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Comment by null_ptr | Hacker News Reader

> will receive updates for at least 2 years

I had my phone for over 3 years now and aside from some tiny screen scratches everything is great. Why can't any manufacturers really stand behind their products and support them for something like 5 years?

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Greed.

Even google with all the money and more interest in acquiring users joined the greed bandwagon by removing Sd card slots and doing things in software to ensure device obsolency ever couple years.

Google's removal of SD card has nothing to do with making device useless ever few years. It has everything to do with their cloud strategy. Google wants everything in the cloud. If your information is in the cloud, they can possible get access to it to better understand you so they can target more relevant ads. If your information is on the cloud, you will also have to spend more time online. That's why google devices, phones, tablet, chromebooks don't have removeable storage.

I would never buy a new phone unless it has an SD slot or perhaps 64GB of storage. How useful is the cloud when you're literally above a cloud in a plane? That's mostly when I use my phone for music playback.

You can use Google Music. It will cache content while on wifi for playback when you have no connectivity. This is done somewhat intelligently and you can also explicitly request content be downloaded.

with a ttl to delete it if you dont connect soon

yeah, because everyone can install all those new games in ...cue music... the cloud.

if a side effect of their greed for your data or not, you cant deny you will need an upgrade every year or so to keep up with app sizes.

heck i cant install firefox on the first three nexus had i not hacked the kernel to allow apps on sd.

I haven't seen this mentioned, but evidently the reason there is no Micro SD slot is to prevent a split in memory options and the confusion that comes with it.

See: http://www.androidcentral.com/why-nexus-devices-have-no-sd-c...

Though, I suppose they could develop some sort of solution that manages the split for the user so you can expand the memory and never worry about what it saved where...

All that said, I definitely prefer large internal memory over having an expandable memory slot... If I'm forced to make the choice.

even phones without sd card still have to have the Sdcard dir nowadays. there is no going back.

Moore's law. You can get a twice as powerful device in two years time. Also, who knows what the smartphone world will look like in two years time.

Reverse the question: Why don't manufacturer only support it for 6 months, or until the next phone comes out? What is preventing that from doing that?

iPhone 4 is still getting updates after nearly 4 years.

True, but each of those updates generally makes the phone less usable from a performance perspective. My iPhone 4 is barely usable with the latest iOS update.

iOS7 in particular was a troublesome upgrade for me. It had issues with my 4's (and my wife's 4S) proximity detector. I would end up face dialing in the middle of a call. And that's just one of many annoyances that came with upgrading to iOS7. I would have been happier if Apple cut off updates after two years.

Compare that experience to my Moto G (that replaced my 4), and each of the updates I've gotten (albeit in a short period of time) have had real performance improvements, unlike the mostly cosmetic animation "speed improvements" that came with the last iOS 7 update for iPhone 4.

My wife had the opposite experience with her 4. iOS 7 was quite a bit faster, particularly with regard to the camera startup.

For the iPhone 5, iOS5 camera startup was pretty good. IOS6 was really bad. IOS7 was a bit better than 6 but compared to 5, still quite bad.

Cost

I wonder how much of an effect "I guess I might as well get a new phone" has on things?

Especially given most fixes require a significant portion of the cost of the phone to perform.

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