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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...]

You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone?

There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver!

But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.

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You can't use your 25 year old phone for more than a snake game. most 2g towers have been turned off to make room for 4g and 5g.

In the US, North America, you mean. 2G is still alive and kicking, especially in Africa and South Asia:

https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-count...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out

And Europe. Finalizing the shutdowns of 2G and 3G networks in Sweden during 2025.

Yup and in the UK a lot of our card payment boxes for car parks will stop working when 3G is shut down, and will be replaced with an app. People without phones need not apply!

One can see how quickly people could drop through the bottom of society once you can't afford to pay your phone or car bills. None of that technology comes cheap, not at least if you hit hard times for a while, and you will become a second class citizen.

Luckily, technology has become cheaper and cheaper over time, and continues to do so.

Don't worry, software developers will keep upping the minimum requirements to compensate.

Really? Oh man ... I was in the UK this summer and had to install a different app to pay for parking (or car charging) in every city I went to, and some of them wouldn't accept a non-UK licence plate :( High demand for developers keeps my salary high, but it's all such a waste.

It is nice with the app though. Topping up, alerts, GPS for where your car is. It's annoying it's multiple apps, but the apps do add value.

Finland will still keep 2G for a long time.

Is there a particular reason? And how do you know so much about 2G in Finland, specifically!?

Portugal will keep it too.

Dumb phones are still being sold that are 2G only.

Not just that, but “landlines” are still being offered that are really a 2G phone restricted to work only in the vicinity of a home that's not (yet?) covered by actual landlines.

It's also used by emergency services.

It's considered a technology of last resort, and the service provider that wins the concession to provide it, with 100% coverage of a given area, probably finds it useful that it can meet the conditions with such tech.

3G has already shut down.

Denmark does the same. 3G has been shutdown, or mostly at least. 2G is kept running, with no plans to shut it down in the future.

Things that uses 2G:

  - Electricity meters
  - Alarm systems
  - Cooling and heating systems
  - Rat traps (?)
  - And an absolute crap-ton of early "IoT" devices.

And it's considered a backup network, with better coverage and range than 4G/5G. It also makes sense as the country is actively starting to remove the old landlines. The first cables are actively been removed from the ground.

Yeah, there was a lot of debates when they started relying on cell networks for alarms systems (mostly for the elderly) as a way to not have to maintain the copper.

A guess...

1G (NMT) and 2G networks have been used in forestry. Very often the machines are far from a mast and need the extra range to communicate.

And in general Finland is a sparsely populated country.

Australia is shutting down 3G this year.

Didn't it shut down at the start of the month?

Yes, I agree, but I assume is not One Big Switch to disable all of 3G at once. Google tells me that is (at least) started on 28 Oct 2024.

Ref: https://www.infrastructure.gov.au/media-communications-arts/...

> what's wrong with corporate America

I don't know that it's necessarily that, simply that SMS became very heavily used _and still is_ for basic functionality, essential services, billing, notifications etc. in Europe, Africa, Asia - unlike the US. Compare to e.g. the US requirement for universal lifeline (landline) phone service.

That's not a good example of 'planned obsolescence'. 2G wasn't 'planned' to be obsolete, it was superseded by better technologies. Also because 2G is a *service* and not a product, it was a business decision to sunset the *service* since there is a maintenance cost to 2G *service*, as well as an opportunity cost in not being able to reserve 2G radio frequencies for 4G and 5G networks.

Yes, and this perfectly illustrates my point that putting in the extra effort to make your product ultra study is not a good engineering nor business decision, if that means the product outlasts the surrounding eco-system it needs to function.

2G is not just a service or a business but it is infrastructure.

You're being overly pedantic. But OK, 2G is a bunch of infrastructure that is then rented out creating a cell service. Everything else holds true in that there is a maintenance cost and an opportunity cost.

The point is that it has been around so long that so many things depend on it. That makes sunsetting it a public policy decision and not just a business decision.

You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay

Not for everything. When I can do that I do, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid subscription fees for everything these days.

Yeah. I mean, technically if you walk into Adobe’s office with $1M in cash, they might make an exception, but that isn’t exactly practical.

I mean effectively you could. Do something like the following:

Take a subscription product that costs $10/mo right now as an example.

Let's say you want a license that lasts your whole life.

Estimate the time you have remaining in your life. Let's call it 50 years.

Now you can use an interest calculator to see how much it would cost to effectively buy a license until the end of your life.

Plug in $10/mo contribution, plus 4% annual interest to cover inflation and price increases, for an investment length of 50 years.

So you can effectively buy an "eternal" license for $18,714.61

You are right about the financial calculations, but the terms of the license might change, or it might no longer be available at all.

But that's stuff from 25 years ago. Try it, get a windows phone with version 8.1 from ebay now and see how far you get.

Yes, that's stuff from 25 years ago. It still works in the sense that the hardware was built to last.

It's not the fault of the phone's hardware that the world has moved on. But this underscores my point: if the hardware lasts longer than the eco-system around it, that's useless, and the company should have probably saved customers a few pennies by going with something less sturdy.

I still have one, as a backup. It works.

What about the browser? Still loading modern websites? That was an issue the last time I tried to reuse some of my ancient tech stuff.

I guess technology lasting a long time for specific non-commercial purposes is one thing, keeping up with modern society in general another.

> You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.

Let's say I'd pay double of what an appliance with similar technical characteristics would normally cost, which I want to go towards higher quality materials, craftsmanship, and quality assurance. I expect such an appliance to work and and be economically repairable for at least 20 years.

As far as I can tell, this is nearly impossible. Many brands that used to produce higher quality products have downgraded the quality of their materials and craftsmanship in order to juice quarterly profits for investors. Their reputation seems to lag the quality of their products by about 10 years.

> Where do you buy long lasting stuff? This is a serious question, I'm looking for new appliances and I am willing to pay more, within reason.

Miele is good for household appliances like washing machines and dishwashers. Kärcher is good for vacuum cleaners. There's lots of other German (and Swiss and Japanese etc) brands like that.

But in any case, I didn't (and can't) promise that you can get that kind of quality by merely paying double.

Btw, almost all cars these days last a lot longer than they used to, and with fewer repairs. Quality has gone up across the board. Planes also fall out of the sky less often. (And that includes Boeing, despite their recent troubles, their track record would be seen as unachievable good about 20 years ago.)

Miele was my first thought as well because they were historically regarded as an expensive, but high quality brand. Now they have a Trustpilot rating of 1.6.

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.miele.de

Our Miele appliances work just fine after using them for 7 years and after several house moves. I have never heard of this trustpilot before, interesting. Seems to be an American website?

> You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Adobe Creative Cloud (among many others) doesn't have that option.

I have worked with some people in the defence industry who got just that from Adobe and a few similar vendors. They had to negotiate with adobe and sign NDAs both ways, and they payed through the nose for it. But you can do it.

"Be defence forces of (checks profile) one-of-the-five nation states" is not a standard of negotiation requirement I deem attainable for just about anyone that isn't one of the five or EU the union.

Fair enough, but how life-crucial can an old copy of Adobe be?... I'm assuming a project like the Voyager mission relies on something a bit more bespoke than a copy of Adobe Creative Whatever. I really hope the defence forces core mission doesn't depend on Adobe Creative Cloud.

I guess the main reason here isn't "keeping an old version", but having a version that doesn't require an internet connection to be activated and doesn't send any data to Adobe.

But having an older version can be useful too because some features from previous releases may be missing in current ones, so that's a way to ensure access to the old files. A couple of years ago all the Pantone colours used in Photoshop just became black after an update because Adobe stopped licensing Pantone stuff.

Interesting. Can you point at something online with details of how that happens?

Many companies have separate license sales if you call them on behalf of a large company.

I worked at a large project management app where we charged per-seat.

We only offered per seat pricing, yet we had at least 3 companies that had flat pricing because they wanted >100k seats.

Deals outside of standard pricing gets cut all the time.

Thanks, that's informative. :)

If it had, I would not trust that at all, because they can switch off some cloud thingy tomorrow, if they please, and I would not trust them not to.

> You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay.

Where do you recommend I buy long-lasting refrigerators, washers, and dryers?

Right, "willing to pay" is not enough. You also need to know which products will actually last a long time and which products are just the regular crap sold at a high markup. Often this is impossible to tell if you are not an expert in the field.

That’s what stymies me

Do they though, or are they just powerless consumers with no real choice, besides the colour of the wrapping?

Why would consumers be powerless?

There data is held hostage, they lack the knowledge and the skill to migrate services, the several companies they could buy from are owned by often one huge owner which prevents any meaningful competition. Consumers have a choice only in the placebo sense of which colour to choose in the company store with the company scrip.

> You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay.

Would that 'twere so simple. Most previously reliable premium manufacturers have jumped on the enshittification bandwagon. You can get better design and a more exclusive branding if you are willing to pay more, but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years? Preferably one that doesn't come with cloud integration. There are still a very small number of ultra-premium brands that really care about their customers, but apart from being way too expensive for most people, they are increasingly hard to find. One of the side-effects of so many companies trading their reputations for "shareholder value" is that trust is eroded for everyone, including those that still deserve it.

> [...] but where exactly would you turn if you are looking, for example, for a dish washer that will just work for the next ten years?

Miele works well for us.

I understand your complaint. I'm also sure it's really hard to get high quality buggy whips these days without paying through the nose, now that everyone has switched to these newfangled horseless carriages.

> Miele works well for us.

That's what I would have said as well, until recently. Last year we had to replace ours, and its been an absolute nightmare. Cost us endless hours of wrangling with technicians and customer service to have it installed and configured properly (and already repaired once). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Interesting. Which country was that in?

We never had any issue with Miele in Singapore.

(The Australian customer service of Bosch was a joke, though. The one in Singapore seems competent, though.)

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