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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

> The fact that a device can be perfectly usable for 5+ years is pretty good compared to most other things I find myself buying and replacing in less time.

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.

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I don’t think this is the correct comparison.

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.

I still have an O.G. iPad 1 stuck on iOS 5.1. It’s essentially useless. The App Store is a ghost town. No software even exists that runs on it anymore, and the App Store doesn’t even let you download the last working version of third party apps. It’s just totally useless.

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…

I think you’re probably buying higher quality items, yes? Because there’s no way a $50-100 coffee machine or printer is lasting a decade.

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.

> Because there’s no way a $50-100 coffee machine or printer is lasting a decade.

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

Your experience is different than mine, then. At least 50% of the cheap electronic devices I've purchased end up breaking in a year or two.

I'm using the same $9 (yes, 9) drip coffee machine to make my daily coffee for more than 10 years currently. It has an on/off switch and no 'smarts'. It works fine, why should I change it? It's plugged into a smart outlet that I use to make sure it's turned off after an hour. That plug is getting close to 10 years old as well.

You must not have hard water. We get a >$20 mr. coffee every year or so. They'd likely last longer if we cleaned them more often because if you wait too long, it doesn't seem to help.

> every year or so

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.

Yeah, it's more about the fact that my wife doesn't like running vinegar through because she swears you can still taste it later. A year's worth of the liquid coffee pot descaler costs as much as a new pot. Looking on amazon, it does look like you can get little powder packets affordably though, so I might look into that.

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.

The idea that an iPhone (any computer, really) is a high end item is pretty ridiculous.

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.

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