropped on concrete or falling into the pool or snatched when you left it briefly unattended.
It's like when people wish for medical advances so we can live for a million years, not realizing you'll probably be hit by a bus long before that.
That is not to say regulation is unimportant, but that I rather that regulations tilt the playing field toward more consumer friendly companies.
On the other hand, Apple is like the best player in this category with almost a decade of proper, first-class support, compared to every android device that will die in 2 years, only recently may survive the 4 your mark.
Apple as a company is set up to only build and focus on software for newer hardware. They don't spend one minute extra to optimize for older hardware.
shudder