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Comment by AraceliHarker | Hacker News Reader

"(Lenovo) said people buy new smartphones every other year but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years. The industry needs to do better at motivating people to buy new devices"

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/05/microsofts-panos-panay-expla...

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What I want is a frame.work equivalent repairable and parts-replaceable smartphone. I know it's not practical right now because the commodity and consumer-purchaseable parts that go into a framework laptop don't exist for a smartphone analog right now, and the phone would probably be unacceptably large for most people. But I'd buy it if I could just replace the flash myself every 3-5 years, battery every 2-3 years, etc, and have security updates.

What's wrong with the Fairphone?

Fairphone is repairable but not upgradable.

Not to mention getting one and its parts outside of the EU is difficult and/or expensive. As a North American I'd be happy to hear if this is different now.

Fairphone 4 is supposed to come to the US.

For people in the US it's not really available. Also phone vs laptop. While there is some overlap, I think of the two as different devices for different use cases.

Can you replace the flash in a fairphone? (If you can, and at near-cost for the flash itself, then it sounds like I'll try to buy a fairphone)

Dang it looks like you can't. It's soldered into the main module? And they don't sell replacement parts for it. You can only send it back to the company. Which I guess is better than nothing.

But also can't seem to figure out how to buy it lol

Project Ara [0] was exactly that, but unfortunately Google shelved the project.

It would be really nice to have such a phone though!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara

I want a thick and strong chassis, the ability to pick which (camera) sensors are plugged in, standardized Single board computers, and add in batteries. Phones should be DIY projects with Cheap off the shelf components.

The PC equivalent.

If only they would try to make that work. I don't vape, but have noticed those that do seem to take customizing their pens pretty seriously by changing out certain components. I heard someone describe it as like a Jedi building their lightsaber haha. I'd like to do this for a phone for sure, but it'd be hard to get manufactures on board I think.

like a Jedi building their lightsaber, but more addictive.

I have a sneaking suspicion it could easily be done but then the big smartphone dealers wouldnt have you captured on the new phone treadmill.

>but became accustomed used to buying new PCs every six or seven years.

Why would they buy any quicker? The average laptop in 2016 was only maybe 10% faster than a laptop in 2010 thanks to that stupid Ultrabook shit (and Intel refusing to push out more than a 10% YOY improvement in their standard-voltage desktop lineup), which resulted in 2020's CPU lineup only being about twice as fast as one made in 2010. And, so long as you had a machine with an SSD, there's very little difference between a laptop from 2015 and 2023 if all you're doing is browsing Facebook (which is what most people are doing with them).

Plus, at the end of the 2010s, tablets started to become mature enough to supplant laptops as the household's only computer, so you'd either buy a tablet or get a new laptop, but not both.

Phones are a different beast in two ways- first, if you're buying Android, you're throwing your phone away every 2 years anyway because the ecosystem sucks; Qualcomm is even more incompetent when it comes to hardware performance than Google is with software performance and it really shows, especially since Android allows manufacturers to stack a bunch of other unremovable shit and skins that does nothing but take up storage space, enshittifying the device right out of the box like having 10 unremovable IE6 toolbars did back when people still used IE6 (Lenovo is less guilty of this than some but it's still not as clean as a Pixel is). Plus, financial incentives exist (for both Android and iOS) to trade in one's old phone for a new one at a steep discount, they get smashed up far more frequently than laptops do in ways that make them impossible to fix, and they're fashion accessories to a point and it's nice to have the new one in a way that normal computers don't suffer from as much.

It's not rocket science; the industry became boring and stagnant so people moved on (and good GPUs have been unaffordable for the vast majority of the last decade including in prebuilts, so...)

Now Lenovo can join smartphone manufacturers and Google on the as-successful-as-drug-empires stage! Seriously, increasing profit for the sake of profit is a terrible goal. We as consumers need to be less susceptible to the marketing hype and demand to have only technology that serves us.

Seems to be plenty of decent second hand machines. I'm typing this on an ex-corporate T470 I got for £250. Spend another £120 replacing the battery and pushing upto 32G of ram

(I actually bought 3 of them, one for my son and one for my S.O. Those didn't need to last for hours at a time so they're on original battery+memory and work great)

I know it's in the industries interest to force E-Waste, but it's not in the public interest.

They are stopping to buy new phones every year too. Modern midrange phones already have every feature you really need, a standard user-replaceable battery would probably kill the whole upgrade cycle.

If we had user-replaceable batteries and easily-upgradable software (think LineageOS) for phones, the upgrade cycle really would be killed.

Back through the 90s and 00s, I think that ~3 years was the norm, at least for the part of the population that even owned computers.

But since then, there are fewer major improvements coming that fast. GPUs improve, but most people aren't hardcore gamers for whome that matters, and these can mostly be upgraded independent of the computer itself instead.

Other than that, if you're mostly just using your web browser, and maybe doing some spreadsheets and desktop-based email, what's the point? Even if you're doing more demanding stuff like Photoshop, we're at a point where the app's demands aren't growing fast either.

It did feel around ~2012 or so was when computer/laptop upgrades stopped mattering, roughly coinciding with the switch to SSDs from HDDs.

So? If the reason is that the new one is far better, that seems fine. If the reason is that the old one broke beyond repair, that is not fine.

Actually, question: at which point in time is it less eco-friendly to keep using an old computer considering power consumption and the fact that for the same amount of work it will need to use more power for a much longer time? 10 years? 20 years?

I bought a used T530 6 or 7 years ago. The machine is 10 years old and it's still my daily driver. My desktop is of a similar vintage, probably 2011 or so.

It's perfectly fine. I do wish I had more CPU cores, but it's probably better for me to get up and step away from the computer while it runs a big C++ compilation or something

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