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Comment by Tepix | Hacker News Reader

Until recently, the availability of software updates was a limiting factor, especially for midrange phones.

(Before that, phones were so slow and had so little RAM that software updates made them unusable eventually).

The mid-range Samsung A52 5G now comes with 7 years of security updates and you can get it with 8GB of RAM for less than 300€.

That's a pretty good deal! You just need to replace the battery every three years or so.

Having said that, i think that on-device AI will change things and it will accelerate the update cycle once again because bigger models are better and the models that fit on phones are still anemic these days. Where are the phones with 32GB of RAM? My body is ready!

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Have there been compelling use cases for on device LLMs where the value isn’t based on privacy benefits yet?

Lower latency, which can be useful for live translation or keyboard autocomplete

For me complete privacy is a must-have for an LLM that gets access to pretty much all my data (mails, calendar, location, browser history, chats, address book, health, app use, ...).

But there are other benefits such as the availability, even when your phone is offline, latency and no cost per use.

But you are already giving Google, Apple, and/or Microsoft all that data anyway.

I'm not. Are you?

How is Samsung? I had 1 bad experience with their phones, 1 bad experience with their tvs, a few bad experiences with their appliances, and a bad experience with their SSD.

I just assumed they are the Apple of Android, big marketing budget, expensive, but mid-tier.

I went from S20 to S21 to S24. Before that every Android phone I had was good but qc issues would pop up or some new phone would come out with much better features (eg camera quality is really important to me). Since I switched to Samsung have had 0 qc issues and every camera has been amazing. The only reason I upgrade is because it's free with my carrier so why not? Staying with Samsung if/until it changes.

Well, if you didn't have a $800 phone included in your contract, chances are you contract would be much cheaper. That's why not.

I haven't bought this phone myself but i got one for a family member. So far, no complaints.

You just need to replace the battery every three years or so.

If you used it as a PC, presumably in a dock attached to a monitor, keyboard, etc, then it's be plugged in most of the time and battery wouldn't get much use.

Provided you limit the charge level to something like 80% (ideally even 60%). Keeping these batteries at 100% constantly also leads to degradation, even if you don't really 'use' them.

Keeping them at 100% is prone to explosion, actually. When we built a farm at the company I worked at, the more experienced guys advised on specific models that survive all-time on cable.

They're usually designed to handle that, presumably by not actually staying at 100%.

My comment was about using a phone just as a phone :-)

Aghast! Oh, the humanity! Heathen, be gone from these parts!

There are phones with 24gb of ram already available!

Yes, it's a start!

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