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
Sure ARM based Mac laptops are great. But x86 laptops are still just as loud, hot with horrible battery life as they always have been.

>>scarfa+M92
Hyperbole much?

2003 x86 laptop: 1-2h battery life, fan ~always on, annoying tonal fan noise

2023 x86 laptop: 6-10h battery life, fan off in idle, some kind of wide spectrum whooshing sound when on

>>ahartm+qE2
You realize how bad 6 hour battery life is right compared to the MacBook Air?

And my work Microsoft Surface laptop fan never shuts off.

>>scarfa+8K2
And my work x86 Thinkpad fan rarely spins up and when it does it's way quieter than my Intel MBP ever was. Also gets 8 hours battery life web browsing which is good enough.

It's almost like there's a spectrum of PCs.

>>goosed+zV2
I never said that x86 MacBooks didn’t suck.

My former work 16 inch MacBook Pro could easily make it through a day and half of decently heavy work and conference calls doing presentations over Chime (how do you say where you worked without saying where you worked) on battery when on site at a customer. Some of their team couldn’t make it.

My personal MacBook Air (M2) can make it 16+ hours with a relative light workload and there is no fan.

Why would I ever in 2023 still put up with a heavy, loud, low battery life laptop when I could get an M1 Air for less than $1000?