Of course when it was new the camera opened quickly. And then Apple made their OS more heavy weight every year until my phone slowed to a crawl.
And faster phones are nice, but I think it is worth considering how valuable that really is to us as users and a society, especially if the process involves making loads and loads of ewaste and consuming tons of new resources, and all the emissions their mining and transport involves, when we could simply keep our software slim and our old devices functional.
And the big companies will never do this. Do we need to force them to allow open software to run on these devices, so that clean builds can be patched and maintained when the company over bloats them or abandons them?
The things you listed (camera and chip speed) are basically the only things left that these companies can claim is better than last year's model, but only because it's so easy to use synthetic benchmarks and numbers that mean nothing to make them sound like a dramatic improvement despite the fact that we've reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of diminishing returns on the user experience for smartphones in their current form. More megapixels don't matter anymore, CPUs are hardly a limiting factor and yearly gains on their performance are marginal at best, and we have more than enough RAM for pretty much all use cases.
My point is that if these companies insist on re-releasing the same phone every time, maybe they could space it out a little.
It makes perfect sense that five non-significant changes can add up to a significant change.
So the suggestion would be 1 or 2 releases instead, after more of the changes build up, instead of 5 releases.
Personally I think yearly is fine for manufacturers that only have a couple models. But they need to actually support things for a reasonable lifetime, and should be mocked for having frequent releases if they don't have a good support lifetime.
For me, the addition of satelite SOS introduced on iPhone 14 is a game changer. I do enough out of cell range activity that I carry a SPOT device.
The ability for one more device (and pricy subscription) to be eaten by my phone is fantastic.
For others it might be onboard ai capabilities.
Each incremental hardware update to an iPhone tips the utility scales for someone, and is a completely ignorable change for others. Some people don’t care a bit that the new iPhone has a 2k nit brightness, for others, that is the feature they’ve been waiting for to upgrade.
I don’t pay attention to androids much, but it is pretty rare for iPhone full number bumps not to have a hardware feature that is new.
This is not a replacement for a SPOT device. It's a backup. You might need to move around reportedly, point it very carefully to find a satellite, coverage isn't great, even minimal tree cover is a problem, etc. Plenty of cases where a SPOT device would be a life saver and where this would not.
I too would like to ditch mine. But I'd rather be alive in a real emergency than die because I broke my leg and can't walk around in a circle pointing the phone right.
A phone with upgradable parts and minimal bloat would be better than any recent phone I've had, but it would also be less profitable for Google so obviously they will avoid that as much as possible.
Middling specs. Huge battery.
I'm still on a Pixel 4a 5G now, because I haven't seen any reason to upgrade.
But I'm a "I want to be able to accidentally run over my phone with a car, shrug, and go get another one" type of person. (Despite the fact I've never actually cracked a screen...)
Battery lasts forever and a day and there's never been a situation where I've felt prevented or limited by the phone.
The initial SailfishOS phone from Jolla was supported for 7+ years and was also a really nice experience.
In my experience of years working in agile and scrum methodologies all cadence does is it makes developers release unfinished code to tick boxes and show that they are productive every sprint.
Even just on the iphone the improvements in software have been dramatic over the past 10 years. Go install one of the early versions of ios on the simulator some time to see how far we've come.
I feel compelled to bring up this tweet from John Carmack I just saw a few hours ago. The most popular editor on the planet feels laggier than stuff Borland made in the 90s, on hardware probably a thousand times as fast. I don't know how anyone can say software is great with a straight face.
We have supercomputers in our pockets and on the slightly aged phone my dad refuses to upgrade from four years ago many apps lag. They display like 5 widgets or 20 rows of items at any given time
As someone that used all their products from MS-DOS, through Windows 3.x days up to switching to Visual C++ 6.0, I clearly remeber code completion, syntax highlighting and macros, three features that Notepad isn't capable of.
As easily proven, by reading the manuals available in Bitsavers.
It was a DOS, Turbo Vision application.
Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The C++ one demonstrates the unsuitability of C++.
As for curated/opinionated, most people don't want to be power users. Most people never did it was just in the 90s you had little choice. If you want to be a power user today the options are still there.
nowadays you have many "desktop" applications bundling their own special build of chrome just because developers are so lazy(and I'd say many severely lacking critical judgement) they feel like taking their webapp and deploying as a "desktop" application.
The situation is infinitely much worse than it was in 1995.
My Tesla phone key takes 15+ seconds to connect bluetooth and unlock the car, making me look like a goddamn idiot while I keep yanking the car handle while bystanders stare at me as if I'm a car thief.
This stuff should take <0.01s in 2023 by Moore's Law. Computers should work imperceptibly fast by now for the same high-level tasks.
2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise
2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on
And my work Microsoft Surface laptop fan never shuts off.
It's almost like there's a spectrum of PCs.
My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.
My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.
Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
> Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?
Because your workload isn't compatible with MacOS, and Apple makes no effort to remedy it at a software-level? Docker should not be more energy efficient on Windows than it is on Mac... and that's really just the tip of the incompatibility iceberg. Unless your workload is explicitly compatible with ARM, it probably Just Works better on x86.
The real killer-app for me was just switching to Linux as my base OS. I can leave containers idling while watching YouTube at a cool 27c internally. I'm using a 6-7 year old T460s, but honestly I feel like I could get away with even weaker hardware if I wanted. A Macbook Air running Linux might be a candidate if I didn't need to wait for basic functionality to get reverse-engineered. As-is though, you can count me among the people who doesn't quite need an upgrade yet.
By the requests of the luddites here, I should not be able to do better than a 5 year old camera to appease them.
[1]: I also have a DSLR for special occasions, but I do not carry that round with me generally...
I mean, it is a bit unfair against Apple - some of the reason behind the OS getting more heavyweight is actually backporting new features in 7 year’s distance, many which actually has dedicated hardware in case of the more modern lineup.
Also, there is a big aspect which is independent of Apple: every app is getting more and more heavy, the same phone now has to open a 500MB facebook app, not a 70MB one (just random numbers).
Also, the whole “yearly replacement” thing is just.. not an actual thing. People on average change their phones every 3 years, where the accumulated small improvements do add up. But everyone is at a different point in the cycle, so it absolutely makes sense. Add to it how apple devices hold their value to an insane degree, often living 2nd-3rd lives, and one would be really hard-pressed to actually pinpoint apple as a threat against our planet - compared to cheap androids that are barely good for a single year due to instantly obsolete software, has no resale value whatsoever, and are absolutely single-use.
I am not a proponent of extreme capitalism/libertarianism, but I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.
People in my circles seem to use their phones for 6-7 years atleast.
That is all gone now. Carriers have post-paid plans where the monthly device cost varies based on device. These are 0% interest loans from the carrier. At the same time, people have started holding their phones longer. Renewal periods when to 30 months, then 36 months.
Some people will never be happy but cellphone customers are never happy.
Why can't people just enjoy our pocket computers with their always on connections?
If by "bubble" you mean my family, nobody but the eight year old has seen a new phone since before the first COVID lockdowns. And the phones that my children use were are purchased with money they earned themselves - including the eight year old. He decided at six that he wants a phone, and saved for two years to buy one - not a grain of which was aquired through his parents.
I should mention that he also managed to buy two goldfish during this time - also with his own money. So he learned very well to budget, and that each thing that he buys along the way pushed back his goal.
As a father, I see the phone as an opportunity to teach limits from an early age. And wow, does he test those limits! In retrospect, it is better that him and I are going through this testing phase at eight, rather than in the rebellious teenage years.
And most of those that can afford it would still want to buy other things instead when they already have one, which means only the richest of the richest ones really do that.
Also, I remember a while back they did a specific optimised speed-up release of iOS with barely any new features and it _really_ worked. My iPhone 6S went from being basically garbage I was going to replace to like a brand new phone.
They can do it if they want to. It’s what’s needed now. My iPhone 12 Pro has started to feel super slow since I got iOS 17. I have a new battery. Even texting feels painfully slow. There’s no excuse for this. It’s either deliberate and bad, or lazy and bad. Either way it’s bad.
But that's a lot of maintenance burden, in exchange for slitting their own revenue throat. So hard to expect them to do it for altruism.
Sounds like you might have some bad app interactions going on? There’s really no reason for a 12 Pro to be slow at this point even if the OS was getting “heavier.” The 12 Pros have 6GB of RAM, which is now pretty standard across the iPhone lineup even years later. And the A14 SoC in the 12 Pro is effectively the same tech as the M1 processors that still rock, albeit with fewer cores running at somewhat lower clocks.
I can’t really think of much reason for you to be having a slow experience aside from the usual bugs that can accompany any new major release, and usually get ironed out over the course of a month or two.
Also, ios 17 likely is a bit buggy - I’m on 17.1 beta with a 12 pro max and I can say that the performance is back to how it used to be.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/apple-to-start-paying-out-5...
> I really have a hard time with a realistic business model that would be significantly better.
Well this one might be good for business, but as you can see, it is extremely bad for the individual.
And yes they didn’t communicate it, that’s why they got sued. But this problem was real.
But if they were genuinely just concerned about battery health, and not about their sales numbers, then why do the throttling covertly? Why not tell the user that throttling was happening, that it was related to power issues, and that they should consider a replacement battery?
The only thing that has changed is they now tell you if it’s happening.
Assuming for the moment that reboots were a serious concern, and not just a fabricated excuse... it's better for Apple's reputation for old phones to be slow than to be flaky.
With the former, people were assuming that Apple's shiny new OS required state-of-the-art hardware to run smoothly. It just appeared as if technology was advancing rapidly, and one had to buy the latest iPhone every year or two to keep up.
With the latter, there would be noone to blame but Apple, and they would develop a reputation for unreliable hardware, like Samsung or worse.
They still are. As a battery ages the internal resistance increases. This leads to brown-outs under high current. This isn’t unique to Apple, it’s just how batteries work.
Anything less is deceptive and anti-user.
The only thing they have changed is that they now have the OS level pop ups, the feature still exists.
Apple get phone sales from me because of this stance.
Flash storage doesn't last forever, and it's got a whole gradient of failure and wear experiences.
Too bad no flagship phones have removable storage anymore, because that would be a really easy fix to this problem.
And there's good reason for the OS not being on a microSD card. Run a Raspberry Pi without locking the storage and see how fast it'll corrupt itself. Most SD cards have pretty miserable reliability compared to the storage on-board. Imagine if you had to re-image your device every few weeks after your storage device corrupted itself again. Not really a great experience.
There's unfortunately slightly different issue here: if the phone vendor puts the OS on an user-replaceable SD card, then the UX quality and reliability of the device depends on the SD card vendor, which is a bad position to be in, given how much fraud is happening in this space.
Today, Apple/Google could design a phone with (a) a user-replacable battery & (b) no flash, only RAM + removable SD storage + long-life EEPROM.
Boot loader, SD validator, and minimal image retrieval goes in EEPROM. Storage contents continually backed up, encrypted, to cloud with delta updates. Customer prompted to replace SD card and device reimagined whenever there's an issue.
Apple/Google sell cloud storage subscriptions.
Aka the cockroach phone.
That they aren't even interested in that model is because they're in a Faustian bargain with cellular carriers to drive device renewals and post-paid plans.
And integrated batteries and flash memory happen to be a convenient "Oh well, we can't possibly design it any other way" excuse.
Compared to 5 years of good on board storage performance, with no little bits to accidentally lose. And a gradually degradation of performance after that.
They could possibly design a phone the way you outlined, but people won't buy it.
There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large and create inefficiencies in the phone shell (even M.2 2230, when you take into account the mounting mechanism), and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
It's been a long, long time since I couldn't fit all the apps I wanted on the phone storage. My SD card is mainly for multimedia files, and it's plenty fast for that purpose.
The only performance limit I've hit in recent times was because it was exFAT, not because it was an SD card.
> There are options; NVMe and CFExpress cards exist. But they're large
Ignoring SD Express as a failure to launch, UHS SD cards can be plenty fast if they're designed to be. A hundred megabytes per second is not a significant bottleneck if individual IO operations are fast and it can do many of them.
Also there was that XFMEXPRESS form factor if manufacturers wanted to put an SSD socket into a phone. "card size is 18x14x1.4mm, slightly larger and thicker than a microSD card. It mounts into a latching socket that increases the footprint up to 22.2x17.75x2.2mm."
> and I doubt that people are going to pay that kind of money even when they currently pay it for onboard storage.
That's the real killer incentive, that you can charge huge amounts per terabyte and also force people to buy higher-end phones just to get the ability to buy more storage.
As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
You have to remember that a current microsd cards is just a general purpose micro-controller and some (probably SPI) flash in a plastic case.
As mentioned, random I/O tends to fail, but the other tradeoff here is that fast microSD card slots tend to get extremely hot. Not necessarily "failure" hot (stuff like the ROG had issues from other parts), but uncomfortable to hold, depending on where the thing is going to go.
> As opposed to the user spending $40 for a 512GB sandisk extreme, and giving the phone maker no extra money.
The thing is, price anchoring is a thing, and people are going to look at a phone that costs $400 and needs a $40 Extra Thing and a $500 phone and go "the latter is easier".
Oh definitely. I would too. I dream of the price being only $200/TB.
The biggest storage upgrade for a normal iPhone is +384GB for $300 (Oof). If you upgrade to the Max model you can get +768GB for $400.
A Galaxy S23 can get +128GB for $60, a Galaxy S23+ can get +256GB for $120, and a Galaxy S23 Ultra can get +768GB for $420.
A Pixel 8 can get +128GB for $60, and a Pixel 8 Pro can get +896GB for $400.
If you include the price increase of better base models, to get access to bigger options, then $700/TB is a good ballpark figure.
I think this pricing is a little bit better than when I last looked, but it's still very bad.
The availability of >512GB is growing but still flaky and usually requires extra expensive base models. While in comparison microsd has had cheap 1TB for a good while, and 1.5TB for $150 becomes available later this month.
I realize it's mandatory from a marketing perspective, but how often is it used?
Accidentally jumping in the pool/ocean/lake with your phone. But past that, I'm not often in submerged situations.
i've yet to be so unfortunate, but i've met a lot of people with a 'I dropped my phone in the toilet so it's in a bag of rice' story.
let's hope they throw that rice out at the end of the process.
Also, generally people spend an awful lot of money on things out of vanity and social pressure, regardless of their needs and if it is a good decision. Look at new cars prices and how most vehicles purchases are usually overkill for everyone. The most sold car in the US are the Ford F series , Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram trucks before a number of high end SUV. Sure people are free to buy whatever they want but a Honda Fit would be enough for large majority of them and be a smarter financial decision[2]. They mostly do it because they can, not because they need.
[1] which has become fairly decent for anyone accross all ranges in the last few years.
[2] I am not sure it is still sold in the US but I could have chosen another example of a smaller and more affordable vehicle.
Low end Android phones just plain suck when it comes to performance and battery life. Not to mention they rarely get operating system updates.
If you did force me to buy an Android phone, it would be the Pixel.
nor does she care about operating system updates.
I live in an area where's it very humid and rains a lot. My phones get wet, a lot, just due to nature. I had one die after I got caught in a massive squall line at an outdoor concert on what was supposed to be a sunny day.
So yeah I would have needed a new phone tomorrow if it wasn't for my phone being waterproof. This kind of stuff happens all the time. I've lost many things from water damage. So many people used to complain about Apple denying warranty claims from water damage from the device just being in a humid area for a long time, now that just doesn't happen.
I never once lost a phone to water damage, despite most of the phones I've owned not being waterproof.
My pocket made of regular fabric seems to be sufficient protection.
Screen on the phone died.
I see the point of waterproofing phones after that.
This is the main use case, but it's not to be dismissed considering this is a very common cause of phone failure. If this doubles the lifespan of your phone then it effectively ~halves the cost. Which is a big deal when phones are as expensive as they are.
How did they talk on their phone for an hour without realizing their phone was underwater?
The customer was probably talking on their landline phone for the hour.
I like your idea but in the US at least most mobile carriers actually don't encourage yearly upgrades as they force you into a multiyear contract for your phone to get "the best deal". In fact, currently both verizon and AT&T have 30+ month payment plans for phones so you're locked into at least 2.5 years. consequently, most people hold on to their phone for 3 years now.
An industrial SD card plus a few software changes would largely solve the problem, but I'm not sure it could be done in a backwards-compatible way, some apps might not work if you stopped letting people hammer the disk with crap.
Even with a standard card, phones don't have any issues with FTL firmware level corruption due to power loss, they have a builtin UPS.
But with phone-scale production there's no reason they couldn't define a new SD variant that had SMART diagnostics and guaranteed reliability properties for similar cost to eMMC.
That said, unlike Pixels and OnePlus once the bootloader is unlocked you lose functionality and it's not relockable. It also almost always has some software quirks and I most recently found out that the Xperia 5 I've been eyeing will after 2-3 years of use randomly break and show vertical green or pink lines.
There you have another "well" manufactured phone with external storage that becomes almost unusable faster than the storage degrades without the user being responsible for it.
Microsd's used to suck(had plenty fail years ago) but it seems like they have gotten pretty good these days.
1: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/external/mmc-utils...
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/apple-ip...
And in fact installing the first big OS update was one of the key points on the Nexus 7 that showcased its incredibly fragile storage. So we've definitely seen this happen in the past specifically with OS updates being the straw that killed the camel's back in flash storage performance.
I've experienced it on devices before as well. Play around flashing different ROMs on Android, eventually each flash keeps getting a little slower and a little slower, and suddenly just copying files directly off USB gets incredibly slow and the device becomes nearly unusable. I've seen it happen on a few different devices.
This is beyond stupid how fucked up the phone market is. I'm still using my 2008 laptop with newest LTS (x)Ubuntu, but my 2018 Android phone lost official support in 2020... Thanks to that, now I have iPhone (longer support) and Fairphone 5 (I like how they try to upstream everything for this phone and promise really long support).
About your question: Should be fine. As long as browser is up-to-date, she doesn't connect to unknown WiFi networks/Bluetooth devices and she is not targeted. The easiest security fix is to not have anything worth anything on the phone :D
Realistically what exactly could it be doing more on startup, that would slow it down so much?
I wonder if there’s code that simply intentionally slows it down. Like the Camera app calculating the value of PI for some number of digits before opening up.
There would be a massive financial incentive to do something nefarious like this.
But haven't those anecdotes been debunked already? A counter-anecdote is my non-plus iphone 7 with whatever the latest ios it supports (15 something IIRC) that opens the camera as quickly as when it was new. Apart from Apple Maps, which never worked well for some reason, the apps I use don't lag. Google Maps is fine. My motorcycling mapping app (scenic) is fine. Lightroom is fine. Hell, even MS Teams works like it does on newer devices.
If you don’t believe me, there are paths hardcoded in the kernel (I’m not joking: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aapple-oss-distributions%2...) to very quickly reclaim memory for Camera to launch.
I know people who lease a new car every 3 years. And often, if there's no redesign, they're getting a nearly identical vehicle. It's strange. Whereas, I upgrade my car every 10 years, and am thrilled with all the improvements.
People lease for many factors, not just to avoid tear and maintenance.
What other reasons do people lease?
Somehow that works for clothing vendors, though.
I don't entirely blame peoples' consumerism; As somebody who once worked in cell phone sales, the mere act of visiting a carrier store is likely to land you in front of a salesperson who is incentivized to sell new phones and lines indiscriminately. Not to mention the incredible amount of advertising that goes into phones - if people only upgraded when they needed new phones, I don't think Apple, Samsung, or Google would feel the need to advertise the new ones so aggressively.
HN is likely a much more tech-literate crowd than the average person, so I think to a lot of us it seems silly to buy new phones every year. But I know that every time Apple releases a new iPhone, I get a call from my dad asking if it's worth upgrading from last year's model. I say no, nothing has changed, but the next time I see him he has it. Why? Because the salesperson made such a convincing case, not only about the merit of the new phone, but the fact that they could give him such a "deal" on it.
It might just be your “bubble”, but even if not, is it really that bad of a deal? If you resell your previous phone at 2/3 the original price each year, you can use the latest phone for like 200 bucks for a year, or $17 monthly. For a device that is with you 0-24, and is probably the most often used item a typical person owns — they have it on them more often than even their shoes!
Somewhere along the way, you pass a threshold where it's uncool to have a certain version of phone and judging from what you hear about the waste problem with phones, it's above the reasonable moment to get rid of it because it's broken or not usable.
I mean, sure it's a nice lie you can tell to yourself, but in the end, it's not good.
Incentives exist on the part of the person who, being human, definitely want the new shiny thing, regardless of the logic behind it.
They exist for the salesperson, who will get a commission for selling the new shiny thing, regardless of whether this makes the customer's life any better or worse.
They exist for the carrier because the customer is on the hook for 2-3 years of service when they buy the shiny thing.
Finally, they exist for the company that made the phone because they make a profit on the sale price of the shiny thing.
1 year from now if you sell it for 2/3 the price, you get back $720. A year's use cost you $360. About $1 a day. This is very worth it for some but not quite as cheap as $200 a year. This is without factoring in time to sell.
You could trade in but that means you are locked in contract with service provider.
I have a Xiaomi 10 or something I bought in 2020 I paid 279$ for, almost 4 years later it comes at 0.18 and I see like 0 reasons to upgrade.
I admit I'm not the most social (media) person out there, I'm not into connecting my phone into every other device on this planet (as Apple people consistently remind how easily they interoperate their devices), but it does everything great: camera, battery, messaging, games.
To me to see people thinking it's normal to spend so much money for a phone is borderline crazy.
Alternatively, you could buy a second-hand iphone 11/12 pro and use it for 5-6 years easily, with proper software support. That’s what I do, and don’t yet plan on updating - maybe the iphone 16 would be worthy for me.
[1] https://www.apple.com/mt/iphone-15/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/16h13z3/why_are_the...
Maybe Pixel has a yearly release cycle, but it doesn't mean I have to upgrade every year, that would be crazy. And they can iterate more often to try some ideas more often than once every 5 years.
That could have probably been mitigated if the s20 remained relevant for more than a year or two and there was a mature parts market that made it feasible to upkeep rather than scrap.
It's very rare that there are any updates at all within the same generation. Year in model designation is just "ha, look at his looser driving last year BMW" and to show when car left assembly line.
There are some examples where the same generation had a significant upgrade without a facelift, but those are rare. One example I could think of is MX-5 (ND): between 2015 and 2018 there were no changes at all, but in late 2019 there was nearly complete overhaul of its powertrain and then a small update in 2021.
Everyone can tell the age of every car [1] simply by the license plate (used to be in 1 year increments, since the early 2000s it's been in 6 month increments).
[1]: Yes, yes, before some is pedantic, imported cars don't come under this scheme, and self-assembled cars also have a unique form that mean you can't tell their age.
These companies virtue signal about climate change nonstop, but still manage to produce disposable phones and light up their data centers for advertising and user tracking
- Advances are mostly software.
- Massive quantities of e-waste (and plastic waste via cases, screen protectors, etc).
- Perverse incentives by companies to not properly support the user experience on older devices.
- Tons of money spent pointlessly.
My android phone is more than 5 years old, the tech in my laptop is similar.
I'm doing just fine and don't feel like I'm missing out on anything. I run up to date advanced software just like the whole world
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/09/apple-debuts-iphone-1...
Isn't this why we're struggling to build nuclear in some countries because they weren't building it regularly, and now it's difficult to scale, let alone build new ones?
I understand that it's wasteful, but maybe it's necessary to sustain itself? Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?
Some waste is the cost of resiliency. But with phones (and other electronics and appliances), we're talking about extreme amounts of waste. Way more than is needed to keep around and develop the capacity and know-how.
> Especially from a feedback perspective from consumers?
What feedback? Unless they screw things really badly, they're just listening to the echoes of their own marketing departments. This is a supply-driven market with high natural barriers to entry. Customers buy what they're told to, and are happy about it as they're told to.
My pixel 4a5g takes photos that are on reasonable standards, obviously they won't match match, but it doesn't make a serious difference either to me. I need three things from my phone - battery, camera and lag free user experience. I don't need thinner bezels for gods sake, I can't understand the craze and demand for thinner bezels over a two day battery life.
I noticed that my old Pixel 5 felt really slow for the first 30 minutes or so, but it seems to be returning to normal now.
Wait if they are making phones that all get bought up every year because of people like your friend, then where is the waste?
No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.
Also, the OS and apps need to take advantage of new hardware, so it’s not a surprise if your seven year old phone becomes slower.
If you don’t like the status quo then I would go with a non-iOS and non-android phone like pine phone, Mairena, librem, or anything else that based on a more open Linux distro.
With video game consoles, you have a single device where micro-optimizations are constantly done, new features are added, and all software can be purpose-built to work really well on that specific hardware. All of that for ~7 years means a really fantastic user experience and a massive community of people that have collectively worked through solutions to common problems and forced the company's hand on defects (joycon drift, for example). It also means tons of high-quality hardware-specific accessories, both from the company that made the console and from third parties.
For about five years it seemed like every flagship spanning generations was the same SoC
Yes they are, by refusing to release security updates for older models.
I don't want to buy a new phone, but likely will have to due to support ending so they can sell more high margin hardware.
If you don’t like the terms, go with a Linux distro phone
Also Linux distro phones aren't practical ways to participate in society unfortunately.
Old phones that have economic life get cleaned up and re-sold. The fact that manufacturers tweak phones annually does not change this.
The ad I keep seeing doesn't even hint at why Titanium matters. No matter, the point is, evidently the technical aspects don't seem to matter.
Titanium sounds cool, it sounds luxury, it's a marketing hack. Like <strike>"aircraft-grade"</strike> "space-grade" aluminum. Nobody is launching their aluminum phones at escape velocity. It's 100% for marketing reasons.
I have some titanium spoons, I feel into the trap too.
The previous iPhone Pro's have a stainless steel shell, not aluminum, and the ~30 gram difference is noticeable.
Of course, they caused this problem themselves by using stainless steel rather than aluminum like the regular iPhones, but they are nonetheless solving a problem with the titanium frame.
I rely on my smartphone for work, I'd rather buy a 4y old model known to be reliable than a brand knew one that ends up preventing me to call 911 or whose screen die randomly and unexpectedly.
The phone on the other hand is connected to every facet of your life and has a software stack that absolutely contains security flaws waiting to be found and exploited.
Apple has always worked to keep devices secure longer, at least up until now having the best long term support. My favorite part of the Pixel 8 is that Google is attempting to match and exceed what Apple's done so far.
Phone performance and features are definitely not changing fast enough for older devices to no longer be useful, even for affluent audiences. I hope support windows continue to get longer so that folks who must use or choose to use older devices can remain secure.
This is an entirely different subject. The software can be upgraded/updated during the life of the mobile phone. And when it comes to chip makers mistakes, which led to vulns like Spectres, they are likely to affect several generations of chips anyway.
Obviously the first clue is cars are not phones.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/183713/value-of-us-passe...
Most people don't care about waste so I know I am part of a small fraction.
Even the image processing for high resolution images can benefit from better hardware. Modern smartphones are heavily dependent on image processing to improve camera quality. Without the right hardware, performance and energy efficiency could be unacceptable.
Because it simply isn't true. FP has been around for 10 years now, making phones, learning, scaling up. They sold close to a million phones every year since 2020 (last year over 1100000 phones). And while a million phones isn't much compared to iPhones or Pixels, it's bigger than many other small phone companies (Chinese or not). They've been diversifying with headphones, and earbuds. And with t he last edition, they finally felt confident with supply chains to guarantee spare parts for decades to come.
Small, incremental improvements each year means that whenever you buy a new device, it's modern (not using 4 year old components), and substantially 'better' than the previous one.
The annual incremental release cycle is fine—what’s silly is thinking phones need to be upgraded every year.
Try that and monitor your quality of life. See if you can avoid therapy.
It's not that people think they need to upgrade their phones every year, or two, or three. It's that the phones are designed for short usable life on hardware side, and on software side, neither first-party nor third-party developers give a damn about performance.
Currently I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Last year when I compared its “lesser camera” to the latest and greatest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference so I kept the old phone.
The specs they throw out are always better on paper, but practice upgrading each year will yield very little improvement in quality of life.
My wife just got to a place where her iPhone got unusable because it's running out of space - mainly having to do with her massive Messages history and photos/videos. We didn't even know until I checked, her phone is the iPhone X which was released 6 years ago and technically nothing is stopping her from using it longer except the lack of desire to prune her message history/photos/vids.
My wife is someone who's not going to suffer with a poorly functioning piece of technology nor someone who is going to work hard to optimize it or prolong its life, so the fact that her 6 year old phone works just fine is a good sign that it can, in the average case.
What is the point of me having 256 GB of storage on the phone, if the phone starts slowing down wholesale once I take 50% of it? I get that there needs to be some buffer for swap and flash magic and whatnot, but I'd thought it would be closer to PC / Windows, where everything is fine until ~90% storage being used.
That's on top of bloated software doing background magic. Can't speak for other phones and brands, but my experience with Samsung flagships (S4, S7, wife's S9, now S22) is that the camera and gallery app are bloated, and their performance degrades rapidly with the amount of photos you take - around 50% worth of storage is when camera starts having delays on the order of seconds, interfering with its core purpose of taking photos.
(And it's not that it couldn't be better - Samsung just isn't investing effort in making core system apps performant enough. It's hard to find efficient apps these days on the Play Store, but there are rare exceptions, like e.g. Aves gallery, which is FLOSS and manages to be leaner, faster and significantly more feature-full than just about anything else, stock or third-party.)
My parents are running 12 year old Apple devices just fine, which blows my mind.
I used to be excited about technology. I no longer am. I may consider upgrading to something with a 4" screen however. That would truly be an upgrade.
I agree though that the physical design should stay the same, so that cases and accessories don’t need to be thrown away. Apple more-or-less does this with the iPhones, eg a case should work with any iPhone 12-14.
It's not like the incremental physical changes just automatically happen independently of designing, mass manufacturing, and releasing new phone models. The incremental physical changes happen because companies are trying to develop new phone models.
You don't have to get the latest phone all of the time.
But never scaling up the damned battery above and sometimes even at demand. It's ultimately my number one request, and I'm sure that of many others.
With yearly, incremental releases, people will evaluate what's new from their phone and most people will update on their own cycle, probably every few or several years.
Meanwhile, with gaming console "generational" releases every few years, that is a strong incentive for everyone to upgrade.
If I have a 3 year old phone which I'm on the fence about updating, then I might pass on this year's model and go for next year's. But if there won't be another phone for 3 more years I guess I might as well get this one.
(And don't many plans come with some sort of discount, if you don't upgrade your phone?)
We could look at the total amount of years any phone is used and abstract away from who uses it. Slightly stylised, if we have four people, Alice, Bob, Charles and Dave, and Alice gets a new phone every year, Bob buys Alice's old phone, Charles buys Bob's old phone, and Dave gets Charles' old phone, then everyone changes phones every year, but each phone is still used for a full four years.
Imagine if they only released a new design every 5 years. They'd have to manufacture another billion iPhones in a relatively short window of time to handle all of the upgrades.
Among the people I know, there's more people living paycheck to paycheck and getting annual phone upgrades than people with FU money doing upgrades. That said, the percentage of FU money upgraders is higher than the percentage of paycheck-to-paycheck upgraders.
Google/Samsung/Apple/etc may be making more total money from the not-well-off than the well-off, at least thinking about people I know.
There is no reason to release flagship phones each year.
So every maker has to have the best they have on sale at all times.
The car release cycle is pretty much exactly what flagship phones do too. They get a major redesign every few years with incremental improvements in between.
The biggest reason is obvious: if you didn't your competitors would and they'd eat your lunch. Modern mobile devices are only 15 yrs old, they're where PCs were in 1995. I'm already seeing people who used to upgrade every two years switch to 3, and before you know it that will climb to 4, 5, etc. as the tech matures. In 1997 your PC was obsolete after two years, now they're fine a decade later, and phones will get there too.
Great many containers filled with stuff from rich countries find their way to poor countries, some include stolen goods (like cars), others include garbage, most include goods that still have some value for other people, including tech.
Maybe the problem should be looked at from that angle, and maybe there's no problem, really. One's garbage will always be another one's treasure.
Yes, that's a very nice story. Tell me it again, please mommy.
A better example of waste is when local governments funds things which people don't use.
I think the root of this sentiment is misunderstanding or lack of satisfaction at the system level.
I have an iPhone 12 Pro Max that is three generations behind now. While there is nothing I have to have, the always on display, the USB 3 speed, and video out to my portable USB-C monitor on the iPhone 15 Pro would be nice.
I just wish they kept the pixel 4 design and only improved the battery life. I would pay more for it than this new design.
My 98% of the usage is to read something. Some website, email or ebook. Why do I need 120 Hz display for that? Gaming? That's always going to be inferior to even a console let alone a gaming PC.
My reasoning was better camera.
I honestly was going to skip upgrading but the camera and some other minor features were enough for me to make the upgrade happen.
I feel if these companies worked together to cut back on the waste of yearly release cycles, there’d be better environmental results. But every year we have a new feature because tech has caught up with demand.
Not sure what the middle ground is.
I have a Pixel 6 which takes excellent photos. In two years time, it will still take excellent photos, regardless of what the Pixel 8 or 9 or 10 does.
Yet, can you really look at your old photos and say "my God, those 2017 photos. Could you imagine taking such crappy photos with such a bad phone?" I doubt it. That hasn't been true in more than a decade even for challenging environments like in low light.
They're selling you on a better camera each year because there's basically no useful way to measure its impact anymore aside from in really technical conditions that don't affect anyone practically.
Personally, I have a proper camera, but I am not carrying it around with me at all times. My phone takes excellent pictures (I have a pixel 6) but I do feel the lack of zoom.
The quality of the main cameras hasn't really gone up in a few generations; but I do think there's been significant improvements in the photography department in phones in the last 5 years. Wide lens, macro photography, zoom lenses. These are genuine innovations.
It does make me a bit angry when software is kept locked into new models when older models are perfectly capable of running it though. But there's been hardware innovation for sure. Don't really see much of a reason to go from a Pixel 7 pro to a Pixel 8 pro, and probably not going to be the case for a few years. But who knows.
A bi-annual release cycle should cut waste in half.
Companies keep polluting the world, as if we had another alternative to live on.
This is actually a very small part of the market. Virtually no-one upgrades their phone every year. 3-4 years is more typical.
It’s for people who bought their phones 2 or 3 years (or even more) ago.
The question is how does this phone compare to the Pixel Pro 6 or 5, not how it compares the 7.
But the software development is driven by the profit from hardware sales. Why would they improve the software if it doesn't make money?
I guess in the ideal world the phone's software should be pay-to-upgrade but free-to-stay-as-is.
So far, I only owned 2 phones in my life (didn't need one before the smartphone era), an iPhone 4S and a Google Pixel 3. For now, the Pixel 3 is doing great, battery life is not so good but holds the day.
If you work in software, think of it as normal SDLC versus once-a-decade waterfall style total respec and rebuild. Which is more efficient?
It also spreads demand more consistently, rather than having 90% of demand landing in the first year and 10% spread over the next four. What would that mean for production capacity?
Continuous processes beat batch processes every time. See also: Tesla’s ideas about model years.
Enterprise computers get refreshed every 3-6 years, usually (I'd probably do shorter for most laptops, longer for desktops). Monitors can do 5-10 years. Until they became active electronics, headphones/speakers/microphones which were decades old were fine.
Biggest boost on a lot of new mobile device refresh is getting a new 0-cycle battery and a clean OS install, and for a lot of people, "buy a new one" is the main opportunity for that kind of upgrade.
Many (without much conscious thought maybe even) are doing this too.
Simply replace when needed. That’s all there is to it.
There is so much time, effort, and physical waste that is generated by slightly redesigning phones every year purely for the sake of making sales (as opposed to meaningful improvement upon the existing design or introduction of a new hardware feature). Think not only of people upgrading for the sake of it, but all of the cases, screen protectors, and other assorted accessories cast in plastic for previous models that are garbage now.
It would be nice if we could just space these things out to 5 years or so now, because that's probably how long it takes for anything to change enough to justify a new model.