zlacker

>>alphab+(OP)
It's starting to feel silly, having a yearly release cycle for smartphones. So much of this product page is focused on new software functions that may have some vague relationship with the slightly upgraded hardware, but that could mostly be released to existing phones. Every new iPhone, Pixel, or Samsung phone basically claims the camera is marginally better and hey, look at these software features that have very little to do with the hardware and should not fundamentally be a reason to upgrade to this phone.

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.

>>kimber+T71
It's funny because if they did not release a new phone every year, the old phones would be useful for longer. I recently had to replace my iPhone 7s plus because it was getting so slow I sometimes could not get the camera to open as it loaded the system down too much. This was despite the fact that the system said my battery was not degraded (it had been replaced with Apple Care a couple of times).

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?

>>Taylor+qa1
I don't update my phone every year but I also don't really want the progress of software or tech in general determined by the laggards.

>>sanswo+Xd1
If anything it seems to me like hardware advances are directly correlated with increasingly worse software.

>>hamand+wx1
People have been saying this literally since the release of the pentium and probably earlier. From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this(usually complaining about developers using C++ instead of assembly).

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.

>>sanswo+8C1
> From where I'm sitting software is millions of times better today than it was in the 90s when I first started hearing people saying this.

Define better. I enjoyed computers more in the 80s. There was less bureaucracy. Cubase on the Atari ST never crashed. The modern C++ one does crash, often.

>>grumpy+xK1
Better features, better functionality.

Much like with old IDEs old DAWs did a lot less. If you truely prefer it why aren't you still running Cubase on an old Atari or emulator?

Besides that there is the whole rose tinted glasses thing. My early experiences getting FreeBSD and Slackware running on my computers, and setting up X for example were something I'd never trade and taught me a lot about debugging systems, configs, etc. But that whole process was objectively worse than today.

>>sanswo+2Q1
both can be true. software has become objectively more abominable each passing year. spyware is being normalized, locking down and taking away control from users is being spoonfed to hipster users as "opinionated" and "curated". Have you taken a look at the chromium codebase lately? 1.5GB of compressed (lzma) "code". W T F. Just look 10-15 years ago and look at khtml, look at webkit a few years after the fork, then look at this shit? we still ordered crap from amazon back then. We still had forms to submit to HN or similar. Sure, we didnt have thin webgl wrappers, webusb, webmidi, web-wipe-my-ass updates to our japanese toilets. The amount of direct crap being put into almost everything is beyond measure

>>redeem+9T1
All those things you're complaining about existed in the past in the form of applets, flash scripts, and activex. They were way worse than a bunch of web* standards.

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.

>>sanswo+3V1
applets were largely unused and flash was mostly used for ads, neither of which were even remotely as huge and gross as the chromium codebase.

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.