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

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

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1709651442762481877?s=20

>>Barrin+QE1
Turbo C++ was my first IDE(a birthday present when I was a kid) and I will always be grateful of it for triggering my love of programming but to say that is even in the same category as a modern IDE is a huge stretch. Of course modern stuff is laggier for most IDE's as it's doing real time analysis on your code as you type. If you want to compare it with a Borland IDE from the 90s open up notepad and start typing.

>>sanswo+rG1
Borland IDEs were definitly better than Notepad.

>>pjmlp+tA2
The editor did nothing more than notepad does today and the IDE at least back when I was using it was basically just a compiler, debugger with basic inspection window and stepping and a make system. It wasn't doing realtime formatting of your code, inspection for errors, referencing to other parts of code, autocompletion, syntax highlighting, etc.

>>sanswo+1D2
Stuck in MS-DOS?

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.