Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone

Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by michael1999 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:51PM (#30075174)

Thanks for contributing first-hand experience. Your story highlights how dysfunctional historical hardware dev practices are for the connected age. Forking for each product absolutely does not scale in an era of continual updates, and manufacturers that don't figure this out are not gonna make it. People don't forget having to discard working hardware because of some stupid software EOL.

The memory limits of old devices is a real problem, and I don't know the solution besides doing the hard work to fight the the bloat, and produce a modular solution. Apple pretends to support the Apple Watch 3, but you can not upgrade the os without a hard-reset every time because the local flash can't hold the update and user config at the same time. But I can't help wonder if they _really_ need multiple GB for the core OS in a watch.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by sulam on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:04PM (#30075391)

Heh. Not going to comment on Apple Watch for obvious reasons, but I will say that we measure free memory in 10s or 100s of bytes on most of our older products. Even a single GB would be amazing, but also amazingly expensive.

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Re:Google Is Forcing Me to Dump a Perfectly Good Phone by michael1999 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @02:31PM (#30076783)

The lower end might be considered semi-disposable, like anything with a non-replaceable battery. I was thinking of things large enough for a full CPU.

The tooling and modular design to support back to an original Fitbit Tracker might be beyond our current skills.

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