zlacker

Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years.

The annual incremental release cycle is fine—what’s silly is thinking phones need to be upgraded every year.

>>bradge+(OP)
> Try this: don’t upgrade your phone for five years.

Try that and monitor your quality of life. See if you can avoid therapy.

It's not that people think they need to upgrade their phones every year, or two, or three. It's that the phones are designed for short usable life on hardware side, and on software side, neither first-party nor third-party developers give a damn about performance.

>>TeMPOr+Xb
I upgrade once every 2-3 years on average and my quality of life is great. It’s not on principle either—I will walk into an Apple Store with my existing phone and use it side-by-side with whatever is their latest. If think the new thing improves my life I’ll buy it.

Currently I’m using an iPhone 12 Pro Max. Last year when I compared its “lesser camera” to the latest and greatest, I couldn’t tell much of a difference so I kept the old phone.

The specs they throw out are always better on paper, but practice upgrading each year will yield very little improvement in quality of life.

>>TeMPOr+Xb
What is the evidence of this claim?

My wife just got to a place where her iPhone got unusable because it's running out of space - mainly having to do with her massive Messages history and photos/videos. We didn't even know until I checked, her phone is the iPhone X which was released 6 years ago and technically nothing is stopping her from using it longer except the lack of desire to prune her message history/photos/vids.

My wife is someone who's not going to suffer with a poorly functioning piece of technology nor someone who is going to work hard to optimize it or prolong its life, so the fact that her 6 year old phone works just fine is a good sign that it can, in the average case.

>>TeMPOr+Xb
Still rockin' my 6s and it is quite peppy. I take 4k videos relatively often.

>>xyzele+hj
As another data point, I've a tendency to not store too many photos and messages for long term. I think thats the reason why my 7 plus is still running like new after all these years. The only reason I'll upgrade will be 5G.

>>throwa+Lu
I do that too, recently for the first time enabled cloud sync (had a 1 TB of OneDrive storage sitting unused anyway), so most photos delete themselves from the phone eventually. But that's compensating for tech deficiency, though.

What is the point of me having 256 GB of storage on the phone, if the phone starts slowing down wholesale once I take 50% of it? I get that there needs to be some buffer for swap and flash magic and whatnot, but I'd thought it would be closer to PC / Windows, where everything is fine until ~90% storage being used.

That's on top of bloated software doing background magic. Can't speak for other phones and brands, but my experience with Samsung flagships (S4, S7, wife's S9, now S22) is that the camera and gallery app are bloated, and their performance degrades rapidly with the amount of photos you take - around 50% worth of storage is when camera starts having delays on the order of seconds, interfering with its core purpose of taking photos.

(And it's not that it couldn't be better - Samsung just isn't investing effort in making core system apps performant enough. It's hard to find efficient apps these days on the Play Store, but there are rare exceptions, like e.g. Aves gallery, which is FLOSS and manages to be leaner, faster and significantly more feature-full than just about anything else, stock or third-party.)

>>bradge+(OP)
I'll probably end up like this with my Pixel 4a because every single of modern phones feels like a downgrade. Larger, heavier, no headphone jack, unnecessarily more powerful CPU to drain the battery faster, all that stuff.

I used to be excited about technology. I no longer am. I may consider upgrading to something with a 4" screen however. That would truly be an upgrade.

>>TeMPOr+Xb
Eh? I just replaced my four year old iPhone 11 Pro with a 15 Pro. The upgrade's nice, but it was a pure luxury purchase, the old phone was still running fine (mostly I wanted the 120hz display, and 5G). There was a time when a 4 year old smartphone was verging on unusable, but that's long past now.

>>rsynno+321
Either I'm having bad luck with phones, or Android flagships just don't have the longevity iPhones do. I can believe the latter, as this seems to be the common belief about all Apple devices relative to competition.

>>TeMPOr+Op1
What’s wrong with them after four years?

>>TeMPOr+Op1
Most Apple devices will last 5 years without breaking much of a sweat.

My parents are running 12 year old Apple devices just fine, which blows my mind.

>>xyzele+hj
This is why I invest in Apple. They have made a bet, that the majority is too unwilling to forgo useless data like messages and photos and videos. If you want to save a picture or a video, why not download the photo and store it somewhere permanent? I think Apple knows most people will not manage/backup their own data. So instead of warning users or educating users, they have come up with a paid solution. iCloud storage. In the future, I can imagine most Apple users paying Apple a monthly fee to store all of their data. I suspect that Apple's profit will continue to grow with every new 8k video created and saved on their servers.

>>rsynno+133
Everything gets annoyingly slow.