Many phones and laptops on the market are made to be so difficult to fix they become essentially disposable. We want to choose electronics that are durable and fixable, but how do we know which products are designed to last and which are destined for the dump?
This report calculates a repairability score for the most popular cell phone and laptop brands, and grades which manufacturers are designing devices to last and which are “Failing the Fix.” This year’s scorecard includes a section highlighting the three most repairable cell phones and laptops available on the market from each manufacturer to help you buy a fixable device.
Today, Microsoft announced paid extended support (ESU) for Windows 10 after we delivered 20,000 petition signatures asking them to extend support! The best choice for our planet is for them to provide automatic updates, but this is a step in the right direction. We'll keep pushing for longer support to prevent the up to 400 million PCs that can't upgrade to Windows 11.
VR risks for children and teens range from dangerous data collection to impacts on developing brains VR risks are significant enough the child health experts we spoke to recommend parents steer clear for now.
'Bad for consumers [and] bad for the planet,' PIRG says of Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows 10 in 2025, even though an estimated 1 billion PCs can't upgrade to Windows 11.
Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models. With e-waste the fastest growing waste-stream in the U.S., it’s not sustainable to consume technology at this rate. This is a meaningful step toward a tech industry making products designed to last.
Ironically (because related to Google), I feel that the constant churn of web development is what makes these older devices unusable.
I have several devices from early to mid 2010's, and the real reason these devices are annoying to unbearable to impossible to use (assuming Linux or Windows for security updates) is that they become very slow while just browsing the web or simply playing a video with a newer codec that has no hardware support on these older machines.
In my mind, this 10 years of updates is fantastic, but also not very practical towards the end of the support cycle. Better to have the option, though.
Even going as far back as Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad, while running Linux or even mildly debloated Win10, as long as it’s been outfitted with an SSD it’s not immediately obvious I’m using a 15+ year old machine until I have to open a web browser. These machines are perfectly usable outside of the boundlessly hungry entity that is the web.
If you aggressively (and I mean really aggressively) block any and all ads you'll find that you can use that 15+ year old machine just fine on the web. The bloat is mostly in the marketing and advertising part of the web, not in the content part.
As of a couple of years ago, I was using a mid-naughts iMac with Linux installed for a number of projects. It was fine for basic scripting, data analysis, and shell-based Web access.
A heavily adblocked Firefox struggled to handle one or two tabs, and became utterly unresponsive beyond a half dozen or so.
(My typical sessions run ... well into the 100s of tabs. Yes, I'm aware I have a problem, but browser state management otherwise entirely sucks.)
That machine's replacement is now also beginning to struggle under what I've considered typical and generally reasonable Web loads.
Until browsers start heavily penalising heavy sites, this will continue to be a problem.
And on a tablet, I find that my web browser uses battery 10x faster than my bookreading software. This for documents that tend to run 10s to 100s of time longer than a typical webpage's actual text, though not their overall memory footprint.
Interesting. I routinely have 100's of tabs open on a 10+ year old thinkbook with 16G in it (they were only sold with 8 at the time but replacing the two 4G modules with 8G modules worked, 16G does not seem to work).
Firefox has an about:performance gizmo that can tell you which tabs are misbehaving, this has already led to me blacklisting some sites completely, others just to close when not in use. Especially image carrousels can be very resource hungry.
modern browsers don't really keep hundreds of tabs open, they just keep a place holder and then return the memory back to the system as resources get low. I'm not sure why people think a browser can keep 100s of webpages open when modern webpages (tabs) often use 100MB->1GB of memory.
1 or 2 GB of RAM? Yeah, that would've been the problem. Old CPUs can handle more than people think but there's absolutely no getting away from modern memory demands.
Yeah. 8GB of ram is pretty much the minimum usable amount these days. If you can get 8GB into an older machine (with an SSD), then it should work fine.
Yeah something that old is gonna be heavily memory restricted, javascript chews through memory like nobody's business, then you start swapping and it's game over.
Chrome is also very resource hungry. Its great, it lives on the principle that if a machine has 16gb of RAM, it'd be stupid not to use it. Some other browsers limit themselves to the minimum but lose performance.
This is best for most people, but not for those with older devices. In that case I usually find Firefox and a mandatory adblock a lot more enjoyable than chrome+ublock. Bonus points if you have a pihole somewhere on your network.
It's also very noticeable on smartphones. My phone is as snappy with native apps as when I first bought it, but every year the ridiculous amount of CPU time and memory it takes to render a basic news article increases. The last time I did upgrade phones it was specifically to get more RAM, as I was finding that modern web pages were so hungry that switching to tab n was almost always evicting tab n-1, necessitating lots of reloads if I was cross-referencing information. And that was on a Nexus 6, not a budget phone, and only a few years after its release
Have had similar experiences on iPhones. Multiple native apps can stay in memory and play nice with each other for indefinite periods, but then I need to go visit a heavy website for some reason or another and it starts booting apps out of memory. It’s ridiculous.
I'm still using a 3rd gen i5 machine as my daily driver. It's only just now getting to the point that I'm thinking about upgrading. And even then, it's really only that I need more cores. Quad core just isn't cutting it for my C++ compilation.
Then again, I've been shifting a lot of my compute load onto a 10 year old dual Xeon server. It's good enough for most things
At home, I am still on my 2015 MacBook Pro. The only thing I wished had done with going with 16GB Memory instead of 8GB. Surprisingly Chrome and Firefox does far better with many tabs. While Safari constantly for one reason or another reload every single in-active tabs which causes insane memory paging.
Other than that, I can see it run for at least another 3-4 years if not longer.
And it is still faster than my brand new 2023 Windows PC I have at work due to all the security shit they put on it.
On a slightly newer machine (3 years old, 32GB memory) Firefox (or rather LibreWolf) again runs nicely with a few hundred tabs.
It would probably run fine with that amount of tabs also if it had 16 or maybe 8 GB, but not together with 2 or 3 IDE instancee, Teams, Slack and ome or more applications running in debug.
I have absolutely zero issues on 10 year old hardware with 16GByte of memory. Hundreds of tabs (Firefox is really good about moving them out of memory when they don't get used for a while - which, lets be honest, are almost all of those tabs) and the normal everyday onslaught of office software, a fat IDE, and a CAD editor.
This stuff is not rocket science. It's not even performance gaming. We worked efficiently in 2013, and it still works today. All it takes is some memory and a halfway decent SSD.
Slowdown can also be due to the soldered NAND flash slowly wearing out - not necessarily because the device is underpowered.
Certainly the Nexus 7 (2012) had that problem (became completely unusably slow after a few years) and I am sure I have seen the same issue with other devices (Android phones and one iPad I had).
My daily driver is a system76 from 2015 and it works perfectly fine. However, I plan to replace it with a 16" framework so I can ditch my desktop and use the laptop for gaming.
8 year old _desktop_ computers (that have anywhere from 3 to 6x more watts hitting the CPU) are one thing. Also consider whether your machine has a dedicated GPU. A Chromebook or other budget-to-mid-range laptop from 2015 would have a different experience, although I'm sure they're still usable.
I was daily driving a 2009 MacBook Pro for a while in 2018. It was... fine, especially as a Vim user, but if someone else used my computer, they would most certainly comment or complain with normal web browsing.
I'm writing this comment on a 2011 MacBook Pro (admittedly a fast machine at the time) with a busted graphics chip, running current Linux and Firefox, and my experience of the web is basically fine, including video. Some JS-heavy app-like sites are slow, but those are slow on my monster truck of an office workstation too.
Google's per-user software subscription model works to their benefit here, as it lets schools and businesses trade the money saved from a less frequent hardware upgrade schedule for additional years of Google product usage.
This is why we need money spent on recycling and proper cleanup. Not just shipping things to countries with lesser economies and lighting the piles of garbage on fire, but taxing profits of these devices and creating jobs for salvaging and turning the garbage back into resources that can be re-"mined" (so to speak, but from storage areas).
If this is considered unrealistic, OK, then we're right back to the same problem no matter which form of garbage we're creating.
> Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models.
The treadmill is powered by "intellectual property". Abolish "owning" ideas, and you abolish the treadmill. Capitalism would solve this issue if it were allowed to run its course. Unfortunately we've let artificial monopolies run rampant in the name of "innovation". All that we've innovated is screwing people over as much as possible.
Exactly. If a single company could not be granted an artificial monopoly over upgrading and repairing a system due to "intellectual property" laws, no company could decide when a device has become EOL. If anyone could maintain a system, anyone would maintain a system.
With some caveats. I've run used chromebooks as my only laptop for about 5 or 6 years now. You have to undo write protection (usually a screw on the motherboard) and flash an aftermarket firmware.
This is a very dangerous mindset. Copyright is only a couple hundred years old and much younger in many countries. Many parts of modern copyright (notably the infamous DMCA and equivalent non-US laws) were introduced within our lifetimes. We did restructure society but in the wrong direction, lets not pretend we can't fix that.
Bitcoin is commonly held to be worth something, i.e., an asset. But there are many who argue that its “true” value is 0. Something similar to that divergence is happening here. We, as a society, have a convention, a habit, where copyrighted works, trademarks, mining rights, etc. are restricted by law to be controlled by a single legal entity. This makes these a tradable commodity. But if the law did not apply to these, they would become worthless. It is, in fact, these laws which have created this tradable commodity from nothing. Other laws could be created to do the same to any number of currently freely available things; this does not prove that these things should be covered by such laws merely because it would create a kind of property which would have value.
There are plenty of capitalists who would disagree by arguing that "intellectual property" isn't capital because such thing isn't even possible. Many anarcho-capitalists hold this position. I'm not versed enough to argue it in depth, but the basic premise is that you can't "own" an idea/thought, and there's no scarcity at play with ideas so it fails the basic test for property.
> Google and other tech companies should continue to find ways to stop the disposability treadmill that pressures us to replace our phones and laptops in favor of newer models. With e-waste the fastest growing waste-stream in the U.S., it’s not sustainable to consume technology at this rate. This is a meaningful step toward a tech industry making products designed to last.
Uh-huh. Alternatively you could go back to books, pencil and paper.
I am really heartbroken by your response, I always feel the world/society should fight planned obsolescence. people/planet over profits. and then I see a person responding with a joke (I hope you don't mean it) when we(society) have means to make products last but some corporation chose profits against it and then greenwash with 5min mother earth videos.
I know you are aware/heard of planned obsolescence.
some people complain, these corporations have to maintain and it costs them, but those people don't realise We are gifted with wonderful opensource community like (pixelexperience os maintainers). These corporation can design it to make it easy for opensource community to maintain it after EOL.
Since you are here in HN, there is high probability you are one of the geeks in industry. I hope you fight for "planet/people over profits".
I have many of my old notebooks that I wrote in as a child. The amount of paper and ink I used was a lot. Multiply that times all the children and you see how much paper is used vs. typing on a computer.
Sometimes the technology route is better, now what we need to do is make it more sustainable.
yeah, that might be true, with all that's going on the news,my first thought was that the commenter is linking planned obsolescence with technology progress (sarcastically). Thanks for the perspective.
There are days when I felt the urge to forgo the computing and go back 5 years when world is hopeful and not overwhelmed with computing
You have to either be very young or be very LCD-brained if you think advocating for simple, effective, time-tested teaching methods must necessarily be sarcastic.
Yeah! We should keep kids away from technology that has reached 100% saturation in all other parts of society. Schools, as places for learning, definitely shouldn't integrate tech into teaching-- after all, school is definitely only about teaching outmoded skills and not about preparing children to integrate with society.
The old way wasn't broken so why fix it, after all.
Exactly. School is about teaching and books+pen+paper is perfectly adequate for most things that they teach in elementary school.
What do you even lose by not having a laptop per child? Most of us suck at using software. Well, correction: most software sucks to use. And when has someone like an elementary teacher made a child better at using a computer..? It feels like a joke just asking that question.
And unless Bret Victor (or someone like him) has revolutionized digital teaching I'll bet that modern digital teaching is not categorically differen than the old ways (pdfs?).
It's so weird to me that you'd use this as logic for NOT teaching tech in schools.
If only there were some mechanism society had to convey knowledge about how to interact with society and common, everyday things, like some sort of centralized location you can go to where you're given the opportunity to gather and explore new information. Ideally, we'd work this concept into society in a way that the younger generation would gain these skills as soon as possible in their lives, and we'd put effort into making sure the individuals conveying that information possessed the skills they are teaching (again, through some sort of societal mechanism to instill basic knowledge)
> > > And when has someone like an elementary teacher made a child better at using a computer..? It feels like a joke just asking that question.
You're quoting this again as if it isn't critically damning to the position you're trying to convey. As though you actually believe the existence of ignorance is a logical excuse to continue perpetuating ignorance.
If only some facility had existed in that elementary school teacher's life that had instilled those skills in a way that it wouldn't be a joke?
I don't know, maybe like some sort of centralized institution where you can go to gain knowledge about basic concepts you might encounter when interacting with society. Some sort of... societal mechanism for ensuring people are competent enough to interact with their world.
Can you think of something like that?
> By obliquely and sarcastically referring to the teaching institution you have convinced me. Well played.
Well, having it stated plainly for you clearly hasn't done the trick. Sometimes different approaches are needed!
> This is a big victory for the parents, teachers, and students
Who should never have been using computers in the first place. There's really no point. Using gmail and gdocs doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other software is pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.
My mom sent me a photo of me when I was about 8 years old, playing on the home computer. It was very expensive to have a computer in Brazil at that age, and my parents used it for their work. I used it for games. I grew up using computers. Just getting the games to run, was something that needed knowledge back then. That lead me to at my teenage years, to try out programming, cause I wanted to make some changes to the open source version of a mmorpg my brother and I played. That lead me to choosing computer science. That lead me to being a FAANG engineer.
I had a leg up agaisnt every single one of my peers during all my teenage and university years. When my peers were learning to use a computer, I was already programming. When they were learning to program, I was already good at it.
You say that computer for young kids have no value?
Useless? That computer usage was the single most valuable thing that has happened to me in all of my life!
Not to be antagonistic, but this story makes it sound like your advantage came from the fact you had a computer early and your peers didn't. If everyone gets one, there is no advantage. You've just created a new necessity instead.
That's an odd takeaway but even if you're right, people who don't use computers suffer a massive disadvantage. Even more so if all their peers used computers. Doesn't change the fact that GP's "parents, teachers, and students
[...] should never have been using computers in the first place" is nonsensical flamebait
Which is only needed at the end of secondary school, and only at higher levels. Before that, essays are very short, and should be handwritten, or they not even part of the curriculum.
If we want schools to reflect useful skills, we'd be better off introducing typing and computer skills younger and dropping the requirement for cursive penmanship.
This has already been done (in many cases, 15+ years ago) at most American grade schools -- touch-typing and computer skills instruction now starts only 1 or 2 years after handwriting instruction. This means it is introduced in 2nd or 3rd grade. (Most essay-writing remains on paper until 6th grade, though)
I mean you can apply this kind of comment to literally any technology. Cars, carpentry, electricity… computing is part of the fabric of society and making it totally inaccessible won’t help anyone. Imagine this:
> Who should never have been using electricity in the first place. There's really no point. Using power tools and washing machines doesn't teach anything of value. A lot of the other appliances are pricey and sometimes even detrimental to the school result.
Okay, and? Hand written papers haven't been a thing in nearly 2 decades unless it was some form of punishment. Also, teachers don't want to have to context switch between reading each paper, adjusting to each student's handwriting
You listed the one exception to the rule. Most AP tests (physics, math, econ, etc) don't have that. Even the SAT essay is gone. That one AP test the final stronghold for an obsolete medium
The ones you listed still have FRQs that require critical thinking. Econ is writing a paragraph and drawing a graph, as I recall, and Physics has a question where you have to reason out an experiment. And all of the history and english ones require long form writing.
Weird, I don't remember writing paragraphs for any of those tests. I took almost all the AP tests available, tho that was a decade ago. At most I labeled some axes and that was enough for perfect scores
Thankfully. Handwriting caused me massive hand cramping until much later in life when I re-trained myself to hold a pen differently. A lot of my school essays were optimized for the fewest number of words that met the base requirements.
That in itself is a useful skill, but I don't recommend it as a coping mechanism to avoid physical pain.
Yeah, writing on a word processor is a million times better (at least it is for me).
Don't get me wrong, I do think it's bad that writing things by hand is becoming more and more rare all the time. In particular, handwritten letters and notes have an extra bit of "personal touch" to them that can make them very valuable to the recipient.
However, from the time I was in High School to today I would never want to be required to write a paper, well, strictly on paper (from the beginning). I want all of that ability to quickly edit at my fingertips.
As someone who has physical problems writing by hand, papers I wrote by hand in school where better. Being forced to slow down gave me mental time to edit before I committed to page, by the time my pencil made a mark I was already on the 2nd or 3rd revision of what I was going to write.
I also have physical problems writing by hand, and it led to me handing in a lot of unfinished essays after running out of time in exams. If I hadn't gotten a special dispensation to type my exams later on, I wouldn't really have anything to show for my education. Before my issues were diagnosed, my teachers and parents felt that it was due to a lack of effort on my part and that they could punish me into writing properly, and I feel that having access to Chromebooks is worth it if it even spares one kid from having to deal with that.
On a computer I can easily rewrite the same phrase 10 times, reorganize a sentence for the best sounding flow, move or remove whole paragraphs multiple times, until I am satisfied I have said what I wanted to say in the best way I know how.
I can save off any number of possibilities and compare them side by side.
Also, none of this prevents me from spending 30 minutes beforehand thinking about what I am about to write. Although, I will admit, even if I do that I am likely to have at least a text editor open to jot down a few notes as I think about it.
I do agree, however, that the up-front thinking is a very good idea.
For me it's the lack of context switching that would get to me. I'm many years out of school (for now) but I do remember having a blank page in front of me as being somewhat inspiring. It was a new, fresh invitation to write something. Ctrl + N in a word processor just opens up a new window, and for whatever reason, doesn't carry that same weight of inspiration.
I am married to a teacher who teaches 8-9 year olds. This is her perspective from many years with that age group.
Computers and screens are introduced too early. The kids just use them to zone out and mess around.
The kids all forget their passwords, so login is a pain. To solve this the school made the same password for all. Some brat sets all the girls avatars to boobs.
The various ways kids look up porn is a continual frustration.
It doesn’t add to the learning, it makes lazy teachers lives easier. Some classes play Minecraft - I’m unclear how that’s teaching. Some use iPads to take creative photos. It’s not creative and is a waste of time and lazy.
Computers have a place in schools, and it’s with older kids than 8-9 and needs to be way more prescriptive when used with <10 year olds.
Edit: Probably relevant, my wife and I went to a Steiner school, as does our kid. That system has a pretty old fashioned view on screen time and devices - as I started typing this our child stated that metal work and leather work lessons were starting soon.
How many of us learned about computers first because we were playing video games, such as minecraft? How many of us learned what a "frame" was, and learned that "RAM" and "HDD" were things?
That familiarity builds over years to give you a half decent mental model for a computer - one that is a massive aid to college freshman learning CS.
Perhaps screens are being introduced too early, certainly there is a point where a game like minecraft is not teaching, but I wouldn't dismiss the concept outright. Familiarity with computers is why some kids soar through CS degrees and others feel like they were missing some secret pre-college class.
The thing is that most schools use platforms that are mainly meant for consumption: tablets and chrome books. You're right that many people in the previous generations picked up useful skills, but that is because we were using platforms that were primarily intended for work and creation. They were also a lot less streamlined so understanding the underlying tech was a requirement to get to the good parts.
I'm not sure collecting kids biometrics makes anything better. Fingerprints are easy to find, capture, and replicate using things students have readily available like glue or gummy bears (https://it.slashdot.org/story/10/10/28/0124242/aussie-kids-f...). Once a fingerprint is compromised the user is screwed forever because it can't be reset.
You have a point, but I don't think a thirteen year old slashdot post is the best way to illustrate it. Fingerprint authentication has to be implemented correctly, or else it does face the problem you mentioned, and other ones as well. Which Apple did. You can't steal the fingerprint out of an Apple Secure Enclave and compromise it like you're thinking. So it would need to be done right, which Google is capable of mandating for Chromebooks.
As far as Gummy bears are involved, my read of the Cisco Talos Threat Intelligence group report*, vs the competency and resources available to 13-year olds (who are not to be underestimated, tbc), is that the gummy bear trick no longer works.
I would love to here about how Waldorf education impacted your and your wife's adult life compared to the average bear. I am so close to moving so that my child can go to a Steiner school...
One counter point is that I learnt how to touch type at that age at school, admittedly on an Apple II which limited most of the problems you listed. It has been a handy skill to have.
I like the idea of kids robotics with Scratch. I want to believe that there is an opportunity with children to experience the excitement of blinking an Led with a microbit for example and suspect it would be more difficult for teenagers.
Mostly I want my kids to have an understanding of what computers can be used to create earlier than later.
That's exactly what they're not going to learn. There's nobody to teach software engineering. The only thing they learn is to copy-paste from wiki into gdocs. They'll leave school with the same computer knowledge as they entered.
Manufacturers lock us into buying inkjet cartridges at exorbitant prices. Three policy solutions to fix inkjet printers with transparency, competition, and choice. If we can fix printers, maybe we can fix it all. We can have technology that’s designed to last, is fixable, and restores our freedom to choose.
Inkjet cartridges are sold at an absurd markup. Black printer ink can be purchased wholesale for $1.18 per fl. oz., while functionally the same ink in a cartridge costs $118 per fl. oz.
Americans could save $10 billion per year by using remanufactured (refilled) ink cartridges. Refilling rather than manufacturing single-use plastic cartridges could save the plastic equivalent to 4 million single-use plastic grocery bags per year.
Printer restrictions are the poster child for the growing conflict between common-sense ideas of ownership and restrictive copyright claims.
the OEM ink is expected to last 100+ years but some of the third party inks fade in 0.2 years, none exceed 3 years.
Inkjet printing is a serious hobby for me, I print a large number of “three-sided cards” which are intended to be displayed bare (no frame, no glass in front). These are super-low cost (no frame!) so I do expect to replace them frequently, but one ink/paper combination I used faded notably in three months, which I could not accept.
I am always reading accounts of people attempting borderless printing and having inksplosions and often third-party ink is involved. Major vendors are concerned about the VoC content of inks which has an impact on office air quality, cartridge refillers certainly are not. (Isn’t PIRG compared about air quality, health hazards, etc?)
I’m not against third-party ink in principle, but it needs quality standards. Modern inkjet printers produce excellent output if you use quality materials (e.g. fancy coated paper, not “plain white”) and personally I’d never use third-party ink unless I had strong evidence about quality.
It sounds like you found the best ink for your needs! All consumers should have that choice rather than be locked into OEM ink via firmware restrictions.
In terms of the quality of third-party ink, your experience isn't entirely uncommon. Some folks have great experiences, some don't. There's a lot of variability by brand. For aesthetic/craft printing, that variability might not be tolerable.
The biggest problem I had researching consumer tips for inkjet ink is that there are NO universal quality standards for third-party brands. Other consumer groups like Consumer Reports don't test third-party ink because the industry is too volatile. The market is confusing, which is a shame. The industry rumor is that the remanufacturing trade group is implementing a certification system at some point, which is sorely needed.
This report calculates a repairability score for the most popular cell phone and laptop brands, and grades which manufacturers are designing devices to last and which are “Failing the Fix.” This year’s scorecard includes a section highlighting the three most repairable cell phones and laptops available on the market from each manufacturer to help you buy a fixable device.