Comment by prosaic-hacker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by prosaic-hacker | Hacker News Reader

I may be a little more "temporally ludditish" than the author. I have bought the cheapest unlocked cellphone that Best Buy, Staples, or Costco had to offer. Most times on Black Friday.

I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.

As for PCs and Laptops. All are old BF buys or rescued "garbage". I am setting up a Dell Latitude E5420 (2013) for a current need. (Official disposed by my employer and intercepted before sent to electronic recycling.) Other resurrected acquisitions that are operational are from 2013 and 2015. I can do this because "what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career".

I like keeping this systems out of the garbage for a few more years.

>I typically paid 150 to 250 Canadian. They last 2 to 3 years and meet my needs right up to the next purchase. I am due this year for a switch.

Seems penny wise pound foolish compared to getting something like an iPhone SE or a low end pixel (eg. 7a) which have 6-8 years of support, rather than the 1-2 years support you get from low end phones.

There could be secondary factors. If you're physically hard on your devices, you might be scuffing up screens and permanently smooshing USB sockets with a couple years of hard use. Yes, they might be repairable, but the breakeven math is getting pretty close.

Replacing every 2-3 years also means replacing the battery every 2-3 years, which you were likely going to want to do eventually anyway.

TBH, I don't get the flagship phone thing at all. When my employer was paying, I got some of them-- a Lumia 1020, a LG V10, and a Samsung GSII-- and I didn't really use any of the performance. The phone that was the biggest upgrade for me was a Umidigi F1, because it really had two-day battery life for the first time.

>TBH, I don't get the flagship phone thing at all. When my employer was paying, I got some of them-- a Lumia 1020, a LG V10, and a Samsung GSII-- and I didn't really use any of the performance.

With the proliferation of javascript heavy SPAs and electron apps, you'll definitely notice the performance difference even if you're not gaming or whatever.

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