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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

The thing that really annoys me is that batteries in most phones are indeed replaceable, but so many people just trash their phone when the battery life gets bad. Sure, many/most of these phones don't have a user replaceable battery, but even for high-end phones you can get the battery replaced for under $100 (and that's on the high end; for many you can get it done for half that).

I don't know if this is an education problem or what. Maybe manufacturers make it less obvious that you can get batteries replaced, because doing so would hurt sales of new phones. I dunno.

Sure, in an ideal world standardized batteries would be available off the shelf, and regular people could replace theirs with standard or even no tools. But honestly, I don't think the world we live in is that terrible when it comes to this.

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I think a lot of people want a new device and use the battery getting weak as an excuse to justify the expense

And if batteries were trivially replaceable, I'm sure they'd come up with a different excuse: not enough storage space, "it's getting slow", this year's model has a much nicer camera, blah blah blah blah.

It's not that I'm not sympathetic toward wanting the new shiny. I've been there and done that and generated my share of e-waste. But I've managed to (mostly!) get off that treadmill. I only got a new phone last year because my old one stopped getting security updates. The new one will (in theory) be supported for 7 years, so, barring loss or catastrophic breakage, I should be good until 2031.

I think this is changing simply because the rate of change for phones has slowed down like it did for computers. Just like a 2014 computer is a lot closer to a 2024 computer than a 2004 computer was to a 2014 computer in 2014, a five-year-old phone is a lot less outdated than five years ago.

> not enough storage space, "it's getting slow",

Surely wrinting better software will help. /s

After happily replacing the battery in a ten year old phone, six months later it was obsolete due to the 3G network switch off; the device was no longer capable of one of it's primary functions; making and receiving phone calls.

I could have had someone replace the battery in my Moto G%+ a couple of years ago. But it would have cost at least 800 NOK (about 80 USD). Instead I bought a Moto G30 for 1 200 NOK (about 120 USD) which has a better camera, faster processor, and more storage space.

Mobile phones haven't yet reached the point of diminishing returns on power, cameras, etc., so it doesn't yet make economical sense for an individual to keep the old devices working. I have kept the Moto G5+ and I use it as an internet radio and to listen to podcasts so it isn't a complete waste. Unfortunately the battery is now in such a poor state that I have to keep it on a timer to cut off charging frequently to avoid overheating.

Android could of course make batteries last longer by giving the user control over the charging regime.

I am going to say something that I haven't found anywhere but it has been my experience with every single battery replacement I ir somewhat close had.

The new battery, even if it's Samsung original, it isn't as good as new, it is better than the old one, but not anywhere close as first day phone.

Why? No idea. I imagine that although the battery is new it was built circa when the model was in production and somehow that has affected its capacity.

So you get a phone, you pay 60/80 euros, and you get maybe, two hours more of battery when a new phone would give you 6 or 7.

For a 4-5 year phone "under $100" still might be more than the phone is worth.

And then there is the other problem that an old enough phone is no longer getting software updates, including security updates either.

Yes, it is still probably less than buying a new phone but you don't know how long it will be before another component dies. If replacing the battery gives you another 4-5 years it might be worth it, but if something else is going to break in a couple months, probably not.

It seems possible to document issues and [partially] brick it until a security update is purchased.

Then we could begin forcing manufacturers to sell security updates regardless of the age of the device.

Lots of questions and puzzles here that would be interesting to figure out.

>Then we could begin forcing manufacturers to sell security updates regardless of the age of the device.

Who's going to pay for those updates? It's hard for the economics to work out. It makes sense for handset makers to pour engineering resources into developing and maintaining operating systems when there's millions of customers. How are you going to scrape together enough money when there's only a handful of customers?

I thought you had a point but then I remembered how funny it is. If you are dealing with sensitive customer data you shouldn't get to skip security.

It is actually cheap and easy if we change the question: Should you be allowed to run a closed source proprietary platform with insufficient security? After all, if you open it up and let people do what they want it becomes their responsibility.

Bricking the device at a predetermined date isn't very elegant but it would work. Maybe the user should have the option to return it (working or not) and get some money back.

It doesn't have to be that expensive to continue supporting old devices. If all your devices use the same software, and new versions don't add new hardware requirements it wouldn't be that hard to continue supporting old hardware.

But in the current ecosystem every device has its own medley of custom firmware and software that gets abandoned when the maker stops selling that version, and the makers are incentivized to stop updates to drive customers to buy new devices.

I think this is indeed a problem of awareness - and I'm sure you're right that companies wouldn't go out of their way to let users know they can do so - but also one of trustworthiness: I think a lot of people don't trust third-party repair shops because they feel it's sketchy or unsafe in some way. If phone manufacturers were like, "Here's a list of our trusted third-party repair shops and the parts they can fix" I imagine a lot more people would get their stuff repaired.

Yeah, that's surely part of that. There are authorized service centers in major cities, but that's not very accessible for a lot of people. When I got my battery replaced, it meant 2 trips to a 100 km distant city (no same day replacement) which also meant a day without my phone. I could have opted for an unauthorized repair shop, but again there's the problem with trust, these often seem quite sketchy.

Unfortunately, after a few years lack of security updates will also force plenty of users to upgrade.

Hopefully not trashed. There's always the second hand market.

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