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Comment by kimbernator | Hacker News Reader

It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.

There is so much time, effort, and physical waste that is generated by slightly redesigning phones every year purely for the sake of making sales (as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature). Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it, but all of the cases, screen protectors, and other assorted accessories cast in plastic for previous models that are garbage now.

It would be nice if we could just space these things out to 5 years or so now, because that's probably how long it takes for anything to change enough to justify a new model.

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It's funny because if they did not release a new phone every year, the old phones would be useful for longer. I recently had to replace my iPhone 7s plus because it was getting so slow I sometimes could not get the camera to open as it loaded the system down too much. This was despite the fact that the system said my battery was not degraded (it had been replaced with Apple Care a couple of times).

Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.

And faster phones are nice, but I think it is worth considering how valuable that really is to us as users and a society, especially if the process involves making loads and loads of ewaste and consuming tons of new resources, and all the emissions their mining and transport involves, when we could simply keep our software slim and our old devices functional.

And the big companies will never do this. Do we need to force them to allow open software to run on these devices, so that clean builds can be patched and maintained when the company over bloats them or abandons them?

I don't update my phone every year but I also don't really want the progress of software or tech in general determined by the laggards.

I think that a new phone release should just be warranted. The trigger should be "we made significant improvements that couldn't be applied in software to the old device" instead of "it's October"

An improved camera can't be something applied in software, a faster chip can't be applied in software. So by your own standard every version is warranted.

"significant" is the key word here. I'd be hard pressed to think of a generational release of an existing phone line in the last 5 years that I would describe as a "significant" improvement.

The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases.

My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.

Just because you don't value the type of improvements doesn't mean there aren't improvements. It just means you probably don't need to upgrade this year.

And yet compare this years phone to a phone 5 years old. There is a large different. It just so happens that the yearly increase isn't seen as "significant" to you.

When you say "seen as", are you trying to imply that they're wrong? Because what you said can be true without them being wrong at all.

It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change.

So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases.

Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.

Depends on your use case.

For me, the addition of satelite SOS introduced on iPhone 14 is a game changer. I do enough out of cell range activity that I carry a SPOT device.

The ability for one more device (and pricy subscription) to be eaten by my phone is fantastic.

For others it might be onboard ai capabilities.

Each incremental hardware update to an iPhone tips the utility scales for someone, and is a completely ignorable change for others. Some people don’t care a bit that the new iPhone has a 2k nit brightness, for others, that is the feature they’ve been waiting for to upgrade.

I don’t pay attention to androids much, but it is pretty rare for iPhone full number bumps not to have a hardware feature that is new.

Yeah. Don't do that.

This is not a replacement for a SPOT device. It's a backup. You might need to move around reportedly, point it very carefully to find a satellite, coverage isn't great, even minimal tree cover is a problem, etc. Plenty of cases where a SPOT device would be a life saver and where this would not.

I too would like to ditch mine. But I'd rather be alive in a real emergency than die because I broke my leg and can't walk around in a circle pointing the phone right.

My SPOT has a pretty significant failure rate at getting tracking messages out (~20% of my tracking dots are unsuccessful), and has no feedback mechanism to indicate whether it was successfully sent. Unless emergency messages are sent using a different technique than tracking messages I’m not sure I trust the spot much either.

My last three phone upgrades have been decidedly 'meh', and I only upgrade every 2-3 years. There have been some marginal improvements in battery life and performance, and some software niceties; but those get counteracted by bloat, regressions, and UX churn. Replacable battery and storage becoming less common is categorically worse for users.

A phone with upgradable parts and minimal bloat would be better than any recent phone I've had, but it would also be less profitable for Google so obviously they will avoid that as much as possible.

Honestly, one of my favorite phones was the Motorola (what's now) Power.

Middling specs. Huge battery.

I'm still on a Pixel 4a 5G now, because I haven't seen any reason to upgrade.

But I'm a "I want to be able to accidentally run over my phone with a car, shrug, and go get another one" type of person. (Despite the fact I've never actually cracked a screen...)

I still use a Motorola G(whatever, honestly can't remember) Power. Works fine, doesn't lag. The camera is nothing to write home about but I have a DSLR for good pictures and all my phone pictures are crap due to a hand tremor that stabilization can't accomodate for anyway.

Battery lasts forever and a day and there's never been a situation where I've felt prevented or limited by the phone.

I hold no love for Apple but the phone I used the longest was my iPhone 3GS. I think 5 years or so but only because it was jailbroken. (Thanks saurik!) Otherwise it would have been half as useful (or secure since I got fixes to exploits faster than Apple made then).

The initial SailfishOS phone from Jolla was supported for 7+ years and was also a really nice experience.

But it's silly to imply that there would be a new release every October even if they hadn't designed a new phone and prepared it for mass manufacture. What determines whether each release is "warranted" is, roughly, whether people buy the new one.

im all about keeping my phone 5+ years, but I think that “significant” progress is likely only realized in small incremental amounts..

The reason Google releases a phone every October is because Apple releases a phone around the same time.

Having a cadence helps improve quality by standardization and repetition. It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality, and releasing often reduces risks by making smaller changes.

>> It’s just like with agile and scrum, the cadence improves quality

In my experience of years working in agile and scrum methodologies all cadence does is it makes developers release unfinished code to tick boxes and show that they are productive every sprint.

If anything it seems to me like hardware advances are directly correlated with increasingly worse software.

People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly).

Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.

> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s

I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face.

We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20

The ratio of users who give a shit about 100ms of input lag on a 4 year old phone is tiny compared to devs who cared about typing lag 20 years ago

It isn't. The users are just conditioned to shut up. Technology universally sucks, but it's magic, and it's all a supplier-driven market with high natural barriers to entry - meaning vendors don't give a flying fuck about what the users think, the users are to buy what they're given and be happy about it - so everyone just accepts it's how it's supposed to be, and adjusts their lives to work around tech being shit.

Turbo C++ was my first IDE(a birthday present when I was a kid) and I will always be grateful of it for triggering my love of programming but to say that is even in the same category as a modern IDE is a huge stretch. Of course modern stuff is laggier for most IDE's as it's doing real time analysis on your code as you type. If you want to compare it with a Borland IDE from the 90s open up notepad and start typing.

Borland IDEs were definitly better than Notepad.

The editor did nothing more than notepad does today and the IDE at least back when I was using it was basically just a compiler, debugger with basic inspection window and stepping and a make system. It wasn't doing realtime formatting of your code, inspection for errors, referencing to other parts of code, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc.

Stuck in MS-DOS?

As someone that used all their products from MS-DOS, through Windows 3.x days up to switching to Visual C++ 6.0, I clearly remeber code completion, syntax highlighting and macros, three features that Notepad isn't capable of.

As easily proven, by reading the manuals available in Bitsavers.

Yeah looks like you're right about at least the syntax highlighting and macros, I can't find any reference to Borland doing code completion back then and what I did find was people from much later complaining that it'd take up to 5 seconds to return suggestions, I used it around 4.5 and really don't remember any of those features though. I guess it was almost 30 years ago now though and I was mostly just interested in making the asteroids do weird things.

So replace Notepad with Notepad++ in my previous comments. There are definitely fast editors that do the same thing as Borland editors did back then the ones like VSC do a whole lot more and support a whole lot more.

Besides moving goalposts, Notepad++ still isn't on the same league as Borland's IDEs.

Turbo Pascal 7 did syntax highlighting, as well as source-level debugging. That was on top of nice-to-have features like auto-indenting.

It was a DOS, Turbo Vision application.

In the meanwhile, I know plenty of my friends happily daily driving an iphone 8, a 6 years old device.

> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this.

Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.

Better features, better functionality.

Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator?

Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, configs, etc. But that whole process was objectively worse than today.

both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then look at this shit? we still ordered crap from amazon back then. We still had forms to submit to HN or similar. Sure, we didnt have thin webgl wrappers, webusb, webmidi, web-wipe-my-ass updates to our japanese toilets. The amount of direct crap being put into almost everything is beyond measure

All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards.

As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.

applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.

nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.

The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.

I don't know, Microsoft Word 2.0 started up on a high-end machine of its time faster than Google Docs with its stupid progress bars.

My Tesla phone key takes 15+ seconds to connect bluetooth and unlock the car, making me look like a goddamn idiot while I keep yanking the car handle while bystanders stare at me as if I'm a car thief.

This stuff should take <0.01s in 2023 by Moore's Law. Computers should work imperceptibly fast by now for the same high-level tasks.

Moore’s law has never been about speed - and serial speed has been on a very slow increase rate year-after-year for more than a decade now. The current Microsoft Word can do a million times more things than 2.0.

Why are you using Google Docs instead of Word 2.0 then?

Sure ARM based Mac laptops are great. But x86 laptops are still just as loud, hot with horrible battery life as they always have been.

Hyperbole much?

2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise

2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on

You realize how bad 6 hour battery life is right compared to the MacBook Air?

And my work Microsoft Surface laptop fan never shuts off.

And my work x86 Thinkpad fan rarely spins up and when it does it's way quieter than my Intel MBP ever was. Also gets 8 hours battery life web browsing which is good enough.

It's almost like there's a spectrum of PCs.

I never said that x86 MacBooks didn’t suck.

My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.

My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.

Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?

My M1 Macbook Air was lucky to make it 6 hours with Docker running in the background. If I was editing text I could get maybe 10-12 hours. For my money, there are lots of machines that would run cooler and more efficiently.

> Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?

Because your workload isn't compatible with MacOS, and Apple makes no effort to remedy it at a software-level? Docker should not be more energy efficient on Windows than it is on Mac... and that's really just the tip of the incompatibility iceberg. Unless your workload is explicitly compatible with ARM, it probably Just Works better on x86.

So how long does you Windows laptop battery last when running Docker? How loud do the fans get?

It hovered around 40c, about the same as my Macbook Air. Fans kicked on at 45c, so idling was silent (but working wasn't).

The real killer-app for me was just switching to Linux as my base OS. I can leave containers idling while watching YouTube at a cool 27c internally. I'm using a 6-7 year old T460s, but honestly I feel like I could get away with even weaker hardware if I wanted. A Macbook Air running Linux might be a candidate if I didn't need to wait for basic functionality to get reverse-engineered. As-is though, you can count me among the people who doesn't quite need an upgrade yet.

You reminded me the 90's joke: "What is Windows? An 386 emulator for Pentium".

Indeed so: I do replace mine every year because each generation has a successively better camera, and I value being able to take better pictures with the device I have available [1] more than I value the incremental cost to me of selling the old one and buying a new one each year (and iPhones hold their value very well!)

By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them.

[1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...

I know there have been cases where companies seem to intentionally slow down old phones to encourage new sales, but it doesn't really even require an "evil" motive. By releasing new hardware yearly, they are dramatically increasing their workload by having to support every device. On top of that, there's the perverse incentive that spending the money to release timely, high-quality updates to previous-generation devices will actually have a negative impact on their bottom line by reducing new sales.

> And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.

I mean, it is a bit unfair against Apple - some of the reason behind the OS getting more heavyweight is actually backporting new features in 7 year’s distance, many which actually has dedicated hardware in case of the more modern lineup.

Also, there is a big aspect which is independent of Apple: every app is getting more and more heavy, the same phone now has to open a 500MB facebook app, not a 70MB one (just random numbers).

Also, the whole “yearly replacement” thing is just.. not an actual thing. People on average change their phones every 3 years, where the accumulated small improvements do add up. But everyone is at a different point in the cycle, so it absolutely makes sense. Add to it how apple devices hold their value to an insane degree, often living 2nd-3rd lives, and one would be really hard-pressed to actually pinpoint apple as a threat against our planet - compared to cheap androids that are barely good for a single year due to instantly obsolete software, has no resale value whatsoever, and are absolutely single-use.

I am not a proponent of extreme capitalism/libertarianism, but I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.

> People on average change their phones every 3 years

People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.

This figure sourcing gallup has nearly half of Americans replacing their phone "as soon as their carrier allows it": https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/07/15/how-often-...

Of course - it's not like the monthly bill becomes less if you have a phone taken from a carrier, so you should change it out immediately.

It absolutely does go down if you're not making payments on a phone

That article is from 2018. 2 Year Contracts were still a thing back then. The contract included a hidden fee that covered the cost of the device spread out over the length of the contract.

That is all gone now. Carriers have post-paid plans where the monthly device cost varies based on device. These are 0% interest loans from the carrier. At the same time, people have started holding their phones longer. Renewal periods when to 30 months, then 36 months.

Some people will never be happy but cellphone customers are never happy.

Why can't people just enjoy our pocket computers with their always on connections?

The mistake was giving the general public pocket computers with always on connections and acting like they wouldn't be stupid with them or turn them into status symbols

I worked for a verizon reseller in 2014-2015 and 2 year contracts were not very common by the time I left. 0% loans on 2 year periods were big by then. Functionally I don't think "normal" people really see a big difference.

And those people are the reason that the average is three years, instead of one year like the teenagers do.

Your bubble is showing again — only rich parents’ kids buy a new phone yearly.

This is not Reddit, you do not need to prefix comments with personal attacks. Nor is karma farmed here by insinuating that you are poor, confused about your gender, or had abusive parents.

If by "bubble" you mean my family, nobody but the eight year old has seen a new phone since before the first COVID lockdowns. And the phones that my children use were are purchased with money they earned themselves - including the eight year old. He decided at six that he wants a phone, and saved for two years to buy one - not a grain of which was aquired through his parents.

Genuinely curious - how did your 6-8 year old earn an income that didn't come from his parents?

He walks smaller dogs and sells drinks that he makes at the football field near the house. The neighbour lets him pick lemons to sweeten the drinks. He worked for two years to buy the absolute least expensive phone available. I did buy him a case as a gift for achieving his goal, though: $3 on Aliexpress.

I should mention that he also managed to buy two goldfish during this time - also with his own money. So he learned very well to budget, and that each thing that he buys along the way pushed back his goal.

Really cool!

Maybe having a phone at six is normal now but it sounds crazy to me

He got the phone at eight, but in general I agree with you.

As a father, I see the phone as an opportunity to teach limits from an early age. And wow, does he test those limits! In retrospect, it is better that him and I are going through this testing phase at eight, rather than in the rebellious teenage years.

I'm 15 and I don't even want a phone, this thing is a goddamn headache, portable little advertisement device hurdling me with ads even when I run GrapheneOS and it depresses me mine (pixel 5a) is the last that will ever be made with a headphone jack, which I literally rely on, earbuds don't need a battery. I use it because it's what I can get and I didn't make my financial decision on it.

I don't see that as a personal attack. It is factual. No teenager - except the richest ones - can afford buying a new smartphone every year, neither do their parents.

And most of those that can afford it would still want to buy other things instead when they already have one, which means only the richest of the richest ones really do that.

The "attack" was deciding that I live on a bubble of rich parents. In fact, my own mother wouldn't be hungry during dinner many evenings while we were growing up... only years later did I realize why.

Have you ever heard of financing for things like that? Great way to get people to get stocked up on things they can't actually afford.

There are so many things you can finance at the same time until it isn't sustainable anymore.

If Apple just let people hang out on the last nicely-working version of iOS, where their camera still opens fast, then that’d be fine. But they don’t. They bully you into always being on the latest

Also, I remember a while back they did a specific optimised speed-up release of iOS with barely any new features and it _really_ worked. My iPhone 6S went from being basically garbage I was going to replace to like a brand new phone.

They can do it if they want to. It’s what’s needed now. My iPhone 12 Pro has started to feel super slow since I got iOS 17. I have a new battery. Even texting feels painfully slow. There’s no excuse for this. It’s either deliberate and bad, or lazy and bad. Either way it’s bad.

If Apple committed to releasing a full + feature-slim version of each iOS going forward, I'd switch to an iPhone tomorrow.

But that's a lot of maintenance burden, in exchange for slitting their own revenue throat. So hard to expect them to do it for altruism.

I also have an iPhone 12 Pro and it’s just as snappy as ever on iOS 17.

Sounds like you might have some buggy / bad app interactions going on? There’s really no reason for a 12 Pro to be slow at this point even if the OS was getting “heavier.” The 12 Pros have 6GB of RAM, which is now pretty standard across the iPhone lineup even years later. And the A14 SoC in the 12 Pro is effectively the same tech as the M1 processors that are still rock-solid at running full blown macOS, albeit with fewer cores running at somewhat lower clocks.

I can’t really think of much reason for you to be having a slow experience aside from the usual bugs that can accompany any new major release, and usually get ironed out over the course of a month or two.

FWIW you also don’t have to update. Of course they bully you to update. You don’t have to.

It’s just temporary - after you install a new update, every cache has to be regenerated in the background, so for a few days/week it will have a shitton of background tasks running.

Also, ios 17 likely is a bit buggy - I’m on 17.1 beta with a 12 pro max and I can say that the performance is back to how it used to be.

Curiously, I noticed people here mention that camera on older iPhones is taking ages to open. I'm on iPhone7, battery never replaced ("battery health: significantly degraded" as reported by iOS), so goes from 100% to 10% in about 12 hrs with "normal" use. However, camera opens just fine.

No, it's not unfair at all. Apple's gotten busted for this exact thing and had to shell out $500 million in damages.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-start-paying-out-5...

> I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.

Well this one might be good for business, but as you can see, it is extremely bad for the individual.

The consequence of their upgrade was a slow down. But they didn’t slow it down just because they could. It was to prevent a phone with an old shitty battery to shut down in the middle of a task when there was still battery left. Better a slow down than just no phone at all.

And yes they didn’t communicate it, that’s why they got sued. But this problem was real.

Did you even read your own citation? Apple slowed down older phones when the battery degraded because the other choice was the phone would shut off.

That's Apple's claim, yes.

But if they were genuinely just concerned about battery health, and not about their sales numbers, then why do the throttling covertly? Why not tell the user that throttling was happening, that it was related to power issues, and that they should consider a replacement battery?

If they wanted a new sale, why not do nothing and let the phones reboot? Why only target individual handsets with degraded batteries? Why bring the phone back to full speed when the battery was changed? Why does the feature still exist?

The only thing that has changed is they now tell you if it’s happening.

> why not do nothing and let the phones reboot

Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.

With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.

With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.

> Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern

They still are. As a battery ages the internal resistance increases. This leads to brown-outs under high current. This isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just how batteries work.

The whole discussion is incredibly moot, because Apple should be shipping devices with more easily replaced batteries.

The degradation would still happen. You want your car to go into limp home mode even if the part that failed is replaceable.

This issue would still have drastically different framing if the given reason was true and users had the freedom to easily replace batteries in old devices, as well as OS-level warning pop-ups which let the user know that it's time to replace a battery and that their phone will be slower until they do.

Anything less is deceptive and anti-user.

If it was true? All the evidence supports it. My wife’s phone was throttled and mine wasn’t. Replacing degraded batteries brought devices back to full speed. How can you draw any other conclusions?

The only thing they have changed is that they now have the OS level pop ups, the feature still exists.

It's quite easy to draw the conclusion that other alternatives were considered such as an easily-replaced battery, but Apple's management decided on a course of action which was plausible enough to be accepted without much further questioning, and wouldn't give the user back any freedoms, and would ultimately lead to more phone sales.

I don’t subscribe to that at all. I see other manufacturers dropping support for their phones after one or two years and I see apple supporting them for a long time. They want to sell services and they want you to have a working phone to use them.

Apple get phone sales from me because of this stance.

I have refuted that article like 1000 times already, if I ever see it again..

When a company is the first to be worth 1 trillion, maybe the business model is exploitative and should be forced to be worse.

They make so much money, why should their business model have to be any better?

I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow.

Flash storage doesn't last forever, and it's got a whole gradient of failure and wear experiences.

> I wonder how much of that is the software demands increasing and the flash storage itself wearing out over time. As flash storage wears it'll often go slower and slower as the error correction needs to process more to actually get you the uncorrupted bits. This is why a lot of cheap devices tend to just become unbearably slow after a while, their storage just gets to be way too slow.

Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.

If we're looking at older phones with removable storage, it usually limited what could be put on the SD card. And in the end the OS and system libraries were still on the on-board storage which would wear out over the years.

And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.

Perhaps SDcard isn't the right standard. Or some stress testing certification is in order

IDK, I've never had a RPi corrupt an SD card to my knowledge. Also, there are now SD cards optimized for the load patterns similar to that of an OS.

There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.

Phones could ship with a good SD card which will get the vast majority of consumers to end-of-useful-life for their device. At that point if a user replaces it with crap, it's kind of on them. Similar to how cell phone chargers are now.

I've never had an RPi corrupt an SD card, but I had one (running pi-hole) wear out a card over the course of about six months. It was pretty easy to get everything back up and running (it needed a new card with the most recent version of the default OS package), and I was able to resolve the situation long-term by using log2ram to space out writes to the SD card (at the risk of losing a day's worth of logs).

With cloud backup... this isn't as defensible as it used to be.

Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM.

Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue.

Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions.

Aka the cockroach phone.

That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.

And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.

That's honestly not a good user experience. Having to buy a new sd card routinely, and better hope you system can detect impending as card failures accurately.

Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that.

They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.

Not to mention what it’ll do the waterproof rating.

Do that many people need their phone to be waterproof rated?

I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used?

Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.

I always sort of imagine it's a selling point less for the adventure aspect and more for the 'dropped in the toilet' angle.

i've yet to be so unfortunate, but i've met a lot of people with a 'I dropped my phone in the toilet so it's in a bag of rice' story.

let's hope they throw that rice out at the end of the process.

People routinely ruined phones via submersion or splashed water. I drowned a phone in my pocket while biking in a rainstorm as recently as 2018. You never hear about this anymore.

You really don’t think people accidentally jump in pool, drop their phone in a puddle, in the sink, in the toilet etc?

They do, but they were also doing it before the phones were routinely designed to be waterproof, and I don't recall an epidemic of water-related phone-killing incidents.

you don't mind so much when it is a 50$ phone, a bit more on a 1100$ one. Not that I understand why anyone would pay more than 250$ in a smartphone really.

Well since even the average Android phone’s selling price is $285 the last time I checked, maybe it says more about your lack of insight than anything else?

I don't know, I have had company issued high end phones and apart from better camera quality[1] these devices weren't doing things significantly better than my personal 240$ smartphone.

Also, generally people spend an awful lot of money on things out of vanity and social pressure, regardless of their needs and if it is a good decision. Look at new cars prices and how most vehicles purchases are usually overkill for everyone. The most sold car in the US are the Ford F series , Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram trucks before a number of high end SUV. Sure people are free to buy whatever they want but a Honda Fit would be enough for large majority of them and be a smarter financial decision[2]. They mostly do it because they can, not because they need.

[1] which has become fairly decent for anyone accross all ranges in the last few years.

[2] I am not sure it is still sold in the US but I could have chosen another example of a smaller and more affordable vehicle.

Yes I’m sure 60% of Americans care about “social pressure” enough to buy a different phone. Trust me, my 80 year old mother doesn’t care about what TikTok influencers think.

Low end Android phones just plain suck when it comes to performance and battery life. Not to mention they rarely get operating system updates.

If you did force me to buy an Android phone, it would be the Pixel.

> Trust me, my 80 year old mother doesn’t care about what TikTok influencers think.

nor does she care about operating system updates.

Actually she does. Once she saw that an old computer running an old version of Windows was no longer going to get updates, she stopped using it. She would be just as cautious about a phone that didn’t get updates

Nothing is truly waterproof, but IP55 is really weaksauce by modern standards. Modern flagships are IP67 or even IP68.

I live in an area where's it very humid and rains a lot. My phones get wet, a lot, just due to nature. I had one die after I got caught in a massive squall line at an outdoor concert on what was supposed to be a sunny day.

Funny you say this when I was just in a pretty bad rainstorm tonight and got absolutely soaked. I've lost a couple of portable devices getting drenched like that in the past but this time it was just the USB-C port wouldn't charge for an hour while it dried out.

So yeah I would have needed a new phone tomorrow if it wasn't for my phone being waterproof. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I've lost many things from water damage. So many people used to complain about Apple denying warranty claims from water damage from the device just being in a humid area for a long time, now that just doesn't happen.

I live in a very rainy city, I got soaked several times.

I never once lost a phone to water damage, despite most of the phones I've owned not being waterproof.

My pocket made of regular fabric seems to be sufficient protection.

my old Samsung Galaxy s2 died when tripping around Australia, just by being in the car overnight (where I was sleeping too). Apparently enough humidity that in the morning it was dead, board fried up

I have, phone in the pocket of my rainjacket, got caught in a serious downpour, water got into the pocket and because it was a rain jacket stayed there to the point it was sodden.

Screen on the phone died.

I see the point of waterproofing phones after that.

> Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.

This is the main use case, but it's not to be dismissed considering this is a very common cause of phone failure. If this doubles the lifespan of your phone then it effectively ~halves the cost. Which is a big deal when phones are as expensive as they are.

After working wireless retail in the early '00s, I will always choose a phone with a high IP rating. Other scenarios I've seen - Phone pushed into sink without realizing while doing dishes and walking away for an hour long phone call, parked convertible with phone in the cupholder, boob sweat, working in a greenhouse going in and out of air conditioning, leaving on a picnic table overnight while camping, water bottle leaking in purse, etc. Also there's utility in feeling confident the phone can survive if you need to wash syrup, baby food, sticky bar residue, etc off it.

> Phone pushed into sink without realizing while doing dishes and walking away for an hour long phone call

How did they talk on their phone for an hour without realizing their phone was underwater?

> in the early '00s

The customer was probably talking on their landline phone for the hour.

We had regular Samsung phones with waterproofing, all ports and replaceable battery. It is a myth that only sealed phones can be waterproof.

I think most people don't realize how slow SD cards are compared to conventional flash, too. When you put apps on a SD card on Android, it's always been dog slow. And you're at the mercy of the manufacturer to put a reasonably high-speed interface on it.

There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the mounting mechanism), and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.

> I think most people don't realize how slow SD cards are compared to conventional flash, too. When you put apps on a SD card on Android, it's always been dog slow. And you're at the mercy of the manufacturer to put a reasonably high-speed interface on it.

It's been a long, long time since I couldn't fit all the apps I wanted on the phone storage. My SD card is mainly for multimedia files, and it's plenty fast for that purpose.

The only performance limit I've hit in recent times was because it was exFAT, not because it was an SD card.

> There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large

Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.

Also there was that XFMEXPRESS form factor if manufacturers wanted to put an SSD socket into a phone. "card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm."

> and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.

That's the real killer incentive, that you can charge huge amounts per terabyte and also force people to buy higher-end phones just to get the ability to buy more storage.

As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.

UHS SD can be fast in consecutive read and writes but I've rarely seen good performance in random I/O or lots of small actions.

It doesn't have to be that way. Its entirely feasible to make a microsd card with a better controller and some ram buffer for fast wear leveling. The best we see today is some mild tuning for IO in A1 and A2 cards.

You have to remember that a current microsd cards is just a general purpose micro-controller and some (probably SPI) flash in a plastic case.

It doesn't have to, but it is, and an effort like this is going to be off-the-shelf if it ever exists at all.

> Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.

As mentioned, random I/O tends to fail, but the other tradeoff here is that fast microSD card slots tend to get extremely hot. Not necessarily "failure" hot (stuff like the ROG had issues from other parts), but uncomfortable to hold, depending on where the thing is going to go.

> As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.

The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".

> The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".

Oh definitely. I would too. I dream of the price being only $200/TB.

The biggest storage upgrade for a normal iPhone is +384GB for $300 (Oof). If you upgrade to the Max model you can get +768GB for $400.

A Galaxy S23 can get +128GB for $60, a Galaxy S23+ can get +256GB for $120, and a Galaxy S23 Ultra can get +768GB for $420.

A Pixel 8 can get +128GB for $60, and a Pixel 8 Pro can get +896GB for $400.

If you include the price increase of better base models, to get access to bigger options, then $700/TB is a good ballpark figure.

I think this pricing is a little bit better than when I last looked, but it's still very bad.

The availability of >512GB is growing but still flaky and usually requires extra expensive base models. While in comparison microsd has had cheap 1TB for a good while, and 1.5TB for $150 becomes available later this month.

> That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.

I like your idea but in the US at least most mobile carriers actually don't encourage yearly upgrades as they force you into a multiyear contract for your phone to get "the best deal". In fact, currently both verizon and AT&T have 30+ month payment plans for phones so you're locked into at least 2.5 years. consequently, most people hold on to their phone for 3 years now.

should just use m.2 2230 nvme. should be user replacable, its okay if it needs to be disassembled and its a 30 minute job, but that would solve a whole lot.

SD Express is PCIe and much smaller, but a full sized SD card still isn’t small. Supposedly microSD Express exists but I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen it…

Aren't the speed constraints on SD cards due to the controllerless single flash chip design rather than the connector format? Unless you also shoved an ssd controller on the SD Express card I can't see it being much of an improvement.

Most of that is because the OS defaults write about 20 times more crap than anyone needs, and devs consistently do not care about preserving write cycles. There's still a culture of "Beautiful code is everything, hardware is disposable and meant to be upgraded".

An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.

Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.

But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.

I have a love/hate relationship with Sony Xperia phones, they look and feel nice, have a 3.5mm and a microSD slot.

That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines.

There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.

Ran a rpi for well > 1yr running Ubuntu server and 3cx off the SD card. Longest uptime was like 90+ days only dropped because my town regularly has power outages. Same card had been in use for a good year prior on another rpi doing a different function. Hasn't missed a beat. SanDisk gold colored one. It's now in another rpi...

Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.

I have an obsolete (with Lineage OS installed) Samsung smartphone with an SD-card. I use it for podcasts and audio books, as it has a jack, and I have a nice non-Bluetooth headphones that I wear most of the time of that listening time. I like to think my internal storage isn’t wearing over and over again, but the SD card, which I can super easily replace any time. Plus, I can replace it with something huge (like extra 128 GB or even more, what is supported) for very cheap. I cannot add extra 128 GB of storage to my iPhone, even if I’m willing to pay the premium. I have just one way: to sell my unit and buy another with more storage.

all modern stern pinball machines (everything spike/spike ii, from 2015 on) boot linux on sd card

I just don't buy flagship phones, you can get midrange stuff with removable micro sd, oled, >60hz screen etc. Sure the CPU isn't as fast but unless you're playing games it makes almost no difference.

Interesting, finally I have an idea of why my phones have always gotten slower over time. Is there a way to measure error rates and/or average storage latency on my (Android) phone somehow?

eMMC usually has csd and ext_csd registers that tells information regarding wear level and such. It's easy to access these from Linux, but not sure how we would do it on Android.

You can build/install mmc-utils on the device (even from Google's repo,[1] if outdated) but can't access the storage device paths without root. If you're on a custom ROM, the mmc command might even be part of it.

1: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/mmc-utils...

is there something like crystaldiskinfo for iOS?

Don't be surprised if your latest 'update' is a 'downdate' in disguise. IE it's purposely designed to go slower when the maker has decided that it's time for you to upgrade your device.

There’s no such thing as the iPhone 7S Plus, but nice story

Or there are such things as regional exclusives.

https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-ip...

The iPhone 7S does not exist. You have linked to a pre-release rumour article for a non-existent device.

Ah I was always a bit foggy on that, I bought it about 7 years ago. I guess it was just the normal 7 Plus.

That’s specifically covered under new EU ewaste laws - upgrades the impair device performance must be fixed in a reasonable timeframe.

Does that cover e.g. flash degradation over time from just normal write cycles?

No, but given how stark the slowdown often is after an os update… I don’t think that’s what has happened

An OS update does a lot of writes though. Its downloading a several gig file, unpacking lots of tiny files, shuffling them all around etc. Its probably one of the most disk intensive things a phone will do.

And in fact installing the first big OS update was one of the key points on the Nexus 7 that showcased its incredibly fragile storage. So we've definitely seen this happen in the past specifically with OS updates being the straw that killed the camel's back in flash storage performance.

I've experienced it on devices before as well. Play around flashing different ROMs on Android, eventually each flash keeps getting a little slower and a little slower, and suddenly just copying files directly off USB gets incredibly slow and the device becomes nearly unusable. I've seen it happen on a few different devices.

How real are the security risks? My wife is using Oneplus 5t about 6 years old. It doesn't feel slow, cam may not be greatest, but pretty good. Battery life is one day with mild usage. It is stuck on Android 10, but play services and apps are updated.

This how it works or most people in the world. They get a phone and they change it only when they are forced to (hardware failure, some app they absolutely need stops working etc.). The group of people changing phones because they are no longer supported with security fixes is very small.

This is beyond stupid how fucked up the phone market is. I'm still using my 2008 laptop with newest LTS (x)Ubuntu, but my 2018 Android phone lost official support in 2020... Thanks to that, now I have iPhone (longer support) and Fairphone 5 (I like how they try to upstream everything for this phone and promise really long support).

About your question: Should be fine. As long as browser is up-to-date, she doesn't connect to unknown WiFi networks/Bluetooth devices and she is not targeted. The easiest security fix is to not have anything worth anything on the phone :D

I have the same phone, and the main culprit is the connectors. The audio jack connector has gone a few years ago, now the USB-C is getting worse - I need to sometimes wiggle the cable to connect the charger. If I use a headphone then the smallest motion might disconnect it. This is the only reason why I'm considering getting a new phone - battery is still around 75% capacity (after 6 years of daily use!), otherwise still performant enough, runs any apps I use without a problem.

> Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.

Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much?

I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up.

There would be a massive financial incentive to do something nefarious like this.

There would be such an incentive, yes, and even more: set the number of digits to compute as proportional to the age of the model.

But haven't those anecdotes been debunked already? A counter-anecdote is my non-plus iphone 7 with whatever the latest ios it supports (15 something IIRC) that opens the camera as quickly as when it was new. Apart from Apple Maps, which never worked well for some reason, the apps I use don't lag. Google Maps is fine. My motorcycling mapping app (scenic) is fine. Lightroom is fine. Hell, even MS Teams works like it does on newer devices.

Opening the Camera app on iPhone is one of the most demanding tasks it can possibly do. Doing it and doing it fast means powering up the image sensor and its supporting hardware (ISP, ML hardware, etc.) and immediately terminating all non-essential tasks on the device so it can dedicate it to this.

If you don’t believe me, there are paths hardcoded in the kernel (I’m not joking: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2...) to very quickly reclaim memory for Camera to launch.

But it also did all that when new, and the camera still opened fast.

There’s a lot more going on in the background on your phone now.

So you think, when someone upgrades their phone they throw perfectly working "old" phone into trash?

Yes. I have drawers full of them which I have no use for and will likely be thrown out.

But phones are manufactured regardless, so why not let the people who are currently in the market for a new device get something current? The yearly release cycle isn't meant to be kept up with every year, in fact I think that that notion is so hilariously out of touch basically everywhere except the US (and a small international wealthy elite elsewhere) that it would be ridiculed. Remember, the global median per-capita household income is only $2,920 per year. That's not "the poor", that's the median. 99% of the world would never have even considered buying an iPhone 15 or similar after having an iPhone 14, let alone feel pressured to do so.

I've been consistently upgrading every 3 years since the Nexus days and I really don't think I'm missing anything. With trade-in, it ends up being something like $50/yr (I always go for the budget versions). Unless you're already sitting on FU money, I don't understand why anyone would spend more.

> Unless you're already sitting on FU money, I don't understand why anyone would spend more [than $50/yr on phone upgrades].

Among the people I know, there's more people living paycheck to paycheck and getting annual phone upgrades than people with FU money doing upgrades. That said, the percentage of FU money upgraders is higher than the percentage of paycheck-to-paycheck upgraders.

Google/Samsung/Apple/etc may be making more total money from the not-well-off than the well-off, at least thinking about people I know.

There's a point at which something like a new smartphone isn't a status symbol anymore. Among wealthier people, having an iPhone 11 isn't less of a signal than a day one iPhone 15.

I like to get a nice laptop and phone because I spend so much time on them. An iPhone is worth it for me, as I like a predictably good camera. Before I went iPhone, I had a Pixel 3a, and it took perfectly fine pictures. I just like the iPhone cameras more, although I’m starting to get a little jealous of the better zoom capabilities on some Samsung phone cameras I’ve seen recently. Lately I’ve been upgrading every two years, but every three would also be fine.

There's new cars each year, but hardly anyone is switching yearly, right?

This is a great point, further evidenced by the fact that past years models remain on sale. Apple still sells iPhone 13 and Google still sells Pixel 6a.

Is it? New generations are not released every year. It takes 5-8 years to show something new. In the middle of it there is facelifting (sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger). But I wouldn't say that one, particular model of car have new version each year.

There is no reason to release flagship phones each year.

Because if someone is looking to buy a new phone and they see the pixel is 3 years old while the Samsung is 3 months old and 5% faster, you’re going to buy the Samsung.

So every maker has to have the best they have on sale at all times.

I love it when people say "there's no reason to do x" where x is a thing that the world's biggest companies spend billions of dollars doing. There are lots of reasons, you just don't like them.

The car release cycle is pretty much exactly what flagship phones do too. They get a major redesign every few years with incremental improvements in between.

The biggest reason is obvious: if you didn't your competitors would and they'd eat your lunch. Modern mobile devices are only 15 yrs old, they're where PCs were in 1995. I'm already seeing people who used to upgrade every two years switch to 3, and before you know it that will climb to 4, 5, etc. as the tech matures. In 1997 your PC was obsolete after two years, now they're fine a decade later, and phones will get there too.

And with cars, pretty much all parts/accessories will work for any "model" in that 5-8 year window. Phones are not like this.

Not everyone lives on the same upgrade cycle, you can, but you're not supposed to change your phone every year. With iPhone 15, the majority of people upgrading would be 12 and older device owners.

That is technically true. However, I do find that a lot of people I know tend to get new phones well before they actually have a need for them.

I don't entirely blame peoples' consumerism; As somebody who once worked in cell phone sales, the mere act of visiting a carrier store is likely to land you in front of a salesperson who is incentivized to sell new phones and lines indiscriminately. Not to mention the incredible amount of advertising that goes into phones - if people only upgraded when they needed new phones, I don't think Apple, Samsung, or Google would feel the need to advertise the new ones so aggressively.

HN is likely a much more tech-literate crowd than the average person, so I think to a lot of us it seems silly to buy new phones every year. But I know that every time Apple releases a new iPhone, I get a call from my dad asking if it's worth upgrading from last year's model. I say no, nothing has changed, but the next time I see him he has it. Why? Because the salesperson made such a convincing case, not only about the merit of the new phone, but the fact that they could give him such a "deal" on it.

> lot of people I know tend to get new phones well before they actually have a need for them

It might just be your “bubble”, but even if not, is it really that bad of a deal? If you resell your previous phone at 2/3 the original price each year, you can use the latest phone for like 200 bucks for a year, or $17 monthly. For a device that is with you 0-24, and is probably the most often used item a typical person owns — they have it on them more often than even their shoes!

Yeah, but in the end they are those who fuel the waste machine. They start it, and they are the reason why there are new phones every year. For no sane reason.

Somewhere along the way, you pass a threshold where it's uncool to have a certain version of phone and judging from what you hear about the waste problem with phones, it's above the reasonable moment to get rid of it because it's broken or not usable.

I mean, sure it's a nice lie you can tell to yourself, but in the end, it's not good.

It's not always about being uncool. Sometimes it's about your current device getting slow enough to be annoying, so you want to replace to avoid paying the daily mental tax, "death through thousand papercuts", coming from the single piece of electronics you use most of, day in, day out. And that is caused mostly by software bloat - as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, between OS updates and app updates, a year is about how long a flagship phone has before it starts to become annoying to use. And then it only gets worse.

I feel qualified to say it's not just my bubble, having worked in cell phone sales. The business hinges on the fact that people don't run out the useful life of their devices.

Incentives exist on the part of the person who, being human, definitely want the new shiny thing, regardless of the logic behind it.

They exist for the salesperson, who will get a commission for selling the new shiny thing, regardless of whether this makes the customer's life any better or worse.

They exist for the carrier because the customer is on the hook for 2-3 years of service when they buy the shiny thing.

Finally, they exist for the company that made the phone because they make a profit on the sale price of the shiny thing.

Historically? Sure. But we are no longer in that phase of the mobile industry that a year old phone is close to useless at running new apps - the hardware improvements are more gradual.

Math doesn't work. Entry iphone 15 pro is $1,000. Say Tax is .08, so $1,080 out the door.

1 year from now if you sell it for 2/3 the price, you get back $720. A year's use cost you $360. About $1 a day. This is very worth it for some but not quite as cheap as $200 a year. This is without factoring in time to sell.

You could trade in but that means you are locked in contract with service provider.

That seems still high to me.

I have a Xiaomi 10 or something I bought in 2020 I paid 279$ for, almost 4 years later it comes at 0.18 and I see like 0 reasons to upgrade.

I admit I'm not the most social (media) person out there, I'm not into connecting my phone into every other device on this planet (as Apple people consistently remind how easily they interoperate their devices), but it does everything great: camera, battery, messaging, games.

To me to see people thinking it's normal to spend so much money for a phone is borderline crazy.

My whole point was that you can actually get the latest, best phone for this price.

Alternatively, you could buy a second-hand iphone 11/12 pro and use it for 5-6 years easily, with proper software support. That’s what I do, and don’t yet plan on updating - maybe the iphone 16 would be worthy for me.

Definitely not only his bubble. Most people with apple I know will do that.

May I assume you work in IT and from a Western country?

Indeed, Apple compares on its website the iPhone 15 to the iPhone 12: "The A16 Bionic GPU is up to 40% faster than the GPU in iPhone 12" [1]. Maybe unsurprisingly, they don't use this comparison for the Pro line. r/iphone discussion here [2].

[1] https://www.apple.com/mt/iphone-15/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/16h13z3/why_are_the...

That's an awesome stat in favor of the iPhone 12, which is now 3+ years old.

I agree. I find upgrading less frequently makes the upgrade so much more significant. Upgrading yearly would leave you complaining and wondering what's new.

I know people who lease a new car every 3 years. And often, if there's no redesign, they're getting a nearly identical vehicle. It's strange. Whereas, I upgrade my car every 10 years, and am thrilled with all the improvements.

This is fine and good, but the problem is that once your phone is no longer the newest thing, the experience takes a hit because there's little incentive to actually support your device anymore.

I think the lease thing is more to avoid dealing with any maintenance issues as well as the wear and tear on a less than new car. It’s not to get the newest tech or style all the time AFAIK.

Avoiding repairs, even if some of them might be expensive, is still insanely cheaper than leasing a new car every 3 days.

People lease for many factors, not just to avoid tear and maintenance.

> still insanely cheaper than leasing a new car every 3 days

Somehow that works for clothing vendors, though.

I don’t understand what you mean by avoiding repairs being cheaper. In order to avoid repairs you need to have a relatively new car all the time, and leasing is an easy way to achieve that.

What other reasons do people lease?

Apple has a few products like the ipad mini and imac that don't release on yearly schedules and it creates this situation where there are good and bad years to buy. Where the product hasn't been refreshed for 3/4 years and is now severely outdated and a major refresh is something like 6 months away. It's pretty bad for the customer and the seller. Meanwhile it's always a good time to buy an iphone. There is no point waiting for the next model because it won't be meaningfully different.

In the iPhone 15 release they wrote "huge leap" 6 times. It felt like something to anchor the perception and to trick journalists to include it in a sentence. But when they say it so much, it kinda shines through that it's mostly just desperate words. "any man who must say I'm the king is no true king" vibes.

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-debuts-iphone-1...

It's always the greatest iPhone ever! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPkso_6n0vs

The highest number in Apple version history ever! Wait for it …… after last highest 15, we have … ……… 15.0001. Yes!

The fact that's it's just 15 seems to belie this. I would expect Apple to re-brand once something truly different comes along... that being said all smartphones are becoming long and in the tooth and we're finally starting to see inklings of what might replace our phone addiction in the near-term (audio (buds) + vision, eyeglasses etc.)

I think counterintuitively there's less waste this way.

With yearly, incremental releases, people will evaluate what's new from their phone and most people will update on their own cycle, probably every few or several years.

Meanwhile, with gaming console "generational" releases every few years, that is a strong incentive for everyone to upgrade.

If I have a 3 year old phone which I'm on the fence about updating, then I might pass on this year's model and go for next year's. But if there won't be another phone for 3 more years I guess I might as well get this one.

A lot of people are on 2-year payment plans through their provider and just switch every time.

Yes, but those plans cost extra compared to one that doesn't have this feature.

(And don't many plans come with some sort of discount, if you don't upgrade your phone?)

Not in every country/region, unfortunately. In my case it's cheaper to upgrade my phone and sell my previous phone than get a BYOB device by a significant margin.

Yes. Though in terms of physical waste that the original commenter brought up, selling your old phone for someone else to use makes that upgrade a pretty good option.

We could look at the total amount of years any phone is used and abstract away from who uses it. Slightly stylised, if we have four people, Alice, Bob, Charles and Dave, and Alice gets a new phone every year, Bob buys Alice's old phone, Charles buys Bob's old phone, and Dave gets Charles' old phone, then everyone changes phones every year, but each phone is still used for a full four years.

I'm currently using Pixel 4a (just recently EOL), and I'll probably upgrade my phone this or next year.

Maybe Pixel has a yearly release cycle, but it doesn't mean I have to upgrade every year, that would be crazy. And they can iterate more often to try some ideas more often than once every 5 years.

I'm using a Pixel 3 (my first Pixel) that I bought new (in original sealed box) on eBay one year ago, for a bit under AUD$300, still works fine, all the apps keep upgrading (the OS won't upgrade as it's EOL, hasn't been an issue for me so far), the camera AI is impressive enough for me, I'm planning to keep on using it for at least another year. That's as close as I get to having a bleeding edge smartphone. No need to waste $1k+ on the latest and greatest hyped-up kool-aid.

The Pixel 3 is a good phone. I bought one new and used it for ~5 years. The battery was still going strong and my only issue was the USB-C port stopped working.

For my Pixel it always helped to clean the USB-C port with a toothpick. That thing attracted so much lint from pocket like no other.

As someone who's mostly buying used tech, or newish at deep discounted price from classifieds or ebay, I appreciate not having to wait 5 years cycles for stuff. Yearly release cycles means people let go sooner of perfectly functioning high end tech very fast, selling for very cheap, and I'm very grateful for that.

Great many containers filled with stuff from rich countries find their way to poor countries, some include stolen goods (like cars), others include garbage, most include goods that still have some value for other people, including tech.

Maybe the problem should be looked at from that angle, and maybe there's no problem, really. One's garbage will always be another one's treasure.

I agree with much of this post, but I have to take issue with "it's starting to feel silly." The "you need to upgrade your phone every year" concept has been silly from the outset.

That's totally a fair point, but at least phones were actually adding new features year to year a decade ago. It's fair to have new stuff releasing yearly when you're in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks" phase.

What's silly isn't the fact that they release new smartphones every year but that people feel compelled to upgrade every year.

Incremental annual hardware refreshes are great, because everyone who is in the market for a phone can always get the latest and greatest and can be set for several years. For those that give in to the marketing and throw away perfectly usable devices and a thousand+ dollars – well that's nobody's fault but their own.

Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years.

The annual incremental release cycle is fine—what’s silly is thinking phones need to be upgraded every year.

> Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years.

Try that and monitor your quality of life. See if you can avoid therapy.

It's not that people think they need to upgrade their phones every year, or two, or three. It's that the phones are designed for short usable life on hardware side, and on software side, neither first-party nor third-party developers give a damn about performance.

I upgrade once every 2-3 years on average and my quality of life is great. It’s not on principle either—I will walk into an Apple Store with my existing phone and use it side-by-side with whatever is their latest. If think the new thing improves my life I’ll buy it.

Currently I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Last year when I compared its “lesser camera” to the latest and greatest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference so I kept the old phone.

The specs they throw out are always better on paper, but practice upgrading each year will yield very little improvement in quality of life.

What is the evidence of this claim?

My wife just got to a place where her iPhone got unusable because it's running out of space - mainly having to do with her massive Messages history and photos/videos. We didn't even know until I checked, her phone is the iPhone X which was released 6 years ago and technically nothing is stopping her from using it longer except the lack of desire to prune her message history/photos/vids.

My wife is someone who's not going to suffer with a poorly functioning piece of technology nor someone who is going to work hard to optimize it or prolong its life, so the fact that her 6 year old phone works just fine is a good sign that it can, in the average case.

As another data point, I've a tendency to not store too many photos and messages for long term. I think thats the reason why my 7 plus is still running like new after all these years. The only reason I'll upgrade will be 5G.

I do that too, recently for the first time enabled cloud sync (had a 1 TB of OneDrive storage sitting unused anyway), so most photos delete themselves from the phone eventually. But that's compensating for tech deficiency, though.

What is the point of me having 256 GB of storage on the phone, if the phone starts slowing down wholesale once I take 50% of it? I get that there needs to be some buffer for swap and flash magic and whatnot, but I'd thought it would be closer to PC / Windows, where everything is fine until ~90% storage being used.

That's on top of bloated software doing background magic. Can't speak for other phones and brands, but my experience with Samsung flagships (S4, S7, wife's S9, now S22) is that the camera and gallery app are bloated, and their performance degrades rapidly with the amount of photos you take - around 50% worth of storage is when camera starts having delays on the order of seconds, interfering with its core purpose of taking photos.

(And it's not that it couldn't be better - Samsung just isn't investing effort in making core system apps performant enough. It's hard to find efficient apps these days on the Play Store, but there are rare exceptions, like e.g. Aves gallery, which is FLOSS and manages to be leaner, faster and significantly more feature-full than just about anything else, stock or third-party.)

This is why I invest in Apple. They have made a bet, that the majority is too unwilling to forgo useless data like messages and photos and videos. If you want to save a picture or a video, why not download the photo and store it somewhere permanent? I think Apple knows most people will not manage/backup their own data. So instead of warning users or educating users, they have come up with a paid solution. iCloud storage. In the future, I can imagine most Apple users paying Apple a monthly fee to store all of their data. I suspect that Apple's profit will continue to grow with every new 8k video created and saved on their servers.

Still rockin' my 6s and it is quite peppy. I take 4k videos relatively often.

Eh? I just replaced my four year old iPhone 11 Pro with a 15 Pro. The upgrade's nice, but it was a pure luxury purchase, the old phone was still running fine (mostly I wanted the 120hz display, and 5G). There was a time when a 4 year old smartphone was verging on unusable, but that's long past now.

Either I'm having bad luck with phones, or Android flagships just don't have the longevity iPhones do. I can believe the latter, as this seems to be the common belief about all Apple devices relative to competition.

What’s wrong with them after four years?

Everything gets annoyingly slow.

Most Apple devices will last 5 years without breaking much of a sweat.

My parents are running 12 year old Apple devices just fine, which blows my mind.

I'll probably end up like this with my Pixel 4a because every single of modern phones feels like a downgrade. Larger, heavier, no headphone jack, unnecessarily more powerful CPU to drain the battery faster, all that stuff.

I used to be excited about technology. I no longer am. I may consider upgrading to something with a 4" screen however. That would truly be an upgrade.

My pixel 4a 5g works like a charm. 3.5 years and still going fine. I used my pixel 2 for three years so badly. I used it as a hotspot every single day and the number of battery cycles were as if the phone was used for 6 years.

My pixel 4a5g takes photos that are on reasonable standards, obviously they won't match match, but it doesn't make a serious difference either to me. I need three things from my phone - battery, camera and lag free user experience. I don't need thinner bezels for gods sake, I can't understand the craze and demand for thinner bezels over a two day battery life.

Whatever you do, don't take the Android 14 upgrade. Mine is dogshit slow now. I'm trying to decide if I can be bothered losing all my config and setting it up again with Android 13, or just paying Google for a new phone.

It may just need a little while to settle down. I get the feeling a lot of things get updated in the background after the initial upgrade.

I noticed that my old Pixel 5 felt really slow for the first 30 minutes or so, but it seems to be returning to normal now.

DON'T UPGRADE TO ANDROID 14, I am 4a 5G user, work as charm on last version of Android 13 September version, I feel like a lot of dropping frame while using Android 14. I feel upset and dissapointed towards Google now.

You may not buy a new phone every year. But there's always someone who's buying a new phone right now. Why should they have to buy hardware that's potentially almost 5 years old?

It doesn't seem to annoy people who buy cars. In fact usually cars that were released 5 years before had most of their quirks known and ironed out through a midlife revamp or the model or scheduled preventive replacement of known parts breaking at a specific mileage. Just released one tend to be more of a problem to first gen owners reliability wise.

I rely on my smartphone for work, I'd rather buy a 4y old model known to be reliable than a brand knew one that ends up preventing me to call 911 or whose screen die randomly and unexpectedly.

To be fair, a car is widely expected to last 12 years or longer, has relatively simple software and computer systems, and has no (or limited) access to your personal data. They are also typically a much larger investment.

The phone on the other hand is connected to every facet of your life and has a software stack that absolutely contains security flaws waiting to be found and exploited.

Apple has always worked to keep devices secure longer, at least up until now having the best long term support. My favorite part of the Pixel 8 is that Google is attempting to match and exceed what Apple's done so far.

Phone performance and features are definitely not changing fast enough for older devices to no longer be useful, even for affluent audiences. I hope support windows continue to get longer so that folks who must use or choose to use older devices can remain secure.

> The phone on the other hand is connected to every facet of your life and has a software stack that absolutely contains security flaws waiting to be found and exploited.

This is an entirely different subject. The software can be upgraded/updated during the life of the mobile phone. And when it comes to chip makers mistakes, which led to vulns like Spectres, they are likely to affect several generations of chips anyway.

Used car sales outstrip new car sales 3:1.[1] I didn't bother looking up the same number for cellphones but it's nowhere near that ratio. That should be your second clue that cars and phones are very different.

Obviously the first clue is cars are not phones.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183713/value-of-us-passe...

Well I set a rule fairly recently 3years ago that I would only buy second hand electronic devices unless I can't find anything decent.

Most people don't care about waste so I know I am part of a small fraction.

No snark: that's very admirable. Have an upvote.

Isn't domain knowledge lost when we don't regularly build and release things?

Isn't this why we're struggling to build nuclear in some countries because they weren't building it regularly, and now it's difficult to scale, let alone build new ones?

I understand that it's wasteful, but maybe it's necessary to sustain itself? Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?

> I understand that it's wasteful, but maybe it's necessary to sustain itself?

Some waste is the cost of resiliency. But with phones (and other electronics and appliances), we're talking about extreme amounts of waste. Way more than is needed to keep around and develop the capacity and know-how.

> Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?

What feedback? Unless they screw things really badly, they're just listening to the echoes of their own marketing departments. This is a supply-driven market with high natural barriers to entry. Customers buy what they're told to, and are happy about it as they're told to.

This seems divorced from reality. Just because a new phone is released every year, it doesn't mean you need to buy a new one every year.

Small, incremental improvements each year means that whenever you buy a new device, it's modern (not using 4 year old components), and substantially 'better' than the previous one.

Apple has, what, roughly 1 billion iPhone users right now.

Imagine if they only released a new design every 5 years. They'd have to manufacture another billion iPhones in a relatively short window of time to handle all of the upgrades.

This has nothing to do with phones, but products in general. Many product companies try to release new product versions very year. Not because they expect customers to update every year, but because buyers looking for a new product want to buy the newest to ensure the product is not outdated soon. And the older version can be sold to price sensitive customers, so it allows product companies to get higher margins for new products.

Yeah, it feels like smartphones are finally maturing, and they are no longer new enough to justify the fast release cycles and short support times.

I feel it's a decade since I was excited about a new phone. Now I just copy over my settings and app, and act a bit disgruntled for a week that things are slightly different.

I have a Pixel 7 Pro that I was pretty excited to get, mainly for the 5X optical zoom lens. First time I've had anything like that on a phone. Super nice!

Cars still release on a yearly schedule decades later and they change almost nothing each year.

Well no. Car models have generations and mid-generation updates (aka facelift).

It's very rare that there are any updates at all within the same generation. Year in model designation is just "ha, look at his looser driving last year BMW" and to show when car left assembly line.

There are some examples where the same generation had a significant upgrade without a facelift, but those are rare. One example I could think of is MX-5 (ND): between 2015 and 2018 there were no changes at all, but in late 2019 there was nearly complete overhaul of its powertrain and then a small update in 2021.

There's almost always year over year changes on the same chassis.

Yes, but those changes aren't making people change cars every year.

As far as I'm aware, the idea of a "model year" is uniquely American (perhaps North American) - in the UK, it's not marketed at all.

Everyone can tell the age of every car [1] simply by the license plate (used to be in 1 year increments, since the early 2000s it's been in 6 month increments).

[1]: Yes, yes, before some is pedantic, imported cars don't come under this scheme, and self-assembled cars also have a unique form that mean you can't tell their age.

There are also the odd ones due to the pandemic; the 2024 MY I just bought technically had almost no changes from 2023 MY but the reality is that several options that were TECHNICALLY available for the 2023 refresh weren't actually produced in any significant numbers due to supply constraints. Now in 2024 those options are actually hitting, making it almost a mini tech update.

Nobody is demanding that you buy a new smartphone every year. Modern smartphones have 3-5 years of security/bug updates and the batteries no longer degrade as fast as they used to.

I bought my pixel 7 early this year because my s20's screen broke and the cost to buy a new one to replace it myself, which is not something I think most people would be willing to do (instead paying even more for someone else to do it), exceeded the cost to buy another S20. On top of that, the moment my 3 year old, perfectly working phone had anything other than a pristine screen, it had zero trade-in value and basically encouraged me to throw it in a drawer or the trash. This was literally Samsung's flagship phone only 3 years prior.

That could have probably been mitigated if the s20 remained relevant for more than a year or two and there was a mature parts market that made it feasible to upkeep rather than scrap.

Yeah, I think I'm going to pull the trigger on a Pixel 8 and that's partly because I've been rocking a Pixel 4a for several years.

Normally I agree with you, but I don't think that's the case this year at least. The on-device ML chip (Tensor G3) is a legit difference-maker. A lot of the ML features they are rolling out wouldn't be possible on older hardware. You could do the non-realtime portions in the cloud, but the realtime audio cleanup wouldn't work for example (way too much latency). Also, personally I much prefer on-device. I frequently have spotty data connections so it's very disruptive when stuff relies on cloud connectivity.

When I upgrade in two or three years from now, the ML chip will probably be even better than now. My phone has been fine for the past couple of years and the introduction of something on iPhone 15 doesn’t really change that. I don’t mind waiting.

I think it's more likely that if they spaced the releases out to every 5 years, there would just be a 5x reduction in the pace of changes, and you could issue the same complaint "Why do they release every 5 years when hardly anything changes?"

It's not like the incremental physical changes just automatically happen independently of designing, mass manufacturing, and releasing new phone models. The incremental physical changes happen because companies are trying to develop new phone models.

If I’m buying a phone 4 years into the cycle, I don’t want to start with a 4-year-old CPU and camera. 5 years later, when I’m ready to get a new phone, that’ll be a 9-year-old CPU and camera. I’d rather have the latest tech when I buy it, and use it until it stops working.

I agree though that the physical design should stay the same, so that cases and accessories don’t need to be thrown away. Apple more-or-less does this with the iPhones, eg a case should work with any iPhone 12-14.

They are selling millions of each version. There's lots of products where the volume is more like 10,000. The waste isn't in the product that is selling millions...

How is it “physical waste”? No one is forcing you to buy a new phone and in the case of iPhones, Apple has released security updates in the past year for all iPhones introduced in the last decade.

I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max that is three generations behind now. While there is nothing I have to have, the always on display, the USB 3 speed, and video out to my portable USB-C monitor on the iPhone 15 Pro would be nice.

man if you think that's bad let me introduce you to the automobile industry.

Fashion too

The price system is how our society allocates resources. The fact that people are allocating their own resources to buy one -- without any perverse incentives or being compelled, indicates it's not wasteful to them.

A better example of waste is when local governments funds things which people don't use.

I think the root of this sentiment is misunderstanding or lack of satisfaction at the system level.

New cars come out every year, with minor updates, and big updates every 3-10 years ("generation"). I am still pretty happy driving a 2006 car. Maybe phones move toward that, but I like incremental improvement, and I'd be annoyed to buy a phone today which is 4-5 years old if I'm also wanting to keep it for 3-5 years.

Enterprise computers get refreshed every 3-6 years, usually (I'd probably do shorter for most laptops, longer for desktops). Monitors can do 5-10 years. Until they became active electronics, headphones/speakers/microphones which were decades old were fine.

Biggest boost on a lot of new mobile device refresh is getting a new 0-cycle battery and a clean OS install, and for a lot of people, "buy a new one" is the main opportunity for that kind of upgrade.

Five years ? Why would someone want to experience hardware advances in large steps instead of continuously ?

Based on the phrasing of this, I'm not sure if it's meant to be taken sarcastically or not. Apologies if you did mean it that way, because I'll respond seriously:

- Advances are mostly software.

- Massive quantities of e-waste (and plastic waste via cases, screen protectors, etc).

- Perverse incentives by companies to not properly support the user experience on older devices.

- Tons of money spent pointlessly.

I live this way now.

My android phone is more than 5 years old, the tech in my laptop is similar.

I'm doing just fine and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I run up to date advanced software just like the whole world

Obviously, companies that sell phones want to sell more phones as frequently as possible. I'm just glad that Google is aware that people value having longer term feature and security support for their products. The new 7 years of feature and security support is pretty fantastic.

Continuous improvement is the bedrock of pretty much everything modern. It’s a lot easier to make frequent minor revs than it is to do rare, gigantic revs.

If you work in software, think of it as normal SDLC versus once-a-decade waterfall style total respec and rebuild. Which is more efficient?

It also spreads demand more consistently, rather than having 90% of demand landing in the first year and 10% spread over the next four. What would that mean for production capacity?

Continuous processes beat batch processes every time. See also: Tesla’s ideas about model years.

The Apple adverts push the fact that the 15 is titanium. That's it.

The ad I keep seeing doesn't even hint at why Titanium matters. No matter, the point is, evidently the technical aspects don't seem to matter.

Titanium matters for lightweight that is one of the important spec for some people. They aren't good at advertising this (or don't want to advertise much to make heavier again in the future?)

But they don't even say that. As if everyone knows that? And no technical improvements? But then again, the new USB C with out of date max data throughput is nothing to brag about.

You wouldn't notice it, the difference in weight between aluminum and titanium phone shell is negligible compared to the weight of the glass, battery, and PCBs combined.

Titanium sounds cool, it sounds luxury, it's a marketing hack. Like <strike>"aircraft-grade"</strike> "space-grade" aluminum. Nobody is launching their aluminum phones at escape velocity. It's 100% for marketing reasons.

I have some titanium spoons, I feel into the trap too.

> You wouldn't notice it, the difference in weight between aluminum and titanium phone shell is negligible compared to the weight of the glass, battery, and PCBs combined.

The previous iPhone Pro's have a stainless steel shell, not aluminum, and the ~30 gram difference is noticeable.

Of course, they caused this problem themselves by using stainless steel rather than aluminum like the regular iPhones, but they are nonetheless solving a problem with the titanium frame.

30 grams is about the weight of a slice of bread or 5 US quarters (5.6 g each).

I went into an Apple Store and did in fact notice it: it’s quite obvious. I would suggest you do the same before just assuming it’s the same.

Old trick. Regular Car Reviews 2013 Ford Fusion Titanium AWD: Regular Car Reviews https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIZdDi5V7M4

Try out https://shop.fairphone.com/fairphone-5 for a repair/upgrade friendly alternative

It’s still a “fancy” or too niche a phone. It neither has the reach, nor the supply chain backbone. By the time it reaches critical operational/business mass phone landscape would have had changed. Just like it’ll happen with frame.work.

You'll really need to come with some backup of your claims.

Because it simply isn't true. FP has been around for 10 years now, making phones, learning, scaling up. They sold close to a million phones every year since 2020 (last year over 1100000 phones). And while a million phones isn't much compared to iPhones or Pixels, it's bigger than many other small phone companies (Chinese or not). They've been diversifying with headphones, and earbuds. And with t he last edition, they finally felt confident with supply chains to guarantee spare parts for decades to come.

A lot of these new software features are enabled by better hardware. Especially AI features, which can require quite specialized and powerful processors. On-device LLMs are the next frontier in personal assistant software, and that can only be enabled by better hardware.

Even the image processing for high resolution images can benefit from better hardware. Modern smartphones are heavily dependent on image processing to improve camera quality. Without the right hardware, performance and energy efficiency could be unacceptable.

And - price is ridiculously high. $1000+ for what? I don't know about others but my phone camera is only used for scanning QR codes rarely or taking occasional pictures of family (not a picture every hour) which even lower range phones (300 USD or so) do damn decent given it's not dark.

My 98% of the usage is to read something. Some website, email or ebook. Why do I need 120 Hz display for that? Gaming? That's always going to be inferior to even a console let alone a gaming PC.

Many people takes thousands of pictures / videos with their phones yearly.

> Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.

But the software development is driven by the profit from hardware sales. Why would they improve the software if it doesn't make money?

I guess in the ideal world the phone's software should be pay-to-upgrade but free-to-stay-as-is.

The status quo is great. You have yearly releases that are stable and allow anyone to upgrade without fear of the new model coming out like with traditional video game consoles.

No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.

Also, the OS and apps need to take advantage of new hardware, so it’s not a surprise if your seven year old phone becomes slower.

If you don’t like the status quo then I would go with a non-iOS and non-android phone like pine phone, Mairena, librem, or anything else that based on a more open Linux distro.

I think it's interesting that you cite video game consoles as a negative. I'd argue the opposite, I think phones should be more like them.

With video game consoles, you have a single device where micro-optimizations are constantly done, new features are added, and all software can be purpose-built to work really well on that specific hardware. All of that for ~7 years means a really fantastic user experience and a massive community of people that have collectively worked through solutions to common problems and forced the company's hand on defects (joycon drift, for example). It also means tons of high-quality hardware-specific accessories, both from the company that made the console and from third parties.

I don't see why it couldn't be that way - I see people overstating the hardware revisions. Apple, sure, they innovate. Qualcomm? Hah.

For about five years it seemed like every flagship spanning generations was the same SoC

Meanwhile Apple always do the best (and their older chip like A14 is already enough in today IMO), Qualcomm often hits and miss. Their flagship chip made by Samsung fab is tend to be bad battery life and heat. SD888 to 8 Gen2 upgrade is huge than expected for me.

> No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.

Yes they are, by refusing to release security updates for older models.

I don't want to buy a new phone, but likely will have to due to support ending so they can sell more high margin hardware.

The life cycle of Apple Phones for updates is 6 years. On Android, it’s about 2 - 6 years.

If you don’t like the terms, go with a Linux distro phone. There is choice now.

For Google it's been consistently 3 years lately.

Also Linux distro phones aren't practical ways to participate in society unfortunately.

> Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it

This is actually a very small part of the market. Virtually no-one upgrades their phone every year. 3-4 years is more typical.

When I feel that I have to upgrade because the phone slows down or that newer apps aren't available on my OS version anymore, I move over to the opposing team so as to avoid incentivizing short-lived phones too much.

So far, I only owned 2 phones in my life (didn't need one before the smartphone era), an iPhone 4S and a Google Pixel 3. For now, the Pixel 3 is doing great, battery life is not so good but holds the day.

I think the market agrees with you as well. The going rate for a 512GB Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra in like new condition is somewhere in the £600-£700 region. The equivalent S23 Ultra, with only minor specification differences as far as I can see, is currently retailing at £1399. That's a gigantic depreciation for a phone that's only a year and a half old. Phones used to depreciate much slower 5 - 10 years ago.

I agree. I was convinced I need to move from an iPhone 14 to iPhone 15.

My reasoning was better camera.

I honestly was going to skip upgrading but the camera and some other minor features were enough for me to make the upgrade happen.

I feel if these companies worked together to cut back on the waste of yearly release cycles, there’d be better environmental results. But every year we have a new feature because tech has caught up with demand.

Not sure what the middle ground is.

What is stopping you from just using your old phone until it actually needs replacing?

I have a Pixel 6 which takes excellent photos. In two years time, it will still take excellent photos, regardless of what the Pixel 8 or 9 or 10 does.

They keep selling a better camera. Constantly. Every year.

Yet, can you really look at your old photos and say "my God, those 2017 photos. Could you imagine taking such crappy photos with such a bad phone?" I doubt it. That hasn't been true in more than a decade even for challenging environments like in low light.

They're selling you on a better camera each year because there's basically no useful way to measure its impact anymore aside from in really technical conditions that don't affect anyone practically.

Well, when they added a wide lens camera to phones I think that significantly changed phone photography. In the Pixel 7 pro (and the 8 pro) they added a telephoto lens; this is another significant upgrade.

Personally, I have a proper camera, but I am not carrying it around with me at all times. My phone takes excellent pictures (I have a pixel 6) but I do feel the lack of zoom.

The quality of the main cameras hasn't really gone up in a few generations; but I do think there's been significant improvements in the photography department in phones in the last 5 years. Wide lens, macro photography, zoom lenses. These are genuine innovations.

It does make me a bit angry when software is kept locked into new models when older models are perfectly capable of running it though. But there's been hardware innovation for sure. Don't really see much of a reason to go from a Pixel 7 pro to a Pixel 8 pro, and probably not going to be the case for a few years. But who knows.

Unfortunately the world is filled with people like my fried who, without fail, buys - for cash, not as part of a contract renewal - the max spec iPhone available every year. One for him, one for his wife. Sell the old ones, or give them to family. Revenue like that is too hard for these companies to pass up. And so we get this waste.

> And so we get this waste.

Wait. If they are making phones that get bought up every year because of people like your friend, then where is the waste?

In the landfill

Do you have any information about how much material going to landfills? What if 1 car is 1000 phones?

And half the time the UX somewhere gets worse. Then a year or two later it gets better again. Then worse again. It's a stupid endless cycle that was solved years ago for devices that have only one main form of input. At this point I believe most UX changes are made solely for marketing's sake.

Isn't it the same story with every other "smart" device these days? Headphones, smart watches, etc? A new release almost every couple of years, causing a deluge of waste. That's our "growth at all costs" society.

Yeah. They couldn't even give us an ultrasonic fingerprint reader, which is one feature that would have convinced me to buy this instead of the 7. The brighter screen and 1TB model are the only upgrades I find compelling.

> It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones.

These companies virtue signal about climate change nonstop, but still manage to produce disposable phones and light up their data centers for advertising and user tracking

>functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware

But never scaling up the damned battery above and sometimes even at demand. It's ultimately my number one request, and I'm sure that of many others.

I remember how much I wanted every new phone before - back in the days of my Motorola Droid there was always some awesome new feature or development. Now, the only reason I upgrade is if the phone ends up damaged or unusable.

> as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature

I just wish they kept the pixel 4 design and only improved the battery life. I would pay more for it than this new design.

An annual release cycle isn’t for people who bought the phone last year.

It’s for people who bought their phones 2 or 3 years (or even more) ago.

The question is how does this phone compare to the Pixel Pro 6 or 5, not how it compares the 7.

Nobody is stopping you from only buying a new phone once every 5 years.

Many (without much conscious thought maybe even) are doing this too.

Simply replace when needed. That’s all there is to it.

I was thinking the same the other day, and cannot agree more.

A bi-annual release cycle should cut waste in half.

Companies keep polluting the world, as if we had another alternative to live on.

For my point of view they can release as often as they wish, I will only replace my phones when they die or get stolen.

I've started thinking about cars like this too. We shouldn't have yearly models, it's an absolute waste

Tell it to the car industry. They invented it and it's been going strong.

Both car and phone trade ins get resold and used until their actual EOL, no? I imagine most of these Pixel 8s that physically survive to year 7 (no cracked screen, etc) will have been traded in and will continue to be used in the 3rd world.

It’s almost as if these companies have a strategy to grow their business.

Landline phones, for comparison, were bought once and lasted ~30 years.

no no, you should just separate your papers and plastics and keep buying the pocket super computer every year.

Do you also buy a new car when a model update comes out? Do you a new laptop every time a new one gets released?

You don't have to get the latest phone all of the time.

It makes sense for gaming consoles, I don't see what is so different (these days) about phones.

Game consoles don’t have all the peripherals including the screen soldered directly on.

Your premise is wrong.

Old phones that have economic life get cleaned up and re-sold. The fact that manufacturers tweak phones annually does not change this.

Based on the numbers I found from a few minutes of searching you are incorrect. Some phones get resold or reused, most do not. Only 25% of people are using a secondhand phone and the phone population is increasing at 5x the human rate.

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