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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

A cynical person (not me, not I, I'm not a cynical person) might think that this is the opening salvo in a campaign to "save" the US tech sector by getting rid of old hardware. See the comments in this very thread calling for a "cash for clunkers for old devices" or a "remote kill-switch" to disable them (!)

Right now you can go to eBay and buy a used PC for $200 that will do everything you need to do, including gaming. You can buy a 64GB iPhone X for $100, which will do everything a new phone will do (basically). Can you imagine the drain on the hardware sector in the US due to these old devices piling up? And the trend is only going to accelerate. If the powers that be aren't conspiring to "fix" this "issue", it's only a matter of time until they do.

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I think hardware vendors have been allowed way too much freedom in trying to turn hardware into a subscription. The yearly release of new phone models isn’t helping either.

What if we turned hardware support into a subscription (kind of like JetBrains model I think?) and stopped yearly releases in favor of more interesting releases? I wonder how many resources are used just to make the next iteration a bit shinier to catch the consumer's eye.

I'm reading this as "Samsung charges a $10 monthly subscription fee to keep your phone up to date" and I already know how that would turn out.

I was thinking more like "Samsung charges $50/year after the typical 3-4 years of updates they normally give."

I think what is this ignoring is that "security updates" are generally corrections to defects in the original product.

In principle, a complete product would ship with no defects. You could run it for 1000 years unpatched and it would be no less secure than the day it shipped.

Manufacturers ship security updates because the original product was defective. So it makes sense that they remain on the hook for security updates -- we paid them full price up front.

I am extremely sympathetic to this view--but is it practical? Like, should Apple be forced to continue releasing security fixes for the original iPhone?

A relatively small ongoing investment in a phone with which they earned billions of dollars in profit. Doesn't necessarily require new feature updates, but security updates should be available for a far more significant length of time than the single-digit years the have self-regulated themselves. As an alternative, perhaps these companies should be held responsible for the e-waste of their prematurely expired hardware...

> A relatively small ongoing investment in a phone with which they earned billions of dollars in profit.

That's fair. But what about a product which doesn't turn a profit? The iPhone could have been a total flop, no one knew in advance!

I worry that if releasing a hardware product carried an unlimited support burden, companies would release far fewer products. Less risk taking would lead to less innovation, and so on.

I think I would be more on board with a rule like "once you stop releasing security updates, you must share hardware documentation and unlock the bootloader", so consumers can install their own (presumably patched) operating systems. But this wouldn't actually affect most of society, because 90% of consumers (I'm being generous) are never going to install Linux on their phones.

Expecting consumers to DIY install Linux is unrealistic but also irrelevant - that's what commercial refurbushers are for.

They could also sell their devices to those users who will install their own OS, or volunteers could help them do it, or simple device specific plug and play installers could be developed.

Yes they should, they should also be forced to unlocked the bootloaders and release specs to the hardware so that 3rd part OSes can target the devices. Hardware recycling is a joke. I have first gen ipad that would make a great photoframe, video play and ebook reader but instead it is a fully functional paper weight.

First gen "Google" Nexus tablet, factory restored before being put in storage and it's got 15 seconds between touching the screen and the UI even attempting to update. It was a decent small tablet when i bought it, too.

My Nokia N800 runs the exact same as it did when i bought it, used, about 4 years after the release. I can even stream transcoded video to it, still. The camera works. The terminal works fine. That's probably why apple has trillions of market cap or whatever and Nokia is making $50 feature phones with touchscreens (i haven't seen any nor do i care, the n900 (910?) should have been a bigger deal and i'm still mad)

Software copyright law should acquire a concept of defense: if it's no longer profitable for you to maintain it, that should delimit the end of the copyright term, with a short grace period of (say) one year.

Hollywood accounting says no movie is ever profitable. Your proposed law would just create a perpetual copyright for companies with sufficiently creative accountants.

The idea being that the security updates would then also have to keep coming as long as copyright is held.

How about applying the idea behind ESCROW: if you market hardware with software dependencies, you are required to provide the source to a trusted third party who will release/opensource it if you stop maintaining said software before the expected lifetime of the hardware.

Sounds great, how do you enforce this with the deluge of things like IP cameras and the like from Chinese companies?

100% tariffs? Every outdoor IP camera, for example, is either Chinese manufactured or outlandishly expensive. even a 200% increase in purchase price makes these devices competitive, still.

You don’t force regulatory compliance with a tariff, you force regulatory compliance with import bans. Enforcement is a whole separate issue.

“If you doesn’t follow rule X, you can’t import the cheap IP camera into America”

I'm okay for them to stop supporting it but in return they have to open the bootloader and release all the hardware documentation to not turn it into a brick.

As a web developer I really want all devices to have evergreen browsers, and that in turn implies on-going feature updates at the OS level to support those evergreen browsers.

It also doesn’t really matter whether updates are fixes or features. Somebody has to do the work, and they have to get paid, and only so many years of that work can be baked into the original purchase price, before buyers go to a competitor who offers less support. You paid full price for X years of support, but what happens after that?

> In principle, a complete product would ship with no defects. You could run it for 1000 years unpatched and it would be no less secure than the day it shipped.

Not necessarily. Something could be perfectly secure today and for the next 100 years but be trivial to crack in 1000 years because the landscape changed so much. Something that is inconceivable to crack by brute force now won’t be as compute power keeps rising.

It’s impossible to cover every base from the start and forever. Who would’ve thought that soundproof glass could be beat with a camera filming an object?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25999-caught-on-tape-...

> We were able to recover intelligible speech from maybe 15 feet away, from a bag of chips behind soundproof glass

That would only feed their current programmed obsolescence strategy.

If they stop supporting the device, they should release the drivers for the hardware.

People don't have to buy this stuff you know...

In a free market vendors should have the freedom to create bad subscription services and consumers should be free to buy other hardware if they don't like it...

I buy a $100 phone like once every 3 years... No one is forcing me to buy a premium Apple phone every year. Doing so is purely a consumer choice. Perhaps a stupid one, but one consumers should have imo.

Just because you and I don't like it surely doesn't mean it should be regulated.

The problem is, it's not a free market. We as consumers are literally stuck between gatekeepers. Regulation is not only recommended, it's desperately needed (or alternative way to force corps out of dark patterns).

I’ve bought three laptops this year from eBay. The second was shortly after the first because I thought it was such a good deal.

A few months later the first laptops exhaust started smelling like burning plastic and i also discovered that if you move the lid/screen a certain way the laptop hard freezes. A few months after that same smell from the second laptop (different model/seller) that progressed into a proper burning smell. In both cases I’m out my purchase price and for the total could have bought new.

On a whim after coming across the thinkpad subreddit I bought a t480s recently. As soon as I got it paid attention to folding the hinges excessively and noticed it creaks sometimes and the exhaust also gets a little too toasty. So this one is going back.

I’m not against used. I’m a lifelong 2nd hand buyer. No problems with phones or even mini pcs.

I don’t recommend laptops anymore tho. Too delicate and can have hidden issues.

If you read this far. It’s not enviornmental cus my bought new laptop (4yo) doesn’t have any issues. And also I did take off the back cover in both laptops and didn’t see any obvious blown parts. And neither are overheating from sensor data even under p95

After going through 6 very high end gaming laptops the last few years, I agree. 4/6 of them failed for insanely stupid issues, 2 were my fault.

Yes, laptops are really not a great for resell.

We only buy new and kept ours until they die, and they sure die or become quirky in ways we'd be pissed about if we bought it in that state.

The big issue is of course repairability: buying a second hand business DELL Opiplex is mostly fine because replacing anything other than the motherboard/power supply will be dead simple, and even that can be managed either through salvaging or diy. A flacky or half broken laptop is a world of hurt, for any brand, even if you're into soldering.

Some eBay ex-enterprise laptops include vendor warranty that can sometimes be extended. Dell US-based ProSupport and Lenovo International Warranty (3 years, optional years extra) offer competent phone support and relatively quick repairs. Well worth the insurance for mobile computing devices in a hostile world.

If you're not against supporting Apple, their laptops always seem to have the most longevity. I am still running my M1 with 8G of RAM and it out performs the latest "top of the line" Windows laptops my work are handing out.

Prior to this one I had a MacBook Pro for about 7 years and before that one the black plastic MacBooks from 2007.

So three laptops for the better part of 20 years.

My first generation M1 Macbook Pro has been a great workhorse as well. It is still chugging along. The backlight on the keyboard is a distant memory. One of the two USB-C ports decided to retire its data bus. It also made a high voltage arc and rebooted earlier today for the first time ever. I was very pleasantly surprised when I found out the speakers were spared any damage during this process.

It came back online right away as if nothing happened and has outstanding battery life that's still making the M1 Max envious.

We use multiple M1 airs as dev machines and they're all still working perfectly fine and very fast, nothing has broken, on top of that they were all bought used. We're not looking to replace them any time soon. Not an Apple fanatic personally (don't own a single iProduct), but the M series of laptops is extremely well built and performant. I expect them to last at least 6 years from time of purchase.

Agreed, buying used is very often a waste of time

I use multiple Windows 2000 computers as daily drivers for hobbies, writing documents, internet, et cetera.

It's hilarious to me that I get better performance doing those things on a 20+ year old computer and OS than I used to on a recent computer simply using an internet browser.

it'll also be part of a botnet within seconds if you visit a wrong website.

though i also miss the ui-latency of the civilized age ...

Not a problem, I just won't visit anywhere dodgy. Either way, I've got the latest service pack and have been using them for a year or so every day without issue.

probably already is, and doesn't know it.

You are not "simply using" an internet browser. You are using an entire (browser) OS in itself on a 4x pixel count display with antialiased text, transparency, blur, scaling, video compositing... The OS itself is using additional compositing for windows using indirect rendering - all the things that add latency. Additionally, you are using a remote application that has it's own latency when talking to the remote server and even locally executing JS is doing everything in a single thread, plus V8 JIT only works for hotspots in the code.

Do any of those additional things add value to the user in this application?

If your taxi driver takes you for a 2 hour scenic tour of the city when you simply wanted a direct 20 minute trip, you don't cut them slack for all the extra work they did, you complain they provided a terrible service.

This seems like that useless definition of "need" that completely discards any real standards for the sake of an argument. A 200 dollar computer at best is going to let you play low demand indie games and things with garbage mode settings for running on potatoes.

> A 200 dollar computer at best is going to let you play low demand indie games and things with garbage mode settings for running on potatoes.

That's not true. I still regularly use an old Dell Latitude from almost 15 years ago sometimes - it cost under $150. I can do everything I need on it, even compile Firefox. I can't run most new AAA games, but can play a bunch of FPS games from about up until when it came out. It still plays CSGO just fine, for example.

The real advances in performance the last decade has been in GPU performance, not general performance.

What settings do you play CSGO on? And is it just CSGO or can you play Counterstrike 2?

Low to be fair, it depends how hot the laptop gets, but usual around 800x600 or 1024x768 and everything low quality. Not great compared to modern hardware, but not as useless as you were suggesting either.

Can't play CS2 because of it needing DirectX12 and the last driver for the video card not supporting it. I've wondered if it would work on Linux since DirectX isn't a factor but haven't tried yet.

$200 on eBay will get you a used laptop with a Core i7, 16GB RAM and SSD; essentially the same specs as my year-old $1000+ laptop, other than having a newer generation CPU. It'll play many brand new games at 720p or better and acceptable framerates.

I still use an original Microsoft Surface Pro pretty often, and can barely tell the difference between using it and that year-old PC for web browsing, document editing, and tablet-style gaming. The Surface Pro came out in 2013.

Would you say that your laptop can get 120fps on non-minimal settings while playing the current Call of Duty? What about Grand Theft Auto V or Overwatch?

I don't get 120fps on non-minimal settings with a PlayStation or Xbox, yet 150+ million people do all their gaming on those consoles (including almost half of Overwatch's player base according to some polls). That's not the test.

Would you say you can get 60fps on non-minimal settings on the current call of duty then?

probably not, and you know, because aaa-shooters are typically made for push the boundaries.

the point was that most things are playable and the list is only getting longer

the ratio of "playable" to "unplayable" vis a vis FPS or any other measure is around 10000000:1, and that grows even if you never upgrade the hardware. Lots of indie games run fine on old hardware - it's just not that demanding.

Sure a plurality of the 10mm will be shovelware or otherwise bad, but do we have to play FFXVII? COD MWII BOIII WW2?

You don't but lots of gamers want to and the idea that a $200 machine is somehow going to service them is absurd. Hence my original point that the idea a $200 machine will do everything you "need" seems like a stretch unless your needs are well below what's typical for someone who plays video games.

It seems weird to write off CoD as just another AAA meant to push boundaries. It's a franchise that has been in the top 3 most sold games every year for over a decade. And the counterpoint was never that nothing would run it was that this idea a 200 dollar laptop would be fine for the average gamer seems like a stretch. The average gamer is trying to play the games that are the most popular on average. Sure they could probably run Roblox and Minecraft but that's about it until you hit the old and indie markets unless you start making heavy setting sacrifices.

As soon as they feel like TPM isn't pushing enough HW upgrade purchases...

Yup Windows 10 EOL will be fun...

Windows 10 is "still" on 47% of PCs with Steam installed.

Windows 11 is at 49%.

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

> Linux: 1.92% (-0.16%)

> Arch Linux (64-bit): 0.16% (-0.01%)

> Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS (64-bit): 0.07% (-0.01%)

> Linux Mint 21.3 (64-bit): 0.07% (-0.04%)

> Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (64-bit): 0.07% (0.00%)

> Linux Mint 22 (64-bit): 0.06% (+0.06%)

> Ubuntu Core 22 (64-bit): 0.06% (0.00%)

> Manjaro Linux (64-bit): 0.06% (0.00%)

Year of Linux in gaming, everybody! :(

It'll be another Windows XP situation of a large percentage of people refusing to upgrade for 8 years past EOL, the only difference is that XP was a better operating system and doesn't have anything built in that could forcefully update you at M$' will.

>refusing to upgrade

Well, Windows 11 has pretty strict requirements on CPU and TPM to be officially supported. If my computer could have it officially, I would have installed it already.

200 for gaming might be cutting it close for me but I am using a 10 year old PC with an upgraded GPU. I guess thats "bad" lmao. Can we end of life the people who will decide and implement some shit like that? :)

Also enterprise will buy new and then sell, why Thinkpad etc is popular. Should that also be banned?

No used cars too, sound good. No used goods at all. Imagine the productivity!!!

>Right now you can go to eBay and buy a used PC for $200 that will do everything you need to do...

100%! And the average HN poster presumably has the skills to make that work. My suggestion to retire vulnerable devices isn't a US jobs or tech sector program; it was born from a sincere desire to see vulnerable and most likely already compromised devices removed from use.

It seems logical to me if we're going to look for vulnerabilities in order to help harden devices you might want to address ones with known issues. And frankly the reason so many devices still out there are in use because their owners simply don't know any better or see no value in upgrading. Cash for clunkers creates an incentive to fix a situation that I'm guessing many don't even know exists.

I mean if we're committed to spending a bunch of taxpayer money on this problem, maybe education and investment into Linux is better than spending it to increase the amount of toxic waste in the ground.

For example getting rid of these: https://apnews.com/article/fbi-justice-department-chinese-ha...

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