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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

My average time on a smartphone is now at 4 years, feels like it's going to 5 pretty soon. [Last upgrade was for USB-C. Next upgrade will be for on-device LLM. It's wild how approximately 0% of what Apple has done outside of the USB-C connector has mattered to me in the last 10+ years - low-light photography is probably the only other thing that comes to mind. ]

I've had two battery replacements since 2015. One of them was required, the other was mostly optional (battery had dropped to 90% on my iPhone - which was probably sufficient).

USB-C - that was an awesome requirement that it was unclear whether Apple was ever going to do.

User Replaceable Battery? Zero desire, particularly if it reduces water resistance on the device. Dozens of things I've wanted from a phone - being able to replace the battery has never even entered my mind as something I wanted.

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Your cycle is 4 years, and you’ve had two phone batteries replaced in 11 years? That’s 2/2.75 phones.

Ok, one was optional, and let’s round up to 3. So 1/3 of your phones. Kinda sounds like you would benefit from replaceable batteries.

Regardless, those 4-5 year old phones likely went to ewaste immediately or soon after you were done with them because the cost of replacing the battery was less than their resale value after 4-5 years.

That’s a pattern our planet literally can’t handle. Wars over digging up minerals using slave labour then putting them in phones for 3-5 years just to send them to have children get chemical burns stripping the metals out of them.

My last computer lasted me 11 years, with two battery replacements along the way. My phone should do the same, just as easily.

What really annoys me is Apple EOLed the iPhone 8 and then came out with a virtually identical SE version. Of course they soon discontinued the SE too…

Maybe they updated the CPU slightly but screen and camera were identical.

I would have kept my iPhone 8 if they kept updating the software. Yet somehow they can manage update the SE software despite looking the same as the iPhone 8…

I know there is a cost and overhead toward supporting old platforms. But for the premium on these devices and the level of waste generated, manufacturers can still do better…

I’d prefer no new features and only security updates… perhaps I’m weird.

Not weird. The last few os updates have made my phone laggy and slow. I want security updates, i don’t want new features that kill my battery life and usability.

The SE got a 2 Generation newer CPU. The iPhone 8 lost software support the same day all other devices with an A11 lost it.

> Yet somehow they can manage update the SE software despite looking the same as the iPhone 8...

Are you seriuos? What does the look of a phone have to do with how long it is supported?

Look doesn’t matter but they seem to be supporting exactly the same feature set as before.

They aren’t trying to support all the flashy stuff done on newer models… Hence, it seems like they could have easily made it work on the older models but chose higher profits instead.

The iPhone SE (2020) cpu is like twice as fast as the iPhone 8 cpu, lol.

Note that your 2 best features were usb-c and replacement batteries. Both were government mandated against unethical behavior of Apple.

That's what governments are for.

Apple had been switching their various iOS devices to USB-C for several years before the EU decided to mandate it, so I don't know how you can assert that them switching the iPhone to USB-C was because they were forced to. It looks more like the EU just had lucky timing and told them to do something they were already doing.

Laptops, the ipads. Phones and airpods came after the eu law. Debatable, but it seems to me like they consider the ipad in the same class as a laptop, so it got grouped with those. Otherwise why did it take 5 years between the first ipad with usb-c and the first iphone?

The iPhone had by far the biggest ecosystem of Lightning accessories, the biggest base of users with Lightning cords. It was a foregone conclusion that a bunch of people were going to be angry about losing their Lightning accessories and having to buy new cords, and another bunch of people were going to be happy to switch their last non-USB-C device over. Apple needed to find the crossover point where the latter would outnumber the former.

I am curious where you got this impression?

Apple fought it the whole way, commissioned studies to show it was a bad idea, etc etc. This after they had a decade prior been subject to the same thing with micro USB and skirted that agreement by shipping more unnecessary cables.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/02/02/what-the-eu-manda...

The sensible thing for them to do is fight regulation, even if their underlying strategy is going towards a compatible goal. They do not want to set a precedent that they can be bullied into changing their product roadmap based on the whims of government.

> subject to the same thing with micro USB

And thank goodness for that! Micro USB is a disaster, they did their customers a favor. When I was still rocking Android phones back then, I kept a box of Micro USB cables on hand because I was having to toss them so often.

Getting deep into apologetics here.

No disagreement on micro USB, it was a terrible standard.

I very much miss the ability to never use my phone on a charging cable. Just swap the battery on an external charger and go. 5 seconds to charge to full. It was freeing and simple

I always wanted an internal battery of like 1 minute, so I could hot swap batteries. Then the battery capacity would be largely irrelevant. What would be cool is to have a large case that could charge the battery multiple times like with ear buds. The magnetic wireless charging blocks that just stick on the back of the phone are pretty fair compromise though.

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