> a removable battery and OS updates for two years
This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the production of electronics should not be understated. I have a Nexus 5 as a backup phone. It works just as well as my main handset. I know how to duck the G-surveillance and I'm able to keep it alive because I have the knowledge to install roms. Not everyone does. Personally, I much prefer Android over iOS. But when someone asks me what phone they should get I always tell them to buy an iPhone. This is one of the reasons why.
> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the production of electronics should not be understated.
Can you elaborate on this? Because I'm thinking of the amount of garbage I put in the bin over a period of two whole years, and the size of my phone, its packaging, chargers, cables, and manuals all together is just not even comparable. Even if you add in the environmental cost of the manufacturing I can't imagine it's even a drop in the bucket compared to other waste.
I'm sure it is a good idea to optimize for waste in some respect, but cell phones seem like they must contribute such a minuscule relative amount so as to be safely ignored for now.
That article meanders quite a bit, but it didn't convince me that the environmental impact from manufacturing phones is a huge concern, just that the price of some rare earth elements will increase as our current supply runs low, at which point we'll create new mines to increase the supply again.
And how much of that impact is mitigated from recycling phones after you upgrade?
This article reports that "producing a single iPhone (6) requires, roughly, mining 34 kilos of ore, 100 liters of water, and 20.5 grams of cyanide."
Also, "a billion iPhones had been sold by 2016, which translates into roughly ...37 million tons of mined rock".
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/433wyq/everything-thats-i...
Those numbers are pretty substantial - we shouldn't underestimate the environmental impact of our smartphone and gadget addictions.
As with anything, any bit counts. It may not seem like it makes a huge difference but in general anything that mitigates the culture of consumerism helps prevent waste.
Yes your own immediate impact on global waste is much higher from your kitchen trash than your device purchases. But people buying a new device every year, regardless of what they do with it after, encourages companies to keep producing these products at tremendous rates, which in turn results in far more environmental impacts due to everything that comes with it.
It’s sometimes hard to see the effects beyond the scope of what we see on a day to day basis, but they are absolutely there at the societal level.
My Hifi system is 22 years old now, and going strong. Rotel and Infinity built some seriously good stuff back then.
I'm afraid of how much it'll cost me to replace it when it eventually breaks, if I can't fix it. Have already refurbished the speaker surrounds once, about 10 years go.
Guy at Speakerbits (Melbourne AUS) said the speakers would be worth more than when I bought them, as the mid range quality market just didn't exist anymore - either cheap throw away after a few years crap, or you'd have to go really high end.
I thought I'd check, and it seems like Speakerbits have now closed down. That's such a shame, they did a most excellent job. I guess that's a reflection of the times, people aren't willing to repair anymore. :(
It'll be interesting to see how long Bluetooth headphones will last. You lose one vulnerability (the darned cable) and replace it with another (battery).
Good headphones have cables that you can detach and replace, with a universally supported standard (like mini-XLR) built in, so you're not locked into a cable made by a single manufacturer.
Just because OS upgrades stop after 2 years doesn't mean security updates stop. Also technically, 2 years of OS upgrades means 3 years of use since each upgrade last a year afterwards.
What's interesting is that most people that buy the 140 dollar phones tend to keep them for 3 or 4 years, and people who buy the flagship 1000+ dollar phones, tend to keep them for 1 or 2 max.
> Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste should not be understated.
Note it's 2 years of feature updates not 2 years and it turns into a brick. Everything will still work and you'll still get new apps and app updates for far longer than 2 years. Security updates go for longer, too.
Given that Apple are still managing to roll out operating system updates to iPhones that are 5 years old, a potent question is why Google and Android device manufacturers are either unable or unwilling to attempt to do the same. Planned obsolescence isn't just an attack on your customers, it's also environmentally irresponsible.
It's because of how updates work. A good overview is here [0]
Basically for an android phone to get an update, Google, the Carrier, the Manufacturer, etc. all have to update the OS for that specific model, of which there are hundreds/thousands of models of phones.
Apple doesn't let the carriers configure the OS, and is also the manufacturer. They also have only like a dozen models. So they basically get to skip all of the parts that slow down updating your IOS version.
That's just an excuse. The Nexus 5X got updates directly from Google, but it was discontinued a year after it was released. ~1 year after the last 5X was sold, it received the last feature update (Android 8.1). ~2 years after the last 5X was sold, it received the last security update.
If you're not getting updates from the chip vendor, you're going to have a hard time moving to later version of Linux, for example. It would cost a lot of money to port new software to the platform, and then the question is... who's going to pay for it?
If everyone still using a Nexus 5X chips in $50 USD to fund continued development, then maybe that could continue. But it is easier at some point to just buy a new phone.
> The phone originally sold for $400. Is that really not enough money to fund software development for 4 years or more?
No, not really.
First comes the reality of retail pricing. The "leaving the factory door with everything amortized in" unit price of a $400 phone is likely around $250 or less. The rest of that is markup for the store, shipping, warranty returns, marketing, and a bunch else.
A good chuck of that $250 (if it is even that high), pays for the actual hardware, patent licenses, carrier testing, and a bunch of other stuff.
That doesn't leave much left to actually pay for development.
And since most consumers aren't thinking about operating system updates a couple years down the road, the lower selling price will generate more profits than long-term support will.
1. If it was really $400, the problem is most ( pretty much all apart from Apple ) gives plenty of Retail margin and incentive to carriers. That means on average it is highly likely not even getting $250 out of it.
It is like those Flagship Samsung and Huawei phone, their pricing strategy is always $100 lower than comparative official iPhone price, except they are often retailing for 20% lower. Compared to Apple, you could hardly find any decent discount on iPhone, and iPhone has much lower margin for Carrier and Retail, from low end of 10s to even single digit percentage.
2. Only if it is sold for 100 millions unit +. And Google didn't even manage 10. You need Scale for it to work. That is why iPhone is unprecedented, when was the last time you saw a product in its segment taking 20% of shipment and 80-90% of industry profits?
The answer often to all these question is simple, paid up, and find enough people to paid up, in business terms this means market fit. Unfortunately apart from small bunch of people on HN, no one is willing to paid extra $50 - $100 more just for Software update, they expect it to be free, or they would rather not update at all.
And more to your point - The iPhone 7 is currently 450$ brand new and is nearly 3 years old. Not only has it received feature updates for those 3 years, but all it's predecessors down to the 5S have been receiving feature updates (ends this year unfortunately) - we should be able to expect the iPhone 7 to at least get another year or two of feature updates.
Apple does also cut features when they roll out those updates though. Not all iOS versions are equal.
It is a shame Android's update story is bad, but realistically it also doesn't matter much. Non-enthusiasts tend to not even want major updates in the first place (it's a chore - especially if anything changed on them).
It sucks for app developers a lot more than it matters to the majority consumer.
If it was a laptop of desktop definitely not. And initially I wasn't happy with 2 years on a mobile phone because I thought they would age like their bigger brethren.
The reality is none of my mobile phones have aged gracefully. They've all slowed down to almost unusable some time after the 2 year mark, despite me fighting my way past the glue and tape to replace the non-replaceable battery. The really annoying part for me, a veteran embedded programmer who has rolled his own multitasking operating systems, is I have no idea what is causing this slowdown. Nothing I've done fixes it, up to and including including re-imaging the flash.
With my latest phone I've come to accept that I'll be replacing it in 2 years. My previous phone was a Nexus 6P which cost me around $1200, which I planned to have for about 5 years (but didn't). This time around it is a Nokia 8.1 which cost me a tad over $400, so even on a 2 year vs 5 year replacement schedule it would cost me less than the 6P.
The thing that did catch me by surprise is the Nokia 8.1 is a better phone than the 6P ever was - faster, better screen. Do things really move that fast in the mobile space? Maybe they do - everyone is adding bigger and bigger IPU's now. Compare that to desktop CPU's: I don't think they don't have IPU's yet.
Which brings me back to my original point. That 5 year expectation was set by my experience with desktop's. It seems for all sorts of reasons that experience doesn't translate to mobile phones.
> I know how to duck the G-surveillance and I'm able to keep it alive because I have the knowledge to install roms.
This is unconvincing. The Nexus 5 is prone to hardware failure. My ability to install roms didn't help at all when the phone stopped recognizing its own permanent storage.
My phone is going on 3 years. No removable battery, but I followed the iFixit guide and managed to replace the battery anyway a few months ago, since it had lost a lot of capacity. I intend to keep it for another 2-3 years at least.
>This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years?
As someone who buys a new phone around every 2-3 years, two years is perfect for me. I know the developers are focusing on making the update work as well as they can on just the last two years' worth of hardware, and not "wasting time" on making it work well on lesser/older hardware.
Take "wasting time" here defined as selfishly as possible. If I'm buying a new phone every 2 years, any amount of development time that goes into making sure that update works on 3+-year-old phones is wasted on me, and explicitly means less development time was spent on features that are actually relevant to me.
Honestly, I'd be just as happy if updates were guaranteed for just 1 year (though I'd probably just sit for a year without updates between upgrades), and I'd definitely be less happy if they were guaranteed for 5 years because I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.
> I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.
In what ways do you feel that cell phones need to be pushed forward? Phones have been capable of doing everything I want and more for many years now. My biggest complaint is how quickly they become insecure.
Do you just throw away your old phone? Mine become hand-me-downs.
Until her birthday this year, my mother-in-law was using my old iPhone 5S, a 6-year-old phone which still runs the latest iOS. Now she got my wife's old iPhone 6S (4 years old), and my wife has my old iPhone X (3 years old).
Throwing away a phone after 2 years is incredibly wasteful.
I usually sell or give them away to friends that need them, with anything that isn't wanted sitting in reserve in case I ever need a backup phone (I always keep an extra one in my backpack in case my current driver breaks).
The only phone/tablet I've actually thrown away was my 2012 Nexus 7 that finally completely died last year. Everything else finds a home somewhere. :)
I'd recommend self hosting FreshRSS[1]. It works on all my devices via the browser and there's an open-source Android client on F-droid. Works with a SQLite DB, so no migration issues. PHP, so also works on my cheap shared hosting.
I'm actually a bit sad that it seems there's no decent standard for just syncing the read status and subscriptions, combined with some good native clients (like NetNewsWire, which always was one of my prime examples of why the OS X app space seemed so good in the '00s).
But hosting or paying for a common complete RSS service and accessing that with a limited set of clients seems the only viable approach these days.
Although in the last few weeks, I've foregone centralized services and do it all via NNW in the evening -- saves me from constantly checking feeds, too.
I started out with NetNewsWire, but have in the past transitioned to Inoreader - web apps work perfectly for RSS as you don't need to sync anything between devices (EUR 20/year for ad-free version)
Now if only all services could retain RSS, there's a new CMS being used by Norwegian press that don't support it - I'm actually considering cancelling one subscription because I will miss a lot of the content :/
I'm writing my own personal RSS aggregator, and one of the things I did for it was writing a spec for a service-agnostic API for RSS aggregators with the goal of being the bare minimum necessary to sync feeds and items: https://github.com/shadowfacts/fervor
I remember using this in the very early 2000. I made electronic music myself, and it functioned as a sort of mashup between Wikipedia and the recommendations at Spotify. I remember browsing the genres, getting some recommendation and searching for the files on Soulseek. When I found the files I could browse all the files of the user that shared them and often find similar acts. Lovely times. Still have the files, btw. :-)
> DDG (usually) finds the article written on toomas.net, but not the indiehackers interview. Bing often fails to list toomas as the top result, and doesn't find the indiehackers interview at all.
Are you able to explain this? Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same thing. DDG uses Bing's API (for non bang searches).
I cannot explain it, hopefully someone from DDG actually chimes in :-) If they just use the Bing API, how can their results be better than Bing? I suppose they also use other sources.
It has been authorized. The deal works like this: Petapixel pays nothing and the links in the footnotes hopefully drives some traffic to the photographer's site and social media. In this game Petapixel is the influencer that asks for free ice cream in exchange for an Instagram post. Blog spam 2.0.
I don't see why one wouldn't want to link the source and at the same time support the writer directly instead of hoping a fraction of the readers will find and follow the links in the footnotes on Petapixel.
>Blog spam 2.0. [...] I don't see why one wouldn't want to link the source and at the same time support the writer directly
I wasn't the one who downvoted your comment but in this particular case I disagree. I wouldn't call this "blog spam". The petapixel post is more like the author strategically choosing syndication[1].
As a reader of articles, I find the petalpixel url more relevant than the photographer's own website. After I'm done reading the 1 article, I can see more "trending" articles on the righthand side to read more.
In contrast, the photographer's website is less relevant because I'm not interested in buying prints that cost $1100 to $13000 USD or contacting him to book luxury expeditions.
Just wanted to provide a different perspective and why I think the Petapixel url is more appropriate for the HN audience. In fact, sending a potential "HN hug of death" directly to the author's website with virtually no one "adding to shopping cart" while using up his hosting bandwidth seems to be the opposite of supporting the photographer.
> I don't see why one wouldn't want to link the source and at the same time support the writer directly instead of hoping a fraction of the readers will find and follow the links in the footnotes on Petapixel.
Isn't that between the author and Petapixel? The author seems to have granted permission to reproduce his work there.
Ahh, the good old times when there were still somewhat important online problems that remained to be solved. He got rich solving one of them. These days I see very little problem solving and lots of problem invention.
This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years? The environmental impact of e-waste and the production of electronics should not be understated. I have a Nexus 5 as a backup phone. It works just as well as my main handset. I know how to duck the G-surveillance and I'm able to keep it alive because I have the knowledge to install roms. Not everyone does. Personally, I much prefer Android over iOS. But when someone asks me what phone they should get I always tell them to buy an iPhone. This is one of the reasons why.