My old phones are often usable, which is why I only upgrade every three years or so. However, when I do upgrade after waiting so long, it's like I've traveled through time with the improvements.

It seems that most people want more than just usable. They may not want to pay more for a device up front, knowing they will be missing out on the latest technology down the road.

They do not need to pay more. The equation that repairable means more expensive for the customer is propaganda. It assumes that every cent companies save by making devices worse lowers the price. That's trickle down economics and has never been true.

People can still buy new stuff earlier if they want. But their old stuff can be reused by those that do not need, want or can afford the new devices. There are many categories of devices where that's a good option for many, not only phones. Besides, it's always good to have the option to repair that thing you have when it breaks even if initially you did not think you would need that. You might have grown to like it.

I've had an iPhone since 2009 and I'm definitely familiar with the "time traveling" effect of upgrading phones, but I think it has diminished a lot as the technology has matured.

I've been using a 6S since 2015 (this thread caught my interest because it's now somewhat of a Ship of Theseus as I've replaced so many parts over the years), but the 11 Pro I bought last year was the first time a multi-year-gap upgrade felt rather incremental, especially for $1100. I returned it and expect to continue to use and repair the 6S until they drop iOS support for it.

Considering 3 years a long time to replace a device is part of the problem.

A large part of that is simply that smartphones entered the market very recently and started out computationally weak compared to existing computers - the first iphone was released less than 14 years ago and had a CPU running at 412MHz!

Smartphones have largely caught up to traditional computers in terms of the time it takes for upgrade-worthy advancements in hardware. I expect we'll see smartphone upgrade cycles continue to lengthen until they mirror desktop/laptop upgrade cycles.

Agreed but that part of a larger problem such as fast fashion and throwaway trinkets for the home.

It is quite easy — invest in the most limiting factor, for example:

* OnePlus 3, released in June 2016, 6 GB RAM.

vs

* iPhone 7, released in September 2016, 2 GB RAM.

* iPhone 12 Pro Max, released in October 2020, 6 GB RAM.

From my perspective smartphones have not changed much.

The processors have changed significantly. I had a OnePlus 3T which I really liked, and recently pulled it out of a box because my daily driver phone broke. The 3T struggled to load modern, bloated apps like Google Maps. The device would chug at most tasks more intensive than scrolling a webpage (and sometimes even then... what a sad state the web is in these days)

By contrast the processor in my work phone (an Iphone) is faster than my laptop.

My phone today is completely usable but the carrier has decided to stop issuing updates to the phone....

This is the worst kind of planned obsolesces

Right. Repairable hardware is just the one side, security updates needs to be available as well. We need mandated open sourcing of device software (including firmware and drivers + unlocking of the bootloader) after the support timerange, or at the very least alternatively the obligation to continue security updates for decades.

Who is actually going to update this even if it is open source though? There are so many drivers and firmware in a smartphone, nevermind the tens of thousands of models of smartphones out there. It would require an army of people to patch, test and distribute everything. That's even if you can figure out all this code.

I don't think this should be a consideration.

I agree that the manufacturer or carrier doesn't owe you updates indefinitely, but they definitely should give you all the resources you need to develop these updates yourself if you wanted to.

The landscape can change. Maybe there's going to be a huge open-source project that will make these updates. Maybe someone will figure out a way to automatically handle a large number of hardware configurations at scale (a powerful enough hardware abstraction layer should be able to deal with it). Maybe someone will make a business out of it, providing security updates at a reasonable cost. Either way, there shouldn't be any artificial hurdles against the customer developing and running their own firmware on hardware they paid money for.

It's not about 'who's going to do it' but about 'if I want to do it, I can'.

I would really like to hack on a tablet I have that's 5 years old, but I can't because the firmware and drivers are both closed source.

I think when I buy a device, I should get the source code to it once the manufacturer decides it's not worth it for them to continue patching the software for the device I've bought.

We see that happening all the times with devices that are open and popular enough, as much as is possible now. Have a look at the xda forum to see how it is done today.

Have a look at Pinephone. It has no official developers, but the community created >17 operating systems for it with constant updates.

OTOH, you can wind up with stuff like installing an OS that requires more than the device has to offer- like installing the most recent version of Ubuntu Desktop on a Intel Core2 Duo isn't going to go well, nor did installing iOS 7 on iPhone 4's- which I remember eagerly installing without realizing the major slowdown all the new features added that I couldn't undo.

Linux usually works perfectly fine with old hardware, a Intel Core2 Duo should be completely enough. That's even 64 bit hardware. Worst case you have to swap out Gnome with something more minimal, but that's unlikely.

I'm currently running Manjaro with i3wm on a laptop with a core 2 duo. It came with a couple of simple conky widgets enabled by default and those probably took 5-10 seconds to load. Just boxes, one with static text and the other with load statistics. Resizing windows is a little painful, as is opening them.

I3 runs reasonably well, but Gnome would probably be too heavy to make for an enjoyable experience.

Creating those updates costs money. At what point is the cost no longer worth it? It is not realistic for companies to support every phone forever; I think that's something we can all agree on.

Would you be willing to pay whatever your share is of how much generating the update would cost, in order to get it? With a clear indicator when you buy the phone that you automatically get a subscription to 3 years worth of security updates; past that, you pay whatever amount is needed to keep it up to date.

In my opinion, manufacturers who cannot be bothered to provide updates to their software should not be allowed to claim intellectual property rights on the hardware. When support ends, drivers and documentation should be made open source, enforceable by law if need be.

I think that the problem is central to how phones are developed and constructed. Dell doesn't determine how long my XPS 13 gets updated; they provided the hardware, and I can put any software I want on it. It can keep running a secure, up-to-date OS as long as I want it to, until the hardware truly can't keep up (which, based on computer lifetimes these days, is a long time).

Conceptually, I dislike that mobile development hasn't followed a similar path. Samsung should not dictate how many updates my phone gets and for how many years. Practically, I realize that this is a consequence of how we've built SOCs and mobile hardware and there's no incentive for companies to change. That doesn't make it less problematic.

In my case the Manufacturer (LG) already did the updates, the phone was offered on 2 of 3 carriers, of the 2 one of those carriers are still offering updates for it, but because it was a less popular model on the 2nd carrier it is not longer getting updates

I tend to agree if we consider current use cases. Issue comes when we add new use cases which require more processing power or new components.

Also, we’ll have to figure out how to manage with a sort of stagnation.

Essentially this entails curbing change. Curbing change means slowing progress (initially in this niche), but if we extend this into other areas it can mean significant stagnation because since things are good enough we don’t need to improve and progress (ie. we’re at equilibrium )

We'll have to grow comfortable with that outlook.

Sometimes it's more a question of software. On older phones badly made sites like the new reddit for example were unuseable in all browsers - until the new Firefox came along.

But sure. Repairability is one thing, it just means that devices can continue the things they were made for. For new workloads they would need upgradeability, which is a completely different beast.

I don't think having repairability will slow things at all. It will simply prune some behaviors corporations engage in that destroy the planet, like glueing in batteries. Stopping such practices will not even make new devices more expensive - we have old designs that did it right. Falling back to them and innovating there could even save money.

> Phones from 2016 for example feel completely usable today.

The problem is that this has happened despite my usage not changing.