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Comment by katzinsky | Hacker News Reader

The only thing that would make a new phone interesting is Linux support.

Otherwise email works, the web works, mms works, and the camera, screen, and RAM, on phones ten years ago was already way more than you need.

The phone specific software barely justifies maintaining a phone (and doesn't for me so I don't even own a modern smartphone.) There's certainly nothing to justify upgrading it.

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Picture taking and video recording have gotten unbelievably better over the past decade. They were not remotely sufficient for many use cases ten years ago and even now there's still plenty of room left for improvement.

Not all of us care. I barely use the camera on my phone.

Right, but obviously it's something that plenty of people do care about, and is a big driver of keeping me on the upgrade cycle.

And "there is a big difference but not everyone cares about it" is quite different from "there isn't a big difference". The latter is clearly false.

idk I was happy with whatever the iPhone 3gs did.

Yeah there's some really amazing stuff the new phone can do but I honestly don't care. If I need a piece of correctly specked camera equipment I'd probably buy a dedicated device with proper cooling and a removable memory card.

Still using my pixel 4a. I refuse to discontinue a perfectly good phone just because the manufacturer decides it's not supported anymore. Hopefully the EU does something about planned obsolesce one day.

EU actually did that:

> These regulations will empower independent repairers and end-users by ensuring access to spare parts and to the information necessary to repair for at least 7 years after the end of the distribution of a product in the market. Additionally, manufacturers will have to make compatible software updates available for at least 5 years.

https://repair.eu/news/new-eu-rules-smartphones-and-tablets-...

That's definitely a good step but sadly compared to PCs still the stone ages. I want to use my phone with the OS I choose. Sadly the proprietary driver BLOBs make that unnecessarily hard or sometimes impossible.

You're using a device that hasn't received security updates in a year to stick it to Google?

LineageOS for the 4a was last updated on 8/8/24:

https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/

https://download.lineageos.org/devices/sunfish/builds

I don't do it "to stick it" to anyone. I am just not willing to spend 500$+ since my current hardware is perfectly fine and does what I want. Saving money and avoiding unnecessary e-waste is more important to me.

Would you pay for continued software support? IIRC Windows upgrades were $100-200 back in the day.

More helpful answer: I think Graphene OS still has security updates for your model (assuming Google doesn't?)

I don't have to do this on my laptop. I have 10 and 15 year old laptops that I can run the latest version of Linux straight from kernel.org on for free.

The Android running on your phone is not FOSS. If someone wants to write free software that runs on your phone they totally can (and do, check out Graphene).

To an extend yes but it's unnecessarily hard to do so. If we were at a point where is was as easy to develop foss OS/Software for mobile devices I wouldn't complain. Sadly the proprietary nature of mobile phones (mostly drivers) doesn't allow that.

> The only thing that would make a new phone interesting is Linux support.

Looks like you may be interested in Pinephone or Librem 5.

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