Hacker News Reader

Comment by raspasov | Hacker News Reader

"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia."

This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense.

I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.

I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.

View on HN

I owned a Nokia in 2003. The battery lasted a week and they were virtually indestructible. The phone never crashed or reset, the keys were so reliable and well placed that I could text without looking at the screen. The phone did not get slower with age. None of these things can be said about my current smart phone. Granted it does a lot more, but the quality of the things it does do is much worse.

I bought my dad a Nokia phone in 2008. A dumb phone, with just texting and calling features. It continues to work to this day, so, 17 years (the markings on the buttons are fully erased now, other than that it works). It outlived him. I don't know how they managed to build stuff like that. I would expect some electronic part to fail sometime along the way.

Well, I can tell you how: rigorous testing.

I worked for Nokia (briefly, just before Eloppification) and I remember being told that when the iPhone launched everyone laughed because there was no way that the battery could last more than a day, there was no app store back then, no flash, no high-speed data (2G) and it failed every single one of the internal tests that Nokia had.

Yet, people didn’t care, obviously - and the iPhone is the model for nearly all phones today.

I get bent out of shape about this, the same way I get bent out of shape about the death of small phones and modular laptops; but people vote with their wallets and if the market was large enough for both to exist then there would be better options; yet it seems like there’s not.

People seem to care much more about capacitive touch screens, large displays, hungry CPUs, incredible post-processing of cameras (and great camera sensors) than they do about being drop proof, having stable software or battery life.

Features > Stability ; to most people. (and, how do you put stability on a spec sheet for tech youtubers to care about or savvy consumers trying to buy the best “value” they can; build quality doesn’t fit onto a spec sheet).

> People seem to care much more about...

One cannot conclude this from what the market does. Single individuals might want wildly different things than what the combined economy serves them.

I was there, too. Not at Nokia, but in the ecosystem of these companies.

People wanted iPhone over Nokia, not due to its specs but due to its usability and presentation.

Let's be honest, both Symbian and Maemo/Meego were abject messes in both of these categories.

They were really trying with MeeGo, we used to joke that we had the most expensive clock app in the world because it had been remade so many times. People forget that R&D can be super expensive. Apple definitely cooked there.

Symbian though, I mean, considering the hardware constraints was crazy!

The smartphone variant of Symbian needed 2MiB of Memory and supported Qt... madness.

We need a Symbian/Nokia movie to accompany the "Blackberry" movie, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXL_HDzBQsM

  Mike, are you familiar with the saying, "Perfect is the enemy of Good"?

  Well, "good enough" is the enemy of humanity.

Meego’s N9 had in some areas better usability than the iPhone and was overall competitive.

Tap to wake, slide to homescreen, the control center were introduced by the N9.

having stable software - yeah that wasn't my experience. I used early and late Series 40 phones and they had plenty of problems. Mostly minor but not clearly getting better. And then it got worse. My N97 mini was a good phone with pretty terrible software. It was bad. And then it didn't matter anymore.

I'm not excited about the current duopoly, but a decent mid-range phone from either is better now that in was five years ago.

I once supported an expensive application for Symbian OS and the customers had plenty of problems with Nokia smartphones. Not dumb phones, but smartphones. HW keyboards failed constantly, wi-fi quality fluctuated randomly from piece to piece, displays developed weird errors, loudspeakers developed tin sound etc.

Oh, and my favorite, problems with microUSB charging ports were eternal.

On the battery front that really is just a function of your use. I've got a smart phone I use purely for work, which in reality means sending a handful of messages in a day. That battery lasts 5 days or so.

Also my first phone, a "bomb proof" Nokia died when it fell out of my pocket into a shallow pond. Most modern phones would survive that no problem!

In 2003 I almost never touched my phone, because you couldn’t do much on that tiny display other than actually calling people.

Maybe that’s the reason the battery lasted a week.

> virtually indestructible

Owned a Nokia in 2003 as well and it was destructed by some water. It had no Nokia Care and my grandma refused to buy me a new one.

> text without looking at the screen

I do it all the time by dictating.

Try doing that in class. I could message my friends without a teacher spotting it.

It’s 2025, kids just pull out their phone now

I owned a 3310. I remember going into the mountains for a week and didn’t even charge the phone beforehand, because the battery would last anyway. Back then I used to climb, and I remember how it fell out of my pocket from around 30m (100 feet). When I got down, I just picked it up from the ground and put the back panel back on. The phone worked perfectly for at years after that.

If you limit your smartphone usage to the capabilities of a 2003 Nokia (turn off data and wifi, only use calls and SMS) the battery will last 2 weeks and never crash or reset. Before I got a phone with dual SIM capability I used to bring an old spare phone to keep my home SIM in with data off only to be able to not miss calls/SMS. They’d typically last the whole trip without charging when they’re not keeping connections alive for email, push etc.

Before I got a smartphone I used a j2me IRC client to keep connected with my friends, and I had to carry 3 batteries to swap throughout the day for it to last, the battery life was horrible if you actually did anything on it.

I have a 1960s western electric phone on my desk. Between calls it could be used to smash your Nokia into powder.

Does it matter? No. Those phones were built to purpose for their time. Sonim made/makes an Android phone that is approximately as durable as a Motorola radio for police. I used one for a bit, the speakerphone worked submerged, and it fell off a two story building when on a video call.

But it turns out nobody really wants that. When the technology for smartphone chips and displays matures, my guess is, like the tank Nokia, the iPhone Kevlar Edition will be the Nokia of 2035.

My Nokia in 2003 didn't last a week. As a teenager I was on AIM on that thing constantly. The battery lasted maybe a day or two when I was actually using it a good bit.

The battery lasted a week when a week's worth of usage was a dozen messages and an hour of call time with the rest the phone is locked and dark.

Phones of the past also died when exposed to a little bit of water. Back then it was common to hear someone say their phone died because of water damage but it has been years since I‘ve heard that about a smartphone.

Smartphones are pretty durable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2xGzHjYCcY

Note to mention they're waterproof.

my nothing phone (1) full of very ugly scratches (and one especially ugly testament on a corner to me dropping it one too many time) was stolen a few months ago while I was in a house of worship (I was introducing my favorite girlfriend to the forbidden pleasure of dipping fries into mcfreeze ice cream with caramel - and while in this trance state...)

anyway, the new Nothing phone (3a) is amazing batterywise!

Is this written by AI or why does this make no sense to me?

it's not AI (at least I am not aware, but the simulation argument is pretty convincing!)

Memory loss and survivor bias.

There was mountains of tacky, throwaway crap produced in the 80s. Guess what, we've thrown it all away. Quality lasts.

And don't even get me started on the food. A lot of tin cans. Desserts that you reconstituted from powder in a packet. The list goes on.

Food is way better now than it was in the 90s. Every supermarket has refrigerated ready meals which are actually pretty healthy. Here in the UK, the quality of food in cafes (at least in the major cities) is far better than it was when I was a kid.

This. Every once in a while I end up somewhere that the revolution in food has somehow bypassed, and what would have been acceptable standard in the 90s is just _bad_ now.

Same. We had that phase were every manufacturer build their own tiny OS around 2007/2008. I had an LG KS360 and a Sony W200i. The LG would crash regularly. The W200i would work fine, but of course had all the proprietary Sony connectors. The W350i on the other hand was a catastrophic phone, that I had replaced twice, as evident in my Amazon account.

It feels like when people watch the video of a 70s car crashes into a modern car and leaves in one piece.

"Wow, old car was much more solid! The modern car got destroyed!"

Until you realize that the old car utilizes the driver seat as the crumple zone.

2003 was Symbian time. The OS was built around cell network reliability and low power. The N900 was the promising side-show getting few resources and attention.

Compared to the iPhone or any modern phone, it did a lot more with a lot less battery. The networking on my iPhones is not great, but it’s hard to compare.

In the end modern smartphones couldn’t win at that game, but the game has changed. Lately, through addiction and almost omnipresent surveillance for the worst.

In that sense, the smartphones of old with some multimedia and internet would be a welcome change.

people are addicted to features though

that's why these pure/fair/libre phones were failing to reach any market share and even sustainability.

but things are slowly getting better, projects underway to get smoother better performance on every platform, taking better care of the battery (limit charge to some percentage), use more efficient stack - from network to graphics, Bluetooth and WiFi and of course all the other radios.

...

sure, most of this is unfortunately unnoticeable compared to the billions of people glued to the absolutely TikTokified Internet :/

(well, hopefully we'll get through this phase of developing social immune system for a new medium faster than we did after the printing press, after the radio, and after TV)

> I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.

Until you need to replace the battery.

Battery replacement has been intentionally made not just a pain, but actually dangerous, by using excessive amounts of adhesive to hold in batteries that may spontaneously combust if physically damaged while trying to remove them.

Replaced a battery in a Nintendo Switch not too long ago, and what an absolute fucking pain that was to get the old battery out, IPA, dental floss (to try and get under the battery and cut through the glue), and still needed a worrying amount of levering out.

(It's not as if these batteries have any significant space in which to move around, why do they need adhesive at all, and not just some foam/rubber pads to hold them in place?)

Disagree.

You want them rigidly held in place as *any* flex in their mounting will add up to fatigue failures over enough time. Realistically, that means glue or a screw-down anchor that exerts tension--and if you have such an anchor you need to beef up the substrate also to avoid it deforming the case over time. Glue is thinner and lighter, thus it wins in the market. Likewise, cases are glued because providing waterproofing via glue is thinner and more reliable than providing it by gaskets and screw-down anchors.

Simple observation: I have a chest strap heart rate monitor, uses a coin battery and is rated for swimming. What's the biggest failure mode? Imperfect seal of the gasket against the stuff around it permitting water intrusion. (There is a redesign that is supposed to be more reliable but since mine never gets submerged it's still working despite once I found the gasket was clearly not properly seated.)

The gap between 2025 and 2009 is massive for smartphones but I'd say it gets drastically smaller around the midpoint.

If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging port ever breaks)

This author doesn't really understand quality and starts out by defining it purelt in subjective terms. Then makes the mistake in the rest of the article by following this subjective reasoning by talking about perceptions of quality as a stand in for actual quality.

Go read Zen anf the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a decent, if not weird, introduction to thinking about quality. Quality is both subjective and objective and therein lies the rub. This author does not understand that.

I read the “Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” many years ago. What I remember and took away from it is a lot about mental health and about being different and trying or not trying to fit in.

The quality idea in the book sadly never clicked. To my defense I have to say I was young and had no philosophical background whatsoever, but maybe I am ready now.

I should really re-read the book but maybe you could summarize your take away about quality from the book.

Agree, the quality part of the book is hard to grasp. I get that some written works are good and some are bad, that it is hard to qualify why yet there is a general consensus around it but I haven't been able to distill any deeper meaning than that.

However, the discussions regarding "gumption" and separating abstractions from reality when needed (i.e. "the carburetor set screw") as well as several other great lessons from the book have really helped me fine-tune my thinking. I think reading this a few times in your 20s is a fantastic time investment.

I'm surprised. What is the objective aspect of quality? Can you have quality without a human-intended purpose?

It’s worth noting that the author of Zen and the Art literally went crazy in pursuit of this.

I don’t mean this to say “you have asked a bad question”, but rather to say, “you have asked so large a question that a man once went insane in trying to answer it.”

I asked the question because i thought it was good manners to do so. Actually I'm strongly convinced that quality describes how a thing fits the preconceptions about that thing.

As testable example, I'm largely unable to tell the quality of beer as i never enjoyed any of it, and thus could not have developed a preconception of how a good beer is supposed to taste.

Trappist quad ales feature a high alcohol content, which makes them sweet but somehow not cloyingly so. Robust Belgian yeasts generate a surprising amount of effervescence, which keeps things light despite the heavy doses of malted barley, and produce esters that generate flavors of banana bread and dark stone fruits that compliment latent notes of burnt sugars and caramel.

That’s a pretty standard description of some of the best ales on the planet (produced by monks in Belgium), if anyone’s curious.

That description has no comparisons and no baseline definition of beer quality. Why do those things make them better than other ales, especially when most of that is subjective? For some people, high alcohol content, sweetness, effervescence, and heavy doses of malted barley are bad things when it comes to beers. All beers have flavor notes, though flavor notes are notoriously ephemeral and suggestible.

I’m familiar with Belgian Ales, I used to like Chimay, and have sampled many others (though not Westvleteren yet). These days I prefer something less strong. The story about Trappist monks is intriguing, but what does it actually mean? Obviously Chimay and several other Belgian Trappist ales are enormous commercial productions that ship beer globally. They are just beer factories doing a huge volume of beer business. The narrative about monks is intended to give people the perception of quality, but it doesn’t actually demonstrate anything, it’s just a narrative.

>Pirsig had a mental breakdown and spent time in and out of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions

>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published in 1974.

I'm afraid you're romanticizing the relationship between Pirsig's books and his life. That someone is losing touch with reality doesn't warrant anyone to deconstruct their biography at will and reconstruct it to suit their own narrative.

While it may be true that Pirsig's mental breakdown had nothing to do with what went into the book, the facts you have presented here do not particularly support that conclusion.

If his mental breakdowns had been, say, in 1976 and 1978, that would have supported it much better. But someone working on the philosophical underpinnings of a book for over a decade before the book is published is not at all unreasonable.

My primary memory of the book is that the author specifically ties together the quest for meaning and the loss of mental health, even within the book itself.

That's why it's a bad idea to read too much into the myth of objective meaning. No meaning - no problem.

How about empirical instead of objective? I think objective vs subjective can be a false dichotomy in terms of quality.

For example, when my phone connects to WiFi as soon as I get home every time, correctly, for the last many years, that's very strong empirical evidence of quality.

I disagree that objective vs subjective is a false dichotomy with regards to quality. Not because I believe it is false, mind you, but because I don't believe they are a dichotomy; they are actually two essential axes when perceiving and discussing quality. And each of those two axes are measured empirically and valued ethically and aesthetically.

The subjective axis of quality concerns values. What do you value the most in a mobile phone? Is it battery life? Is it photo quality? Is it durability? Is it features? Is it security? Is it screen size? Is it repairability? Is it social approval? Is it free software support? Is it less effort due to habit?

The objective axis of each of those values (and their subvalues) can be empirically measured. Some of them trivially, such as screen size or battery life. Some are harder to measure but still quite easily, such as features, photo quality, or repairabilty. Others may end up in a quagmire of subvalues, some of them subconscious, but could ultimately be measured empirically with great effort (social approval, security, habit...)

What often happens is that, when debating quality, people make the mistake of using empirical arguments about objective characteristics without realising that they are disagreeing on their ultimate subjective preferences. Subjective values can of course be debated, sometimes successfully. However, I am never going to convince an average middle-class American teenager to prefer a Fairphone over an iPhone empirically proving its repairability and support for FOSS Android alternatives, and they are never going to convince me to prefer an iPhone because it's cooler and it takes awesome photos.

Going back to the main topic of the article, I believe that ultimately the problem is that the market has over-fitted and heavily optimised for specific axes of subjective preference, due to their alignment with profitability and ease of development, together with an inefficient feedback loop, to the detriment of large numbers of consumers such as myself who value less intrinsically profitable characteristics.

According to the Kano model what is perceived as quality changes over time for a product category.

Ten years ago your phone reliably connecting to WiFi was a "Delighter" over the course of time it turned over a "Want" into a "Must Have".

I'd say empirical evidence of quality is strongest in the "Want" phase but if something is considered a given and ubiquitously fulfilled, can it still function as a strong empirical indicator of quality?

'Correctly' being dropping IP bound VPNs so they can be reestabilished on the cheaper network, or transfring with no distruption even if it incurres cost?

Yes, there is a number of models for quality. If you read: "What Does Product Quality Really Mean?" by David A. Garvin, you'll find that intended purpose is only one of a number of quality metrics you could concern yourself with.

In the less obvious cases quality can be something you can't really explain, but you'll recognize it. There's also the option of viewing it from the manufacturers view, and forgo the user-centric view altogether. In that case we view the quality as "How well do we make the product", according to standard and specifications. So you could have a product that's absolute trash, but it follows specs precisely and you have zero manufacturing defects.

When we talk nokia we mean 3310 ... and that bastard was indestructible, the battery lasted forever and you had snake and a phone book.

>Nokia N900

There is a fetishistic cult surrounding the N900.

Mainly comprised of people who were too young or broke to own one.

I am an old man who owned an N900.

Simply and concisely: the N900 was a half-baked, poorly thought out, frustrating piece of "exercise in box-ticking" junk.

I had an N9 once and it was certainly much better than the Android I replaced it with years later.

My Palm Treo 700W was straight garbage. Battery lasted hours, terrible OS, Windows Mobile...

> I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.

Having owned both, no. The N900 was programmable, none of the current crop of phones are.

Features are not the same thing as quality.

Not actually owning your phone is part of quality.

This is missing the point of the post.

New iPhones and Android phones eventually have to be replaced because the software is no longer supported. Flip phones continue to be supported, if we would just use them to call people, which would use up less of our lifespan than smartphones, playing games and using social media. Note: I personally wouldn’t suggest flip phones for everyone, because smartphones are expected for some types of MFA now.

The post also says that a lot more clothing is produced and sold that is cheap quality, resulting in more waste. Fast-fashion is also popular, which results in more low-quality material being thrown away than the previous slower release of new styles.

imo the way to help would be to:

- Save enough money to buy higher quality used appliances, clothing, furniture, etc. and stop funding the companies that do this.

- Don’t use social media or websites/apps that promote (through ads or just photos/video) purchase and consumption of low quality goods. Buy used products instead.

I think there’s an opportunity here for everyone to get involved. You can still purchase high quality products, because the point is to increase product quality for future generations.

When compared on exact same use cases, smartphones don't have to be replaced either if they're used to just call people and receive messages. If it's just for calls, why would software support matter? People keep comparing smartphones to dumbphones, while not actually comparing them on that limited set of dumbphone functionality. Does that not seem silly, if not just fallacious?

Your are now carrying around a mobile, personal telescreen called a “smart”phone. The telescreen was also the height of technology.

I googled the author's name and from a cursory look at his linkedin he was a toddler in 2003. It’s therefore reasonable to conclude that he has no idea how a phone from 2003 worked. I mean, he could’ve used one for a bit, but definitely not as a daily driver.

If he wasn’t born yet in 2003 then yeah.

I was born in 1980’s and for me what we have currently feels exactly like I live in the future.

Personal computers from 2003 sucked and now I have much more reliable and powerful personal computers in my pocket - as much as I have fond memories of Windows XP I also remember offhand serial key because I was reinstalling it loads of times for friends family and myself. Nowadays I don’t remember having to reinstall an operating system for at least last 10 years or more.

As late as 2011 Nokias like the N8 or N9 were competitive with the iPhones of that time i.e. the iPhone 4. That iPhone is the famous “holding it wrong” phone.

Then Nokia admitted defeat and switched to Windows which failed badly. Symbian was too hard and expensive to maintain and their Linux OS strategy was to redo the OS three times instead of incrementally developing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com