Forced to upgrade
herman.bearblog.dev
herman.bearblog.dev
Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...: ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to death elsewhere. I was a very late smartphone adopter and I'm already trying to reduce the amount I depend on this thing; too much of their marketing always struck me as being more akin to new sneakers than life-improving tech.
As a dev I understand the challenges of supporting older hardware. As a conscious consumer, I wish there were another option available in the market, and I haven't yet decided what I'll do when my current device finally needs to be retired.
Other sources on the web say that, including 4 years of electricity usage, an iPhone's total carbon impact is ~175 pounds of CO2, or about 9 gallons of gasoline. Which is roughly 0.25% of emissions from driving a car the average amount for four years.
Imperceptible changes to urban planning to shave off a few miles of driving would have a bigger impact than doubling the lifetimes of mobile phones.
Smartphones may have a low carbon emission footprint relative to some other things (numbers I found varied widely) and that still wouldn't be a good argument for discarding them unnecessarily.
Their production and disposal has a great deal of other side effects that aren't defined by carbon emissions, including the mining and refining of rare metals. I would very much like to link a comprehensive examination of this here but I regret that I haven't got one in my bookmarks already and search results are being as useless as usual. If anyone else has a particularly great link to share I'd love to see it too.
Let's imagine we can stop a single car from needing to be produced: that will dwarf all the mining impacts from probably thousands of phones! Cars are soooo much worse along any angle you can possibly imagine, yet people are misdirected from their use of cars to worrying about miniscuke rounding errors from their phones.
I am arguing that our efforts should be in proportion to their payoff for environmental efforts as well.
Or more precisely, we should spend our environmental efforts in ways that maximize their returns.
Thus, here I am spending lots of time commenting on how a tiny minor change in driving habits will have bigger effects than large changes in phone habits.
Urban planning in the US responds to the demands of the residents. We should be asking all residents demand alternatives to driving.
We can drop that legislation tomorrow, basically no problem.
Are you gonna say, no we have to wait and do cars first because a car is equal in carbon to 20 phones (or whatever).
Cars are one of the large container targets, but it takes years to change urban environments, to build transportation infrastructure, to change building zones, etc., to prepare the way for people using alternative transport (or none). Unless you can win over your citizens (and politicians who are in lobbies pockets) for a grand plan like 'no more new cars from now on'.
I don't think you hypothetical would change even a tiny fraction of phone replacements, but even if it did, legislative bandwidth in the US is extremely low and should be reserved for the high impact changes. Anything that distracts from the must-do messages is quite likely to be harmful.
We make people jump through all sorts of hoops for plastic straws and plastic bags that have approximately zero environmental win compared to far smaller changes to their car use.
The real problem is the social attitude that cars can not be touched or criticized. That needs to start changing.
Our phones are not the core of climate change, our cars and all the massive environmental damage from mining the necessary minerals for them really are.
If you have a better quantification of species lost, of ecological diversity lost, of land lost, I would absolutely love to hear it, but I have not found anything better despite my research!
Also, the environmental and ecological damage that we are facing from global warming is so utterly massive in comparison to all other ecological damage that we do, that any other avoided damage needs to be placed in the context of halting global warming. Humans will survive climate change, and a lot of other species will survive too, but the dieoff of species from it is so shocking that focusing on the small amounts of mining for phones in comparison to the massive amounts of mining and e-waste from cars seems, well, at best misguided. And if I'm being more honest, I think it's actually quite harmful to environmental action to focus any attention on phones when action on cars is so much more impactful.
From https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Coolproducts-repo... (2019):
"Our analysis shows that a 1-year lifetime extension of all smartphones in the EU would save 2.1 Mt CO2 per year by 2030, the equivalent of taking over a million cars off the roads. A lifetime extension of 3 years would save around 4.3 MtCO2. And a 5-year extension would correspond to about 5.5 MtCO2."
The extra global warming contributions come from "manufacturing, transportation and end-of-life phases", and the increasing dependency on remote servers.
As for the comparisons there, it's hard to make head or tails of the meaning, because the "context" provided is apples to oranges. A million cars versus how many phones? Or a million cars versus how many cars in Europe? Citing a big number does not mean much unless we have something to compare that big number to, and I question the intentions of such "bald big numbers" because I see it so often used to muddy the waters and confuse people on many topics. For example, nuclear advocates will often disparage solar, talking about X million square kilometers without giving any context on whether that's actually a big number or not.
2.1Mt CO2 (over how many years with that "by 2030") versus how many Gt Co2 per year? Seems to be 2.5-3.1Gt/year based on a web search..
And what percentage of total EU emissions are from cars?
These numbers also make the argument that phones are a small rounding error compared to other much bigger actions.
Should we mandate repairability? Of course! It's good! But getting bent out of shape on the impact of phones compared to far more common and wasteful practices is a bad use of our limited amount of time to make drastic action.
And the EU is far better on cars than the US, so perhaps it makes more sense for them to take action on phones, but in the US, our car addiction makes for far better and practical environmental action.
Urban planning too obviously cannot be pinned on consumer choices. Which is why it would never become the locus of attention.
I don’t know if you are right or wrong about this point. But nonetheless.
Can you explain your reasoning here? I think you are saying that we focus all of our environmental action through the lens of consumer choice, which is something that I also think is true.
We can encourage the public to make better individual choices, but a far better approach is to change the system so that the default choice is the best choice.
But when it comes to phones, a lot of the policy action seems to be set on forcing companies to behave in a certain way, which IMHO is perfectly cromulent if the environmental payoff is proprotionate to the effort.
My focus has been on changing the attitudes towards policy changes that broaden the choices of individuals, to allow them to even choose a better path that is not currently available, because urban planning has banned walkable neighborhoods in nearly every part of every city.
Focusing on the "smallest" problem at the expense of the "biggest" is the wrong approach. But ignoring small problems that are easier to fix is also the wrong approach. The author is using a phone that is more than 6 years old and still functions; making it easier to continue using it feels like an easier problem than changing urban planning.
IMHO we should spend lobbying efforts on the things that will have greater effects, like approving apartment buildings in walkable areas.
I agree with your assessment that we should change what we can and should optimize how we spend our time creating change, but IMHO the best possible outcome of advocating for phone change is that people think "hey yeah let's change this," but then get told "oh so you are OK with that change, how about something far far bigger for small effort?"
We seriously only need to do very small changes to urban planning to effect massive change compared to phones. And those small changes have the effect of growing. And they are necessary urban planning changes, and the longer we put them off the less likely we can have the snowball rolling where we need it to be.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/recycled-iphones-apple-produ...
Not sure if there's a better document that talks more about it, that was just what I could quickly find.
Not about the phone (I have iPhone 12), but I have an app called Trunk Notes which is a wiki reader / editor. It was one of the only wiki apps I found that could work cooperatively with my own markdown vimwiki that I keep on my desktop (and sync via Dropbox or similar).
A few years back, it complained that it would no longer work in iOS version something-or-other and the author apologized because he could no longer maintain it. I never got around to deleting it, and to my surprise it still works to this day.
https://www.apple.com/by/iphone-12/specs/ (12 mini)
https://support.apple.com/en-us/111873
I would recommend to return the phone and get the 13 mini which should last awhile
I'd pay about the same (or maybe even exactly the same, but feel a little annoyed about it) for a small Apple phone with the same camera as the expensive big models.
Also I wouldn't choose one with a lightning connector, better with a USB-C (or A) female port, so I could also use it for some other devices too if necessary.
I upgraded an eight year old SE (first generation) to an SE3 thinking it would be the obvious choice, then promptly replaced it with the 13 mini within a week (fortunately still available at the time).
The difference is small on paper but noticable in your hands, and I honestly feel like the 13 mini is the spiritual successor to the SE series while the SE3 is a weird relative that you don't really want to have to interact with.
For some reason the slightly more boxy and grip friendly design of the SE1 and SE2 was changed in the SE3 to have the curves that were introduced in (I think?) the iPhone 6, despite the SE series having a slightly more square design up to that point. But the SE3 also inherited the lower raw technical specs that were expected from the SE series.
So somehow the 13 mini wins in terms of both form factor _and_ tech capabilities/new Apple features (such as Face ID over Touch ID).
Sometimes you don't quite catch it at the right angle (and sometimes it sees you when you're not even looking), and other times you just don't quite have enough fave visible for it to work (for me usually when I'm doomscrolling in bed with my face squished into a pillow, so maybe that's a sign).
Having said that I wonder if the article’s author would have been better off buying the SE. It is smaller, has Touch ID and will run his apps.
I think it may all have been a terrible mistake though -- the world is more fun when people aren't glued to their phones.
Funny how the German word for mobile phones exactly what most modern mobile phones aren't. Handy.
The iPhone 12 mini still ended as one of the top 10 smartphone models sold in January 2021.[0]
There was also a new iPhone SE model that was half the price and roughly the same size. I wouldn't be surprised that most decided the iPhone SE was a better deal at the time. In fact, the iPhone 11 and iPhone SE were the top-selling iPhone models of 2020.[1]
[0] https://www.patentlyapple.com/2021/04/in-january-iphones-cap...
[1] https://wccftech.com/iphone-11-iphone-se-top-selling-phones-...
If this was OnePlus or someone those would be decent numbers. The problem is they are Apple, they already held the top 4 spots by significantly larger margin with premium devices. Building low cost devices to only make 8th and 10th place with them isn't necessarily a win for them. They can just cut margin on the older versions of the popular models if they want to capture that price point without stifling their focus on their new products each year.
The way people talk about smaller phones around here you'd expect the 2020 model was outselling new models through this day and the masses were waiting with bated breath for updates. Truth is there is just a smaller portion of the market that actually wants such phones when it comes time to upgrade but you here from them more often because they are one of the least common and least valuable segments of the market to try to service.
I'm just confused as this article doesn't even try to present this as a latent demand from others. Such that I don't understand the opening comment. Reminds me hearing folks complain about bad pockets in formal wear. Is largely a true statement, but I think it is also clear that the demand does not exist for it. Despite how vocal some people can be.
I read that criticism as aimed at the software developers withdrawing support for older OS versions.
I read the article more as a lament, rather than angry or annoyed. The author had a perfectly usable phone that he was forced from due to external factors, and the replacement doesn't improve upon its predecessor.
That would be better than "Eh, we don't believe in it anyway" kind of reluctance.
Otherwise I think the only real “solution” to this is to rethink your notion of a phone. Personally I tend to use WhatsApp, email, and other non-phone-specific applications, and don’t use the actual phone feature very often. So theoretically I could use any small computing device and upgrade its components as needed, and not need to have a phone at all.
My bank did solve the issue in a pretty clever way though. Their phone app is so terrible that I refuse to use it. Sadly there new web version is also terrible, e.g. you can't copy paste when doing a transfer, so rather than being 100% sure the amount is correct, you get to type it in and double check it.
Compared to the non-app solutions I'm familiar with in Germany, TOTP lacks at least two things:
1. There are no guarantees as to what happens to the shared secret (whereas at least some of these alternative solutions use your debit card as a smartcard to securely store the secret). From an individual point of view I guess that's perhaps a welcome trade-off (no backup solution except for manually registering a second key everywhere is part of the reason I'm not keen on Yubikeys and the like for replacing all my logins), but banks might have differing opinions.
2. Perhaps more importantly, you can't really authenticate the individual transaction, because the TOTP is only based on the (fixed) shared secret and the current time. The TAN generator solutions I'm familiar with on the other hand also include the destination account and sum of money to be transferred in the TAN calculation (and those get displayed for confirmation on the TAN generator's display), so a malicious website impersonating your bank's online banking can't forge those things.
> also include the destination account and sum of money to be transferred in the TAN calculation
Which banks have it implemented? You are giving them too much credit. In most cases their 2FA is simply code consisting of digits or tapping multiple "confirm" without any context inside of their losy apps. In my personal anecdotal experience only SMS 2FA contain some additional information what exactly are you confirming.
In Germany all banks here (https://www.kontofinder.de/ratgeber/tan-verfahren-ueberblick...) that are listed as supporting chipTAN [1], plus probably most of those that are listed as supporting photoTAN [2] allow using a hardware photoTAN generator instead of an app, too (though sadly some banks like Ing-Diba require their own proprietary photoTAN generator instead of a standard photoTAN-device as supported by some other banks).
[1] That one is using your debit card as a smartcard for the shared secret.
[2] That one requires the shared secret to be transmitted to you in some form (probably a QR-code or something similar in a letter) and set up in the photoTAN generator app/hardware device on first use.
Woa. Nearly every other device in my house lasts for 10+ years. Coffee machine, printer, laundry machine, oven, TV, every single one of those is over 10 years old. Our car isn't yet but I very much expect it to last at least that long. The only device I replace about as often as a phone is my laptop. At least the laptop is noticeably better. I concur with the author that phones haven't gotten meaningfully better at all over the last years, yet we're forced to upgrade. It's all planned obsolescence.
This can probably be explained by the fact that an iPhone is a “cheaper” (comparatively) high end item. In other words, it’s one of the few high end items that many middle and low income people own. And thus compared to the coffee machines, printers, and other cheap electronics that break after a couple years, the iPhone seems rather durable.
There absolutely is.
Viz. the no-name drip machine I picked up at Goodwill for $10 and is probably older than me. The heating element makes the water boil, and it trickles over the grounds and becomes my morning salvation.
Viz. the Brother laser printer ca. 2013 for $99 (in, admittedly, 2013 dollars). I had to replace the toner once, it was slightly annoying.
Neither of these items has an app.
Longevity ≈ Quality / Complexity where Quality ≠ Price
Every year? Good lord what do you do to those things. I've lived in hard water areas my whole life and have never experienced people churning through coffee machines that fast.
> They'd likely last longer if we cleaned them more often
So yeah, just put some vinegar through them every now and then and they'll be fine and last a decade. Take care of it and it'll last you a long time. If they're burning out and not incredibly scaled up, there's potentially something wrong with your home's wiring.
It's not always because of scale though, if you break a carafe, a replacement costs as much as a whole new pot. If the little spring in the basket that interacts with the carafe breaks, there didn't used to be a replacement, but looks like amazon carries a generic now.
I would like a good phone that was not made out of glass to require future replacement purchases, and I’d be thrilled to pay for it. Up front, in cash.
This rental economy’s final destination is the same in all categories: cheap junk.
The iphone doesn’t just die after 5 years.
I still have a 10 year iPhone 6 and a 8 years old iPhone 7 both still working just fine.
Apple stopped releasing OS upgrades with NEW features, but they are still releasing security updates. (In this aspect it’s better than most (all?) modern TVs.
Those iphone are still working the same way as when they were released. The only issue is that some apps doesn’t works anymore.
So part of the blame is on app developers.
Sure, maybe the app needs some feature which the old phone doesn’t have, but more likely is that the company just can’t bother to maintain their app in older OS versions.
If I fired up my vacuum cleaner one day and it said “sorry, this device is just too old and the manufacturer just doesn’t want it to function as it did when you bought it” we’d have regulators jumping down their throats. But it’s a-ok to do with devices that rely on a software ecosystem…
What other things? In my home most appliances are 15+ years old -- ovens, washing machines, even most Sonos things are around 20 years old. My Yamaha PF-P 100, bought in 1994, still works perfectly well.
A smartphone is certainly more complex than a MIDI keyboard, but why would we need to upgrade the OS constantly.
Also, we're getting into the differences between upgrades (what OP said) and updates (the thing necessary to keep up with security) here. I'm having a really hard time coming up with an OS feature introduced in a full OS upgrade within the last 10 years that I actually want. I would have been perfectly content with only getting security updates since.
And sure, a cryptographic coprocessor will make accessing encrypted data a lot more snappy. But decrypting that data in software instead will work just as well, albeit slower. Which really doesn't matter for 90%+ of phone users.
- Live Photos. I won't consider any device that doesn't have something analogous, now. They're magical. Non-kid-havers may feel otherwise, but making every photo I snap of my kids a "Live Photo" is one of the most important improvements any technology thingy has provided in my entire life. (I think these are under the 10-year line? Very close, if not)
- Transparent OCR and text selection in images. The first time I used an image for a couple full minutes, copying text out of it, before realizing only when I went to share it with someone that it wasn't a PDF but a PNG, was when I knew this had to be a table-stakes your-OS-is-incomplete-without-it feature for me. Sure it could just be a feature of some program I've got installed, but having it in any native image view is way better than having to open some specific program to use it, a thing I could long have done, but never did. Making it first-class, fast, and transparent to the user, makes all the difference. I rely on it all the time now.
A couple off the top of my head.
> I'm having a really hard time coming up with an OS feature introduced in a full OS upgrade within the last 10 years that I actually want.
which both of those easily clear for me. I bet I could come up with a few more if I read over some OS release notes from the last few years—"oh yeah, that! I use it so much I'd kinda forgotten it was a thing" sort of stuff.
And really, that's how it should be. Both of those things are not things the operating system does or should do.
Do you have to open Google Lens to do it? I could already do something like that, just didn't. It's totally different when it Just Works.
Headphones automatically connecting to any of my devices that play audio, even switching between them.
How much additional complexity do we tolerate in order to target hardware with diverging feature sets?
How much should we hold new software back in order to target older hardware that can’t do the same things without chewing through battery?
Frankly I think it’s fucking amazing what Apple has done here, especially when you compare against the Windows ecosystem (at least as of the last time I used it ages ago). The rate of adoption of OS upgrades is such that app developers can actually reasonably target new OS APIs without having to wait a decade for a critical mass of users.
Pushing people to get new devices is pushing people to pay for the updates.
Other way would be an iPhone would have to cost idk somewhere in range of $10000 a piece to support it fully until last device hardware fails.
What you're proposing is a massive waste of effort and talent--attempting to accomplish something bordering on impossible with a benefit of practically nil.
In fact I'd go so far as to say "negative benefit". It's going to encourage solutions targeting the lowest common denominator and hold back improvements for others. And even on the individual level--_hardware_ security has improved leaps and bounds in the last couple decades. Even with all the software updates in the world, nobody should be using that thing anymore.
Though I mean, it might finally encourage me to get rid of it. We'd be in a situation where it would be cheaper for one of the big companies to hire someone to have me and my family have an "accident" than it would be to actually maintain that hardware.
People who’ve actually had to maintain software that supports old hardware understand that it is a business decision. Is the cost of supporting older hardware (harder to maintain software, unable to use newer APIs, need to maintain multiple, rarely used code paths) greater than the benefit (revenue, network effect of keeping users)?
At Meta with billions of users the network effect and revenue means that they’ll never stop supporting Android 5 and up. But for a small app with a couple million users and a few thousand users on the oldest OS, it won’t make sense.
People actively throwing their toys out their pram choose not to understand this trade off. They think this can be solved with regulation like it’s a magic wand that makes economic trade offs disappear.
Second, I'm having trouble putting my finger on an actual limitation. I have a 5 year old camera, on my 5 year old phone, I'm not asking for the drivers to be updated for evermore, just a stable api, so takepicture() works. If you want to add takepicturemacro() then fine.
But you don't even need that. My C compiler can target many different instruction sets.
Third. Modern phone OSs are walled gardens. I don't really have to option of doing all this myself. If the phone companies and OSs aren't going to give me full control of my hardware, they should have a duty to support things for longer.
When not available from original source, repair shops.
[EDIT] FWIW I'm in the so-called "Oregon Trail" mini-generation, so have definitely lived in and remember a world far more low-tech and connected than the current one, was a very late smartphone adopter, and have only reluctantly and recently come to admit that my phone is basically the only really useful computer I own for my personal life, and the "real" computers are mostly just toys for me that, at best, can replace only part of my phone's useful-in-my-ordinary-life functionality, in its absence. A high-quality internet-connected sensor and I/O suite in a pocket-sized package is just too damn useful, I've found.
I could lose my phone tomorrow and it would be a bit of an inconvenience but (by intention) nothing approaching "half my life" is tied to my phone.
I was doing at-home deposits using a flatbed scanner and the bank's website (maybe a java applet?) before the iPhone was released. It wasn't too hard, assuming one had a flatbed scanner.
I never encountered any app that refuses to install despite my device being stuck on Android 11. The only reason this sometimes happen is because of geofencing, or apps built for Pixel phones.
I only started to look for acquiring a new device because telecom operators are readying for a 5G launch next year, for which my current device is incompatible hardware-wise.
And unless something unexpected is happening, I'm going to get the A35, ie the latest version of the same lineage.
Better than Google themselves when last I checked, which is shameful.
That said, I don't trust Google, and would recommend filling out the arbitration optout form when you receive the device.
Do you assume you'll have some issue with them that will be worth individually suing them for?
Arbitration clauses and class-action waivers universally favor the corporation -- in this case Google -- and should not be legal. I'm proud to retain my basic legal rights.
Samsung is however among the best in that regard. The last security update received on my phone was in February of last year, so almost 4 years after the release of the device. However I forgot how many os updates the device got, but there's at least one received during the first year.
But the company improved its updates policy since. I purchased a galaxy tablet 3 years ago (iirc) and it already received 4 os updates so far. The latest such update, received last month, was just 6 months or so after the previous os update.
But again, this varies from company to the other. I bought phones from Motorola and Nokia that they claimed would receive 2 or 3 os updates, but never delivered even a single one.
[1] although they have in past updated very old phones when something really bad has happened.
You, too, can be someone who doesn't use these things. It doesn't take luck.
A lot of 2-factor and identity verification type things technically install, but will be blocked as being insecure by the companies that use them and demand a higher security level. Things like Microsoft Authenticator and Duo Mobile, certain time card systems, etc. Working in tech, I'm generally forced update every few years because older phones stop getting android updates, especially since the android updates are generally the responsibility of the vendor and sometimes the carrier, and not google directly.
No. No, it's not good at all. For almost every other product it would be deemed unacceptable. Beyond unacceptable even. We should not normalize this.
My car is > 10 years old. My desktop computer is > 10 years old. My laptop has had both the screen and battery changed. And the fan, multiple times. I don't know how old my laser printer is, probably twice as old, it doesn't see much use.
Users would never accept if Linux or Windows stopped supporting five year old architectures. It would be an uproar, and rightly so.
A phone no longer a toy, it is a tool among others. Five years is hardly enough to get to know a tool. You should just swap out the battery when it goes bad. You should not have to worry about software at all. That people accept this is a travesty.
For the same reason, many car dealerships don't work on cars more than 10 years old. They keep their techs focused on the newer stuff, and increasingly pressure owners of older cars to trade them in.
Fortunately for car owners, there is a robust market of, and legal requirements to allow, parts and independent service shops for older cars. We don't have nearly that kind of support for older phones.
You can't really be playing devil's advocate when you agree with the author, who wrote "Apple seems the best at supporting older devices, and yet I don't actually expect them to support hardware for longer than that."
> except perhaps if we go back decades to appliances made near the middle of the century
Nokia made some very robust phones far more recently than that. The "Indestructible Nokia 3310" is a meme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/indestructible-nokia-3310 .
If we were to play devils advocate, I think the best argument is that in an early technology cycle (which arguably smart phones still are). There is a reasonable expectation that the phone will move into obsolescence before the hardware expires.
How you square the concept of sustainable/long-lived products and technological advancement is of course the predicament we find ourselves in. The answer is of course modularity and repairability. So companies like Framework or Fair Phone is who you should be buying from (both with their own foibles). Whereas if you look at the philosophy of Apple you shouldn't ever think they value agency of the user/owner.
I don't think it's that obvious, and I don't think manufacturers count on it ("it" being short length updates)
Instead I think it's about handling competition: say a manufacturer updates their product line every 3 years, should a user that kept their phone for a while need to buy in the middle to last bout, they'll look at the market and see "oh that other manufacturer has released an update to their product line a month ago, so I'm going to buy that instead of a 2yo product from my current manufacturer". The comparison may be done on any kind of metric but it ultimately comes down to what's state of the art at a given point in time.
It doesn't mean the user hasn't kept their previous phone a long time. But to be competitive across the time continuum the product line needs to be fresh enough.
In that sense it generates sale, or rather, helps with retention, not by having one update every year or other year, but by creating the opportunity to stay within one's current brand.
I think leading manufacturers have realised a long time ago that satisfied customers are what generates reliable sales and growth long term. Even Samsung, king of the shiny "innovative"-but-useless bullet-point feature list have somewhat gotten their act together.
That'a separate from software churn though. Desktop OSes tend to support hardware for much longer than mobile OSes. Apple does better than Android here, but they both should do better. My perception is that most android apps support much older versions of Android than iOS apps support of iOS, but I don't know how that ends up looking for age of device supported.
I'd say that is correct. In a sense it's like part availability for cars or washing machines, and is similarly quite an outrageous situation too: around here law mandates 10y of parts availability; trouble is, reliability has progressively improved to the point that this becomes ludicrously insufficient.
An example: I bought a car five years ago, it's well tended and shows no sign of being anywhere close to the scrape yard five years from now, yet parts will become hard to come by; case in point my other car is turning 16 (sixteen!) and barring the need for a full body paint job because the varnish is gradually peeling away (which is kinda expected), is equally in such good order as to most probably be in similar condition for another 10-15 years with proper maintenance; but will I be able to? Parts are getting rarer as they've been in a stock-remainder only basis for five years.
Another example: my washing machine had a part fail at the 7 year mark. Fine, parts are supposed to be available, so just repair? Well, the part moved out of production to stock-basis because they evaluated statistically that they have enough stock to cover the 10y mark. Problem: the stock is a sort of archival with glacial operation speeds, the time quoted for part shipping was shy of 6 months, and I couldn't find a replacement. So I bought a new machine out of sheer necessity.
10y is way too short for parts. Software, notably OS and its compatibility primitives for third party software, should be counted as parts. 7y for software is better than before but still way too short.
> Desktop OSes tend to support hardware for much longer than mobile OSes.
I feel like this is increasingly less true, at least to the point that the difference becomes immaterial to the problem.
You'll most likely need to bypass the cpu model check, and the tpm check for an older machine, but otherwise should work. Windows 10 support's more hardware, of course. I forget where Linux cuts off now, I think it's somewhere between a 486 and a Pentium Pro/II. Although I'd expect you do need a 64-bit CPU to run modern software.
It wasn't ten years ago, but now they seem to be struggling to give you an actual reason for the new models to exist. The argument that not everyone upgrades at the same pace is not unreasonable, but still, it makes absolutely no difference if you get the iPhone 13, 14, 15 or 16. The number of people who needs the 16 for something in particular is so small that it wouldn't be a market in it's own right.
Google is supporting their current models until at least Q2 2031.
If you consider all users though, they most certainly do not buy/upgrade at the same time. So let's say a new generation is released every three years, for a given user when buy-time comes they'd be buying a brand new phone that is 1.5 years old tech on average, 2.9 worst case. Releasing a new phone each year means there is the opportunity to buy the up-to-date technology (whether it's a flagship or an economic version) at any particular point in time.
Opportunity does not mean necessity. By and large once people buy a phone and are happy with it they don't change it til it's dead or slow. Most I've seen keep it even way beyond the major version support threshold, or even security update threshold (which can happen faster than expected when people buy refurbs or older models, which they do). They're appliances. There are new models of cars or TVs or washing machines every year, yet virtually nobody changes those every year. One just buys the best one within their budget x identified use case at a given point in time.
In my experience the persona that buys a new phone every year used to exist in the early smartphone days, but today is by and large an outlier figure.
Not that mobile carriers like that, instead they try to keep the churn alive against the tide, because they want customers locked in so they have you buy carrier-locked phones at a rebate under a 1y contract and dearly want you to renew at the end, which means enticing you to get a new, carrier-locked phone.
The only ones I see changing phones regularly are the ones buying phones as consumables instead of appliances - less "washing machine", more "toilet paper", the kind of phone that is cheap and underpowered, borderlining on unusable (or outright so, which I consider to be defective by design) e-waste right out of the assembly line. They don't care about the device, so they don't pay attention, so they break it every rand(0..6) mo, and then the cost to repair is barely lower than the price new plus "it was so slow anyway", so they buy a new cheap one and the circle starts again; which doesn't quite work out financially of course, they'd be better off buying a good phone and paying attention to it (which they would simply because it's not cheap). But back to the point, this kind of persona doesn't care at all about the device "newness".
You say this like it’s a bad thing, and maybe it is, but it’s hardly a surprising thing.
Literally everything Apple does is entirely about generating sales. They’re not running a charity for the benefit of their fans. The only reason to come up with designs that people like is to sell them.
Linux doesn't have a financial incentive to delete the code that supports 5 year old processors, but Apple does have such a financial incentive.
Actually, I have a negative example for FOSS for you. I have a laptop with an Nvidia GPU on it from 2012. I cannot use it under Linux since Linux world is terrible at API / ABI stability. So Nvidia driver has stopped working. I can still use the laptop fully functional with Windows 11.
Your example of FOSS not working... is the proprietary nvidia driver breaking? Even though it would almost certainly work if your card were supported by the open source drivers?
Hint: It's the one that changed.
Which... maybe it is; who am I to suggest different priorities for other people. But it would be nice for engineers and businesses to at least think about this and make such a decision consciously.
I mean, I get the sentiment. But I live in this world too, and the E-Waste and forced obsolescence(or whatever you'd call it in this particular instance) does have an effect on me, personally. So yes, we should absolutely have a say, despite the fact that at this time we actively do not. In the US, our environmental policy is laughably inadequate, and with what happened in the election, we're about to be on a path of complete self-annihilation, environmentally speaking.
It's a bit of a long-winded way of explaining myself here, but we definitely shouldn't refrain from serious issues because you feel you may be stepping on others' toes.
I'm sure a small minority might also have an environmental beef, but arguing green isn't going to grab peoples' hearts.
That's kind of what it so disheartening about this whole issue. It's seriously urgent, and yet I routinely meet people who actively deny what is actual undeniable fact, claiming various sources of deception (deepstate, lizards, Nancy Pelosi, etc). A good amount of the rest don't care.
This implies what people want to stick to is some inefficient BS workflow.
As opposed to what's usually the case: more stable, tested, and loved features, changed due to tech fads, to make the product appear new for marketing, to squeeze extra profit despite inconveniencing users, or just for change's sake.
I don't necessarily agree with it, but that's certainly the wider consensus.
For a business that sold a thousand units with a handful remaining, the calculation is going to be a lot less dominated by impact than for a giant who sold millions and has thousands still in use.
And if there's a giant in this industry, that's Apple.
The couldn't give less shits about the environment.
I'm pretty sure they have switched to paper straws on their cafeteria too!
Don't fall for the marketing.
Companies don't care for the "environmental impact". When they pretend to, it's a token gesture to make certain customer demographics feel good. At best they will sacrifice a slither of their margins, but if there's a conflict between environmental impact and any bigger slice of their profit, they'll go for profit anytime.
>Which... maybe it is; who am I to suggest different priorities for other people
Environmental impact is about the commons, so it shouldn't be just about whatever personal priorities each has.
I have wondered sometimes if hardware manufacturers actively seek out significant road-mapped hardware changes (such as Intel>ARM, etc., in case of Apple) in order to keep sales rolling in and stop folks 'sitting on' their well-functioning tech.
With yearly iPhone releases it is harder to justify upgrades. Like for author - upgrading from working phone to newer model while not gaining anything significant is stupid.
It might be helpful to think of them like cars: New models every year, but customers only "upgrade" every 10 to 20 years.
What we don’t want is functional devices rotting in a drawer or landfill.
I don't necessarily attribute anything nefarious to anything, but collectively the whole thing seems like madness to me. What's ironic is I bet if I put linux on that machine, it (a) would be totally feasible to install recent versions, and (b) all the latest versions of the software I needed would be there for those versions. It seems like there needs to be some principled way of maintaining installs on older hardware... or I guess I just have to weigh this issue more heavily in my decision making about OSes in the future.
He should be able to just buy a cheap mac mini second hand and plug it into that gorgious 5k imac display, but nope. Cant do that.
Apple just like every other company could not give less of a crap about ewaste. There is absolutely zero reason why they couldn't relax the limits on older hardware to allow it to be repurposed.
What's now going to happen in my dads case is he'll buy a cheap 4k monitor, probably a second hand mac mini and send the iMac to a charity for recycling.
The whole Intel -> ARM thing though was absolutely about performance and Intel's utterly awful processors holding them back. The forced upgrades were just a bonus for Apple.
It's wasteful, but also not really all at the same time. We're combining a lot of devices and functionality into one unit which can reduce waste, and there's not a lot of things in your life you use as much as a smartphone -- even if you cycle it out every 5 years. There are components of these that are easily recycled as well. For many households the costs of smartphones are cut down as the devices are passed down based on seniority or priority, this makes for a really functional reuse system.
I'm sure they notice some improvements, when I was out shopping for a new phone I could tell the then-flagship iPhone 13 having a slightly better display and a slightly better camera than 11 even by playing with it at the store.
But then, I've upgraded from an iPhone 6S+ to iPhone 11, and even 11 was unnecessary to me. I just had to because I bought the 16GB model back then, the lowest storage option, and with ever larger iOS updates my phone wasn't usable anymore.
With that a perfectly usable iPhone 6S became electronic waste, and I was out 600 euros, to do exactly what I've been doing on 6S: browsing, instant messaging, Uber and Uber-likes. Now the fonts look a little nicer, and camera is so much better, and that's.. about it for noticeable features for me. I wouldn't pay that much for either of those if I could.
My point is, I think smartphones hit a ceiling of useful features a long time ago. The big features, all the important stuff, the GPS, camera, browser, IM and a few other things have been figured out since a decade now. There are some smartphone "power users" who don't have a computer or maybe a TV and use it for watching movies, playing games or they are amateur photographers/influencers and such, for them maybe these new models still offer something. For everyone else an iPhone 16 does what an iPhone 6 does, just a little fancier.
Using the iPhone sucks, but owning it lets me mostly use the Android phone I actually like, while still being able to do everything I would otherwise be arbitrarily restricted from doing.
In early 2023 I "upgraded" to an iPhone XS 256GB. It took a while to get used to FaceID from TouchID, but it's fine. Perhaps this will be its final year? I'm conscious iOS 19 might abandon support. Apple have replaced the battery once and replaced a speaker at the same time (I guess there know the go bad but it's not enough to do a recall). It's a great phone and I too will be a little bit when I'm forced to abandon it.
With all the money these companies make, they can dedicate some people to taking care of legacy hardware.
The datacenter is temperature controlled and the air is filtered. The server is locked in the rack and never moves. By comparison, your laptop or your phone go through hell on a daily basis.
I guarantee you however carefully you are handling your device it is a world apart from a datacenter.
The recitals say: "In determining a support period, a manufacturer should take into account in particular reasonable user expectations, the nature of the product, as well as relevant Union law determining the lifetime of products with digital elements."
and
"The support period for which the manufacturer ensures the effective handling of vulnerabilities should be no less than five years, unless the lifetime of the product with digital elements is less than five years[...]"
So....it's a bit up to us to ask vendors for updates for older devices so that we can maybe slowly move the baseline of what a "reasonable user expectation" is.
Though for the purposes of extending the useful life of a product, throwing it over the wall would be a huge improvement. Publish your garbage code and whatever documentation you have, and people can pick it up themselves, which you already find people doing today but with the added barrier of having to reverse engineer it.
It's possible I'll grab one before the SE4 just to hold on to TouchID a bit longer.
Anecdote of Samsung support from a few years ago on a decidedly-not-flagship phone (just straight-up copying from a comment I wrote a couple of years ago—):
In April 2019, I needed to rapidly obtain a device, and purchased a Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) from a major retailer in Australia. I later discovered that this model had already been EOL for over a year when I purchased it. (It was released with 5.1.1, got its last security patch in November 2017, and was actively unsupported no later than March 2018. The handset should very obviously have been updated to Android 6, if not released with it—Android 6 was announced and in beta 7½ months before, and was the stable release 3½ months before, the handset’s January 2016 release.)
Anyway, the Samsung update program did not exist in 2015.
Could there be a specific app that used some super new API or just wanted to force users to have recent devices? Sure, there absolutely are. But a simple survey demonstrates they're the fringe. For most people, iOS being stuck on iOS 16.x will remain irrelevant for a few more years.
I’d love 5 minutes in a room alone with the bonehead PM or eng lead who decided this was a good way to treat your users.
1.Increased software development costs - Costs increase because software has to be designed to fallback to alternative implementations when the newest OS, browser, database, etc. features are not available.
2. Increased performance optimization costs. Older devices tend to be slower and this means software engineers will have to spend more time optimizing programs.
3. Increased testing costs - You need to test all features on older and newer devices.
The other problem is it might not be worth it to support older devices. Basically, supporting older devices may not be profitable (i.e. too few users who do not generate enough revenue to justify the increased costs).
I was an iOS developer in a past life. It doesn’t take that much effort to keep the lights on on the older OS. But even if it did, it makes zero sense to suddenly make that already working older version stop working.
I get why devs do this sometimes. iOS bakes a lot of support into the OS (so does Android, though increasingly because of slow uptake of new versions Google baking everything into the Play API), and iOS 16 is necessary for a variety of APIs, and even a lot of SwiftUI functionality if they went down that route. And then your APIs start changing so you end up invariably doing breaking changes so you can't just ignore the old versioned apps in the wild.
> I don't use iOS 16 or FlightAware, so it's possible that they allow you to install it from the store and then do some runtime check and refuse to actually run, but that would be super weird behaviour.
This is exactly what they appear to be doing. It should be against Apple’s guidelines to release an app that simply says “go away until you buy a new phone.”
So the 7 is stuck on 15, and it is the one being left out courtesy of 15. Still doesn't address the submission though that is claiming this about the 8 and 16, which as of now is still very widely supported. I assume the author is just reading the tea leaves and predicting what is ahead. Eventually 16 will be deprecated too, though it isn't right now.
FlightAware on the App Store likely works perfectly, though it would require 16.4+ on devices like the 8 or newer. The "you can't use this anymore" is likely a startup API check on previously installed and no longer updatable versions.
I used an iPhone 6 way past its expiry date. It also became slower over time for no reason until it was essentially unusable.
Finally I bought a refurbished iPhone SE 2020 for 200 euros in 2022. It felt almost like going back to a brand new iPhone 6 in both performance and features.
I hope to keep it until the inevitable performance drop makes it annoyingly slow, then buy a refurbished iPhone SE 2022 and repeat.
After the SE 2022 becomes unusable there will be no good alternative left in the market for someone who only wants a small, simple phone without an abundance of stupid features, then I guess I’ll just stop using smartphones.
I agree - Touch ID is far superior to Face ID.
I have an older iPad with touch ID, and I simply turned it off because it felt like an anachronism in the experience.
It also shines first thing in the morning where your hair and eyes are so disheveled that even Siri didn't recognize you. Your thumb is probably still the same shape.
Unless your eyes point in markedly different directions, I'm having a hard time imagining how you'd manage that anyway.
This one. And like you said, it's much more reliable and faster than Face ID.
Really though, why do we keep updating OSes? I understand security updates, but why do these major yearly releases have to keep happening? What do they solve? Why can't we for once just settle for something in this cursed industry? Why can't we release finished products?
Thank You.
I use Android, and I agree that the Android ecosystem is worse about this, although neither option is acceptable. At this point I would pay more for a newly-manufactured model from 2010 than for the current model, if it could still support modern apps (even though it alludes me how the price keeps going up and not down).
This person should have upgraded his iPhone 8 as soon as Apple stopped offering security updates. He either already got hacked or would have eventually got hacked if he continued to use an insecure phone. Note that not all hacks are visible. For example, information stealers (malware which steals passwords and data) are designed to run silently in the background. They don't want to victim to know they have been hacked.
This person is doing the right thing: complaining loudly about corporate practice that should not be accepted by consumers.
What timeline would you recommend that is fair to both consumers and producers?
Software engineers are expensive.
Every action has a reaction.
Certainly there is a trend towards this in a lot of industries besides computers, but given how powerful and expensive these devices are now, the current upgrade cycles are crazy fast. I think consumers are souring on them a bit as well (both because of the price, and because the annual new models have really slowed down in the visible feature improvements they offer).
I know the economic incentives for the producers are aligned towards repeated purchases, and that's super tough to realign, but how long can the market and the environment support four-digit phone price tags that are upgraded every 1-3 years?
Instead, I think the correct way to approach this is on a case-by-case basis that takes into consideration the function of the computer, the needs/priorities/legal obligations of the users, and importantly their risk tolerance and risk appetite. A security policy that is not in some way modulated by risk is a policy that does not account for the real-world complexity of its systems. There is an increased risk to using out-of-date software, but without knowing this person's risk tolerance or priorities, we are not in a good place to advise a security policy.
Love it, it's perfect for me, I dread the day it stops working.
I've been forced to use various newer models over the years, and they just keep getting worse to me.
Companies have a need to make money, for better or worse, that’s how it is. Companies like Apple have to balance the economic viability of maintaining developers on software - for them to keep being updated - with keeping users happy.
Modern smartphones are not analogous to gas cookers. They’re about 100 times more complex, with third party, hardware, software, security and economic interplay.
Reducing it to “My fridge worked for 20 years why doesn’t my iPhone?” is just a stupid argument. Your phone is not a banana.
Given that our beige computing boxes used to be out of date within two years, I'd say six years for a phone is good going. Time to get a new iPhone.
I feel the same way the author does. With a new battery the phone works fairly well and I don’t need to upgrade.
With the exception of the SE models, all newer models are too big, have a notch, and Face ID. There’s just no compelling reason to upgrade other than being forced by the company.
I love the 15 and still keep the 8 around for music and other things. For me, Face ID is superior and I get confused when I look at my 8 and it doesn’t immediately unlock. And I was super worried about losing Touch ID.
The thing is, it is mostly not the apps which forced me to upgrade. I can't get newer ones, of course, but the old ones still work. (Except a supermarket app which practically deactivated its current app and asks me to update to a newer version which I can't install. There is no need, no new APIs except maybe developer convenience.)
But the real villain is the web.
Browsing simple websites becomes a chore, Safari becomes unresponsive for minutes at a time. Sometimes it feels worse web experience than the one an iPhone 1 with the checkerboard background.
I blame React for having to pay money just to stand still.
Personally I don’t mind their cadence. 3-4 year cycle is good for me and well within apples window.
I can understand OPs irritation though. Throwing working hardware out is not nice
That said, I am just glad Fairphones are usually relatively well covered by open source versions of android and other operating systems. Even if I may need another phone for banking apps and all that annoying stuff in 2030 or so, I can at least safely re-use it for other purposes. My "old" Android is now nothing more than an offline mp3 player, which is kinda sad.
Laws. As someone else suggested here, the EU mandates 5 years of support. Make it 10.
Too big of a barrier that cripples new entrants? Apply it only to megacorps, just like the DMA. Easy peasy.
It's trivially easy to solve this, but late stage capitalism's resulting regulatory capture prevents it.