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Comment by 1over137 | Hacker News Reader

Hilarious how 2016 is "*extremely outdated*". Only in tech does anyone think this. :)

Its not even 10 years old. The hardware is aging but the only reason its “outdated” is due to a software lifecycle forced by one or more corporate entities. These are an obvious tool to force sales/upgrades.

I’d be nice if this community weren’t so quick to defend planned obsolescence, especially at a 2-3 year pace.

Be nice if government out in laws to force at least a decade of "consistent operations" (it works as well at year 9 as year 1).

Theres really no reason that can't be done, it's not like phones have the amount of variety as PCs and MS and Linux have both managed to handle some much older hardware.

Note that in this particular case you can still use alternative browsers that come with updated root CAs.

This will still break anything that uses a system webview.

And also any apps that make API calls over HTTPS, regardless of webview, right? I believe they cannot use HTTP, only HTTPS. However, I'm unsure whether they can disable certificate verification. Presumably not, for the same reason...

I think it was apple that forced the use of HTTPS in app APIs, not Google.

I don't believe android apps are locked to HTTPS as a rule, though obviously a lot of them likely don't have fallbacks.

The typical tax-related depreciation term for computer hardware is 5 years over here. Which is already half of what typical office equipment is expected to last. After which it is usually resold or given away to goodwill. 2016 is just 7 years back, so there will quite certainly mobile phone where the tax writeoff period isn't even through which are affected by this. Truly hilarious!

When talking about security updates it most certainly is. You can’t blame LE for that. That responsibilty lies squarely on manufacturers who are not even maintaining the bare minimum of security patching like an up-to-date root cert list.

I have lots of clothes that I wear that are much older than that. And most that are newer than that use designs from long before 2016. They are only newer because the older ones wore out from use. I can only think of a few articles in my closet that could be identified definitively as newer than 2000 by appearance. I imagine this is true for many men, less often for women I suppose.

That is even worse when you consider that tech brands often design their full lineups with the buying-power of rich countries in mind, their lowest option each year often being way too expensive to the lower classes on developing or poor countries, so there they often advertise previous years' models as the official budget option (often two, three or four years behind). As result that "2016" is more like 2018 in many countries, that is, someone may have walked into a reputable store, bought a "brand new" phone in 2018, and then it will be unable to access those websites just 5 years later.

Compare a 2016-era phone with the current equivalent (e.g. iPhone 7 vs iPhone 14) and there is a huge difference, many of the specs. are 4x those of the older model.

Don't get me wrong, I really don't like the whole 'disposable hardware' culture, but you can't deny there has been a huge leap in tech over the last ~7 years.

My mother has an iPhone 7. She just upgraded from an iPhone 5.

It works perfectly fine for her, it runs the two apps that she uses: Camera and WhatsApp. And the price was reasonable, only half of her weekly pension. There’s no way she could afford an iPhone 14, that’s a whole month’s income.

She doesn’t know the specs of her phone, or care.

I still have an iPhone 7. With my usage, the battery lasts 1 or 2 days. I can read the occasional email, my newspaper, use Teams and Telegram when I'm not behind my laptop. It even plays games. What more do I want?

I'm with you, apple stans, but it's worth pointing out it's not the apple devices we're talking about here. That iPhone 7 can run iOS 15, which is out of date now, but only by two years. No letsencrypt certificate troubles.

Depends on how you define "out of date". Is iOS 15 getting new features? Nope. Can the iPhone 7 get iOS16 or newer? Nope. However Apple are still releasing security updates for iOS15, the latest update for iOS15 was just 20 days ago - https://ipsw.me/15.7.7 / https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213811

EDIT: However, I don't suspect that iOS15 will be supported for much longer, iOS14 last update was back in Oct 2021.

And apple supports iPhones much better. Both iPhone 5 and 7 I believe have the isrg root now. My wife likes older iPhones for weight / size reasons and the longevity of these is impressive especially if you pay for a battery swap

My mom uses an iPhone 7. She took video of us brining out the cake to my child’s birthday. Let me just say, I won’t make that mistake again. The video quality is terrible.

> She took video of us brining out the cake to my child’s birthday. Let me just say, I won’t make that mistake again. The video quality is terrible.

Not to be too salty but that cake must have tasted worse than the video looked terrible.

Yes, I too followed your salty comment down that mental rabbit hole.

I'm still using my LG G5 from 2016. On my 4th battery right now and will keep on using it until it dies. Still runs smooth browsing the web or even playing brand new 3d games. Batteries are 10-20eur on ebay. The cameras lack nothing and it unlocks with a finger print scanner on the back. This means that in the past 10 years I've spent about 550EUR on mobile phones.

About a year ago a friend of mine complimented me on a new phone, until I told him that it's my old LG, I just stopped using the case. He seemed annoyed after that. Must be because I got funny looks and giggles years back when I said I'll never buy a phone without a replaceable battery.

I have an iPad Pro (1st gen, 2015) that I continue to use as a (secondary) daily driver.

My laptops are both 2015 MacBook Pros.

I’m sure there’s plenty of use cases where the gains are valuable. If you’re a photographer, developer, gamer, or web browser without an Adblocker, I’m sure it’s immense. For me personally, the gains are questionable.

I'd say you're nearing the cliff.

I have an iPad mini that's only a year or two older than that and software upgrades aren't supported, nor are there many (any?) apps available for that version of iOS

I don't agree, I have an iPad Mini4 from 2015, and that's still good for most day to day tasks (although it feels slower than in the beginning thanks to iOS updates being less optimized).

Same with my mid-2014 13" MBP. While my M1 MBP is a lot faster for things like building complex C++ code bases, for stuff like web browsing the old Intel Mac doesn't feel much different.

Compared to the incredible hardware progress between 1995 and 2005 (where a 2x increase per year was quite normal) it definitely feels like we're on a plateau since around 2010.

It is not a matter of the age of your hardware but your software. Ipad mini 4 got its latest OS update in 2023. The problem is that in the Android ecosystem it is unfortunately common to only have a short window of OS updates from the release date of the hardware.

Yes, but parent was specifically talking about hardware specs. And a 4x times increase since 2016 isn't much progress compared to the 'good ole times' ;)

False, I can use my 12 years old Android perfectly. While I had to ditch my old iPhone 7 (!) because I couldn't install most apps anymore.

iPhone 7 is still a perfectly usable device but bricked now.. Stuck in iOS.

Would you care to elaborate which device it is? 12 years old means it at the most could have come with Honeycomb when you bought it. Has the base OS been updated since? It is great that you bought a device which presumably got OS updates for many years, unfortunately that is not common for android devices. And the problem is, if it did not get an OS update, the truststore did not get updated, and thus it does not trust the LetsEncrypt root CA sometime next year. Except for Firefox which luckily comes with its own root certificate list.

Iphone 7 got an iOS update to 15.7.7 in 2023 and its truststore contains the ISRG Root X1 certificate: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212773 I am unsure which apps you cannot install but a quick look in the app store indicates that Zoom, LinkedIn, Notability, 1Password, Disney+ and Netflix all support iOS 15.7. And in my anecdotal experience I could find no app with a minimum OS requirement greater than 15.7. As far as I can tell you need to go back to iPhone 4S to find an iphone which does not support the LetsEncrypt root certificate. That device is only 11 years old, so still worse than your Android device. And I do not think there is a workaround by using a different browser like for Android.

My grandmother has a Google TV, still works with a bit of stuff. Running Honeycomb.

Interesting - what apps were working as new installs on 12 year old android but not iPhone 7? That’s unusual. iPhones update cycle is much longer and they usually ship w a recent iOS version when released

There are computing devices that are not mobile phones or laptops that also depend on encrypted connections. Usually these devices last a lot longer.

If your whatever device doesn't support a root CA from 2016, chances you should not let it connect to anything over the internet. Most bad software comes from "hardware" vendors, who think they can handle them the same as any other physical part. Stop blaming software people.

But usually these other devices can also update their software, it is quite unique for the android operating system to run old and unupdatable software.

Or they should if they are web facing. For security reasons at least.

I don't think devices have progressed much in the last 5-7 years. Before that, computers became almost twice as fast yearly. So yes I'm actually denying this. Devices haven't changed much in the last 7 years.

The only thing that feels outdated on a 7 year old work laptop that I'm using is the amount of memory.

Auto manufacturers are required by US Federal Law to have parts available for any models they sold for the period of 10 years.

Something like this is needed for mobile phones, and probably other electronics as well.

My current phone is a pixel 2 released in 2017. It's perfectly great and there's no reason it couldn't continue receiving updates other than planned obsolescence.

This "huge" difference is only at the top. If anything, the software has gotten worse... my parents hate the "new" gestures... if they didn't give the option for the old bottom row buttons it would be doubly worse.

The leap in the Android ecosystem is far less significant

There are many low cost Android devices about whos processing power hasn’t really improved much over the same timespan

And although iPhones have got much better it’s worth remembering how much their price has increased too (SE excepted)

This issue doesn’t apply to the iPhone 7 yet given that that device received the iOS 15 update in 2021.

For all the talk this “disposable hardware” and “planned obsolescence” issue is much more a problem on Android.

OEMs could update the cert store on those old Androids. It's a cheap phone problem.

Fashion industry would like a word

That explains how they merged.

The very few incumbents that control the modern web infrastructure have (for quite some time now) been intentionally breaking old technology, with absolutely no plans to change this for the future.

It's planned obsolescence, plain and simple. It's just surprising how frequently they obsolete things now. I fully expect them to "train" all the good little consumers out there to replace their phones every year lest most of the web stop working on them.

As someone who had to endure IE6 on the web, I disagree.

There is a difference between "planned obsolescence" and "not wanting to spend a disproportionate amount of development time making sure old devices work".

If 6% of Android users globally are on an ancient OS version, how many man-hours would it be sensible for my to spend testing that our systems work for them? How many of those 6% are likely to be paying customers for us?

Where could we source enough Android devices with pre-7.1 OS versions? How much time and money would that cost?

The small market share of old device isn't a given. There aren't few of them out there because we, the developers, make them unusable and people have to switch.

Most people don't care about having the latest specs, they want the latest features. If new features only ship to devices that are < 2 years old (like Android updates), older devices will quickly become obsolete. The hardware is still fine - I'm writing this on an almost exact 7 year old OnePlus 3 running a barely year old version of Android and the vast majority of things perform perfectly fine. Even the camera is perfectly fine even for modern standards now that I've switched to a modern camera app by tricking it into thinking my phone is a Pixel.

If we stop making old devices obsolete, dealing with old devices will be a lot easier.

The issue here is software, not hardware. An old Android device would be perfectly capable of running the updated root store if the manufacturers bothered to update it. IE6 also could be switched from, at least theoretically.

> If 6% of Android users globally are on an ancient OS version, how many man-hours would it be sensible for my to spend testing that our systems work for them? How many of those 6% are likely to be paying customers for us?

From a purely financial point of view, I agree. But it stills sucks for the 6% and indirectly this is one of the reasons for electronic waste.

In a way there is a long tail of consumers with smaller incomes and living in countries with weak currencies that benefit from computer hardware and software and services that are developed targeting wealthier consumers but still have to deal with the fact they aren't really the target market.

Isn't the EU advocating (or legislating) longer life spans for consumer electronics?

If so, I hope they're covering both hardware and software and configs.

That certs eventually expire is obvious to me now that someone raised the issue. But I wouldn't have foreseen the problem on my own. So I imagine policy makers will need to be informed too.

> Isn't the EU advocating (or legislating) longer life spans for consumer electronics?

Yes, there is legislation for this that mandates a number of OS updates and security updates. I'm hoping Android manufacturers will stop shovelling new SKUs and concentrate on a few they can actually keep up to date.

I dunno, mayonnaise in my fridge from 2016 is probably extremely outdated.

No no, that's just cave aged mayonnaise, and it sells for a premium. Throw in a blurb about hand crafted artisan, and it'll be a rocket to the moon looking sales chart. You just gotta know how to sell it. These aren't outdated Android devices, they're vintage legacy devices.

I just checked and my own phone is affected by this. Coincidentally I just started getting the "everything feels so slow" thing that seems to inevitably happen to old devices.

It's not that 2016 devices are outdated per se, as a counter point, see the iPhone 7, which runs now on iOS 15.x from 2021, but still receives updates [1].

It is cheap Android handsets stuck on Android 6 Marshmallow or worse that never have received an OS upgrade.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213811

I was walking round our Hq last week and noticed some monitoring screens. Running the code I wrote back in 2005. Code that is now old enough to drink.

Still works.

It depends; there’s also fashion or entertainment; in some aspects also education, law and I’m sure many others.

A lot of perishables (food, medicine, gasoline) get "outdated" pretty fast. Sure, as a concept, lettuce will stay with us for a long time. But an individual Bibb head won't last long, even under perfect conditions.

And yet lettuce can still outlast officials in government!

:) For anyone who doesn't get the reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Truss_lettuce

What is even your point with this comment? Are you somehow claiming that electronics are to be compared to lettuce? This is just absurd.

I agree. Personally, nothing from 2016 counts as "extremely outdated" to me.

I know people who refuse to watch movies that are older than a couple of years.

It is in tech terms. Just deal with it.

Phones from 2016 are ancient and you can buy newer phones dirt cheap. The Samsung A series costs almost nothing, same with all the cheap Redmi phones and Oppo and whatnot.

You can do it but that doesn’t mean you should.

Throwing away a phone whose hardware may be perfectly working, but its manufacturer decided to be too cheap to use anything but walled-garden components, feels like an utter waste of resources.

(By walled-garden components, I mean chips whose suppliers make it difficult or impossible to develop an open-source driver.)

If you really need that old phone, use Firefox Mobile which has its own root store.

But good luck using it

This might be less of an option then you'd think. Android software is often compiled assuming the CPU has comparatively recent instruction set extensions. Older devices, especially lower-end devices (which are more likely to be stuck on older software and more likely to be owned by people without the resources to frequently upgrade), might lack those extensions, making the app unusable. This is not a hypothetical. I've experienced this with FF a couple years ago (and even spent a couple hours trying to figure out how to build from source, but ultimately gave up.)

FWIW, I use Firefox on a 10 year old phone with Android 5.1, and it runs just fine. The phone is built on an x86 Atom SoC, though.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/75203/i...

What extensions other than NEON are you thinking of? Neon was made a CDD requirement for Android 6.0, released on 2015. Even before that it was almost ubiquitous. The last shipping devices in any volume missing NEON were Tegra 2 tablets from 2011.

That "almost nothing" is a typical blue collar monthly salary in my shitty town.

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