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Comment by exDM69 | Hacker News Reader

I work as a software engineer for a chip manufacturer. The fab (silicon manufacturing company) gives only a 5 year guarantee for the smartphone/tablet chips (with presumably some allowance).

As years go by, the chip starts slowly degrading and some of the high performance chips start to get higher temperatures, worse power consumption, needs higher voltages, etc. The power management software counters this by keeping the clocks lower and the voltages higher, causing performance degradation over time to avoid catastrophic failure.

When the same chips are used in products with higher reliability requirements, they are clocked down and more conservative power management software is utilized.

disclaimer: not my area of expertise, I work on something completely different than power management.

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> The fab (silicon manufacturing company) gives only a 5 year guarantee for the smartphone/tablet chips (with presumably some allowance).

I'm not sure that bodes well for smart watches selling at 4+ figures.

To be fair, if you don't use the latest and greatest manufacturing processes - which you don't really need to do in smart watches - chips can be very robust and long-lasting. Plus, given the battery requirements, you don't really want to use high-performance components in watches anyway, Apple's ridiculous battery life notwithstanding.

As for the whole market segment of "this watch will pass through generations", I guess the honest thing to say is that we just don't have that kind of experience with integrated circuits yet... besides, does this type of traditional watch never need repairs? They must have failures as well.

It's different for simple BT notification buzzers, but "maximalist" smartwatches like the Apple Watch surely call out for the latest and greatest semiconductor processes. They face harsh trade-offs between capability, size and battery life, harsh enough to help make them still marginal as mainstream consumer products, and those dilemmas would be significantly eased if performance-per-watt and size were improved. They're also high-margin products so manufacturing at fancy fabs should be affordable.

> I'm not sure that bodes well for smart watches selling at 4+ figures.

I'm pretty sure the smart watch makers don't expect them to last for too many years, definitely not decades. After all, they want to be selling you a smart-er watch in just a few years.

This consumerism drives the whole thing, if your new watch was to last decades it would be designed in a whole different manner. And it's not only the chips, you won't be able to get a compatible display, battery, PCB or case or anything to replace a broken/worn out one in just a few years.

This sad state of consumerism is why I do woodworking to balance my mind. The pinewood dovetail box I built last week will still be there when I'm dead.

It'll be horribly obsolete in five years. It would cease to be a status symbol, like trying to impress someone by being able to get Outlook on your Blackberry. The purchasers at 4+ figures generally know this.

Now I understand why my iPhone gets slower after a year!

Honestly I'm pretty sure your iPhone slows down after a year because they build the software that way on purpose so as to incentivize you to buy a new one.

More likely they write software with the new hardware in mind but not wanting to fragment the market too much they offer the newer software to people with the older hardware and along with that comes some performance issues.

Which is what he said.. they thought this over.

I am also pretty sure that Apple is intentionally adding more and more features to iOS to make it Do More Stuff so that they can sell more iPhones.

iPhone comes with serious memory handicap. CPUs are running just fine since iPhone 4. That's been Apple's sales pattern for decades.

That said, it would really interesting to see just how much the CPU actually degrades over time. I guess it's around few percent.

the phone slowdowns are more likely due to flash storage filling up which makes new writes excruciatingly slow.

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