zlacker

>>skille+(OP)
I feel like the elephant in the room is that there's no phone battery that's going to stay useful in anywhere close to that time frame, and replacing phone batteries is usually a losing proposition. I've tried, several times. Fake, low-quality batteries are rampant (usually degrading within weeks), and genuine ones are prohibitively expensive -- usually a significant fraction of the cost of a new phone.

>>wheels+B7
According to https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/battery-replacement battery replacement for the iPhone 6s which came out 7 years ago is $ 69.

>>g23208+lq
which is about what an iPhone 6s is worth. Repairing such an old phone is not worth it.

The sweet spot would be putting a new battery into a 3 year old phone to get another 3 years out of it.

>>Kepler+ls
Smartphones started hitting the same plateau of "good enough" performance that PCs hit years ago, where today's phone hardware is more than adequate for years to come. Going forward it would become more and more advantageous to keep old phones going by replacing the one consumable component. The biggest difference from PCs is that you're still locked into whatever OS the phone came with so when the OS gets artificially bloated there's little recourse, no lightweight OS that just works and can keep the phone going.

So 7 years of updates would be fine, maybe with one battery swap in the middle, as long as Google starts paying a bit of attention to their phones' quality assurance and control.

>>buran7+6y
Not just one component, the flash memory doesn't last forever, and it's so unnecessarily small these days that it's almost more of a limiting factor than CPU and RAM.

I'd personally like to see swappable storage and mandatory external SD card support.

We could probably get to 15 years with current phone tech, unless they invent something really revolutionary that makes everyone want to upgrade.

>>eterni+km1
15 years is a really, really long time even with Moore's law being dead. The ios AppStore launched pretty much exactly 15 years ago and everything has changed since then.

Quick reminder what we had 15 years ago: a single camera on the back, 128 MB ram and samsung processors in the iphone.

>>Kepler+at1
What we had 15 years ago vs. today is not a good predictor of the level of change we're going to have over the next 15 years. Especially when we're talking about something that was a brand new product category and brand new technology 15 years ago.

I know people who are still perfectly happy with 7+-year-old iPhones. The limiting factor for many people is not processor speed or RAM or storage space, but the lack of OS updates (especially security updates).

(Certainly those other things are limiting factors for some people, but I don't think it's anywhere near as common as it is for the HN crowd. And the storage space issue can be solved with a microSD card slot, which, sadly, few phones include these days.)