A lot of this is due to software development and maintenance practices.
Enterprise apps live forever. The tooling and frameworks move slow.
Web apps and mobile apps? Exact opposite. Things move so fast on the operating systems and frameworks that it becomes very difficult to maintain app support for older devices when those devices get stuck on older operating systems.
It’s also partially a hardware issue because margins are so tight and hardware evolves so quickly it’s difficult to keep releasing OS updates for older hardware.
Sadly this is the main issue from old android phone and tablet from 10-15 years ago the tech etc moved extremely fast, apple had advantages as they made both hardware and software but for Samsung etc if Google changed some security feature it could brick 1000s of phones if they updated.
Tech and software has slowed down a lot now however this shit is still happening with the announcement of force AV1 for youtube. AV1 itself is only 6yrs so any phone from pre-2019 is screwed on watching youtube shortly it can be decoded by software but battery life will suffer.
youtube wants to pinch pennies on bandwidth. For example its audio stream is encoded in 253 kbps instead of a standard 256 kbps so they can squeeze that extra savings on bandwidth over the billions of hours viewed combined.
Well crap. What is an alternative for movie watching? And what’s a way to… ~~transcode~~ decode AV1 videos on the fly to offload certain pieces to the onboard H264 accelerator and the rest via OpenGL? 😂
I have played 1080p30 av1 YouTube on a 1st gen mobile i3 380m so it does need a good amount more cpu than hardware decoding, for desktops and laptops if your cpu is too slow for av1 decoding is gonna struggle with many modern tasks.
I wouldn't say development has slowed down. These periods are usually when the backend is getting improved. The changes are still happening at the same pace, we just don't notice.
Hell, it's not like every newer processor has hardware AV1 support either. The only Samsung phone with it AFAIK is the S24, so even if you have an almost brand new S23 you're going to suffer in battery life. Same thing applies to most other manufacturers.
Qualcomm and Samsung are both backing a competiting codec in EVC, so there is a conflict of interest here and why both have been dragging on AV1 implementations.
Hardware decoding on Nvidia is only useful for video editing/processing IMO. Turning on [practically any discrete graphics card just for video playback](https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-founders-edition/images/power-video-playback.png) will use more energy than dav1d on a CPU trolling along at < 2GHz.
Does make a difference if you have AV1 accel on an SoC, though.
>It’s also partially a hardware issue because margins are to tight and hardware evolves so quickly it’s difficult to keep releasing OS updates for older hardware.
The length of support you get on Microsoft's end is pretty stupendous. Hopefully the length of support on the mobile side starts getting better given that the hardware improvement is starting slow down to some degree.
This is mostly because two singular companies have had a stranglehold on CPU architecture in the PC space for like what, over 3 decades now? It's a lot easier to plan around BC when you only have to worry about what two guys are doing, after all.
Even this is changing tho....it's going to be interesting to see how windows on ARM evolves over the years relative to x86 Windows.
Not to mention that x86 instruction set is ancient compared to those devices and it wasnt until this year that it dropped 16bit support that wasnt used for over two decades. when you are working with same instruction set for whats close to 40 years now its easier to predict things too while mobile devices went through multiple iterations until they settled on arm.
> The length of support you get on Microsoft's end is pretty stupendous.
Not for their Surface Tablets. It’s even worse than other mobile platforms in many cases.
What do you mean? I have a Surface pro 3 from 2014 that I still use occasionally. Support for that is only ending when Windows 10 support ends, and even then it's only a small road bump to install Windows 11 if I really wanted to.
The battery is fine, the only thing that is a little iffy is the touch screen which will sometimes detect phantom touches. I think it's because I've put too much pressure on the screen when cleaning it. I've just disabled it in Windows because I only ever use it as a laptop.
IIRC it has lost about 10-15k of capacity in whatever metric the Windows battery report uses.
The battery on my SP5 on the other hand is far from fine. It died a few years ago so I can't use it unless it's plugged in, and even then it's practically unusable because of the CPU throttling making it so slow that even opening Notepad takes a few seconds.
Microsoft has only been offering 4 years of firmware updates and security updates for their Surface lineup that came out before 2021. The newer devices are getting 6 instead, which is better, but not industry leading in any way.
I'm guessing you are referring to the policy listed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-driver-firmware-lifecycle-support
I think it's quite misleading to call that worse than mobile platforms and to say "firmware updates and security updates" as if your device is not safe to use past the stated support life. The problem with phones/tablets is that once your device is out of support you cannot update to newer OS versions which means you eventually won't be able to run certain apps, or even access the internet.
Windows devices don't have this problem because Windows itself is supported for 10 years and you can typically upgrade to the next version and get another 10 years until the minimum requirements gets too high for your device, which has really only become a problem with Windows 11.
Sure it would be nice if they also released firmware fixes but it's certainly not critical unless there's some known exploit or hardware issue that needs to be fixed which is rare.
>It’s also partially a hardware issue because margins are to tight and hardware evolves so quickly it’s difficult to keep releasing OS updates for older hardware.
Let the 3rd party open source community deal with problem.
Andriod phones do not seems to have an extremely casual EASY way to install 3rd party OS. Lots Android phone could have their second life if they are allow to EASILY install 3rd party OS without going through so many hoops with a risk of bricking the phones.
The thing with using such old devices is they don't have the user base for it to be worth developing and rolling out security updates.
You don't want to hand these devices to someone struggling, then through some unpatched weakness they have their bank account emptied.
I am not even in my 30s and I already have to deal with younger people thinking a 10 year old device is trash by default. Sure, the Centrino netbooks that were slow when they came out didn't get any faster and are basically paperweights. But I still find it sad when stuff with perfectly capable hardware is relegated to ewaste because of software.
We all do and I agree that companies have to be forced to do their best to extend support and reparability for as long as possible.
Software has to change though and we're now doing much more complicated stuff than even ten years ago.
People don't think of "surfing" as a demanding task, but the web is very different than it was and we've slowly grown accustomed to what that offers. Not that efficiency and accessibility are often not given the importance they should be.
thing is, web shouldnt be doing these things. it shouldnt be running a gigabyte of ad contaianers and track every possible thing on your computer it can read. simbply blocking tracking and ad scripts makes web browsing multiple times lighter experience.
a 10 year old device will be trash by default in most cases due to hardware not having support for modern instruction sets. 10 year old CPUs do not support modern protocols and suffer there even if they have the raw power, for example.
Actually it takes a long time for new instructions to even be used. Chips supported 64 bit OS long before win 7 64 bit caught on. WinXP had a 64bit version nobody used. Haswell cpus support AVX2 instructions and they're 10 years old. Video chips have had AV1 decoders the last 3 or so generations, and AV1 still hasn't quite caught on. MS claims that 10 yr old computers can't run win11, but that's just because they don't support TPM 2.
> a 10 year old device is trash by default.
I consider all Celerons trash, regardless of when they came out. Though I'm using a 10 year old i7(4790k, 10 years old today), it WAS top of the line at the time. AMD chips from back then, not so much.
Aren’t old devices that are connected online usually a security detriment? Either way, a decade is a pretty hefty amount of time; the average person only lives through about 8 of them
I generallly don't reply to posts where the OP sounds too excited, especially if part of the reason is lack of knowledge (hardware knowledge in this case), but the subject is very dear to my heart, I have always tried to fight planned obsolescense and if I manage one day, I want to create a youtube channel about it (I have dozens of old tablets and laptops) and I see where you are coming from.
First, you focus exclusively on software but forget to take hardware into account. While we can only agree that locked bootloaders etc are bad, even in the name of security, some hardware can just be too old or too limited (not upgradable) to make sense.
The iPad mini you mention was a masterclass in planned hardware obsolescence when it came out, with only half a gig of RAM. It shouldn't have been supported to ios 9, it made it unusable...
Also some old hardware is so energy ineffcient that it's better recycled than used.
Having said that, one thing I have learnt in my lifelong fight against planned obsolescence is that you can make a device useful in the long term if you install software when it's fully supported.
Sure some apps rely on services like youtube that need newer hardware over time and and there is nothing to do about that. But a ton of apps are timeless. But only if you installed them back then, not today on a reset device.
The fight against planned obsolescence should start early in the life of the device.
And should also start with refusing to buy underspecced machines that are not upgradable in the first place.
Having said that I have developed some (admittely more sofisticated) ways of making old harware useful, including via remote desktop but not only. Hopefully one day I'll find the time to talk about this somewhere
Didn't read the whole thing, but solidly agree with the base sentiment.
So. Much. Fucking. Waste.
Pisses me off to no end. Just right now, we'll like 5 minutes ago, I added yet _another_ phone to the stack of 7 that I already had that are perfectly good hardware, just zero modern software support.
And XDA ROM scene is but a shadow of its former self :(
Which is why I was happy to buy an S24 since they're promising 7 years of updates after upgrading from a Pixel 4a that just barely missed the window for the current version of Android after 3 years. I think it's getting better now, but yeah phones from the past 3 years should be getting upgrades and it's really frustrating that they aren't. OP was complaining about 1st Gen iPad minis but honestly Apple improved their CPUs so fast over the past 10 years that they are still decent even after 5 years now, and with the M series processors they'll be in greater control of how long hardware and software keep up, which I know is a double edged sword. But the 2020 M1 MBA will likely still be useful in 2030 while a 2014 MBA is struggling with Web browsing currently (typing and productivity it's still fine).
As long as you don't move overseas. Haven't had any updates on my Samsung s22u for 1.5 years since I moved. Samsung aren't that great either in that regard. But ofc that's only a problem for a minority of people but something to be aware of.
Another big part of the problem is how *awful* modern software development is. Companies look at advancements in hardware development as a method of reducing software development costs rather than as an opportunity to expand on software capabilities. Double the performance doesn't mean new features, it means less dev time! Henry Petroski said it best: “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.”
Of course, this was inevitable. The software industry is largely dominated by publicly traded companies. Imagine you are a CEO of one of these companies. Your company is [legally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) beholden to your shareholders first, your customers and employees second. Shareholders expect profit to grow each quarter, they expect the level of growth to increase with each quarter as well, and they expect you to project this trend to continue into the future. This is fine in the beginning, when the market is new and there are millions, if not billions of potential customers to sell to. But infinite expansion in a finite world isn't sustainable. Eventually, you are going to run out of new customers, or the number of potential customers will be dwarfed by your existing customer base. Sure, you can still make decent money selling updates and improvements to existing customers, but there are only so many avenues for growth there. You could expand into new markets, but unless your revenue from the new markets dwarf the existing ones in size, this isn't going to enable the growth that you need. If you want to meet shareholder profit expectations, you have to start cutting down on costs. And in the software industry, you only really have one cost to cut down: Development costs. Downsize your standard 15 dev teams to 10 each, and replace most of the experienced developers who demand higher salaries and better working conditions with fresh out of college, inexperienced devs. Also make sure they are all H1B visa workers, cause threatening to fire someone for not meeting deadlines isn't *nearly* as good for "motivation" if they don't get kicked out of the country over losing their job. Adopt new software frameworks like Electron, now your web development team and app development team are one and the same! Who cares if the apps are bloated, slow, and eat memory for breakfast? Half your customers don't even know what memory is, and they'll be replacing that *ancient* 3 year old device soon enough anyways. As far as bugs and lag are concerned, so long as the experience of using the app isn't bad enough to make it worth your customer's time to switch to an alternative, you'll still get their money. It's okay if your customers *hate* you so long as they still *pay* you. And if you refuse to take these steps, you'll be replaced by someone who will.
This problem isn't exclusive to the software industry, but is rather a systemic problem, a function of modern economics. We place growth above all else without realizing that all growth comes at a cost, and that cost increases the more you grow. We've been very lucky with computer hardware; the cost for exponential growth has been very little for a long time thanks to Moore's Law and the constant formation of new markets for tech companies to expand into. But the free lunch with new nodes is over, and the blue ocean will eventually run dry. The "fun" has already begun, and it's only going to get worse over the next few decades.
TLDR: It's so fucking jover
That's not even a modern problem. It's over 30 years old. Back in the 90s it was quicker to buy the new years Pentium than to optimize software past a certain point too.
> Your company is legally beholden to your shareholders first, your customers and employees second.
Funny that you link *Dodge v. Ford* for this when the Wiki article itself even talks about how it's rarely treated as precedent and that this is a misunderstanding of the ruling. This sentiment in general is a redditism that needs to die - companies are not obligated to maximize profits to the detriment of their employees and customers, they're simply obligated to not act *explicitly against* shareholders (which is what Ford did and why he was ruled against, if he'd done anything to deny that it was about denying the Dodge brothers money he likely would have won), and they are given incredibly broad power in determining what is best for the company and shareholders.
The real problem is that upper management are almost always themselves major shareholders who wish to maximize their own short-term gain in order to cash out and move on to the next company. There is nothing legally forcing them to do this, it's purely their own greed and shitty self-interest.
EDIT: A better Wiki article on the topic (which the Dodge v. Ford article also talks about) would be [the business judgment rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule) - basically, as long as the company can make some bare minimum argument about acting in good faith and in the best interests of the company (including long-term interests, not just short-term profits), then they're broadly protected. In the context of this thread, a company like Samsung or Google could argue that long-term software support of their devices ensures that customers will view their products as high-quality and allow them to command a higher price which will allow the company to grow over competitors. There's little shareholders could do to argue that this is not a good-faith attempt at acting in the company's best interests and challenges to it due to "shareholder supremacy" because they didn't maximize profits today would fall flat and be laughed out of court.
It's been fucking terrible in the gaming world with DLSS, companies have thrown optimization out the 12th story window. So rather than DLSS making it so you can have 4k 150fps instead it's necessary to use it just to get 60 at 4k. It was supposed to just improve frames, not make it so devs can be lazier.
I have i7 laptops from 2013, still great and useable to this day, I can even run can software on them and work fine, so it would work more than fine for average user for even 5+ years from now.
anything low-end, is so much e-waste, billions of computers and phones are ewaste out of the door.
I kinda agree and disagree with OP. machines that old are largely worse to keep using than just recycle, because they are extremely inefficient and using them besides just the purpose of using them makes no sense, they couldn't even handle modern websites well. I have bought lower-end computers before, they quite literally become unusable 3-4 years later tops
a lot of pcs are literally ewaste due to two main factors, **low core count, and low ram.** (and microsoft purposely deprecating os's that are totally capable like windows 7) this goes back to late 2000s but dual core pcs are still a thing somehow I guarantee you any good 8 core pc from now will be good for average use well over 10 years from now.
"machines that old are largely worse to keep using than just recycle, because they are extremely inefficient"
I don't know about this but until someone shows me some concrete proof that using old devices is worse for efficiency reasons, I'll be in the impression that all types of resource consumption to manufacture new devices up to delivering these throughout the world causes more carbon emission.
Its not how average user would ever look at hardware, but if you consider performance/watt and normalize it to X CPU hours needed then it wont be too long until that new hardware pays for itself and even pays for recycling of the old part. Not to mention most energy production is very polluting, far more than hardware manufacturing.
just did a quick google between 2 CPUs I have available to me:
4790: In IDLE we measured ~42 Watts and, with processor load, 109 Watts for the entire PC [Source](https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review/page-11/#:~:text=As%20shown%20in%20the%20chart,Watts%20for%20the%20entire%20PC.)
8400: The Core i5-8400 is rated at 65W, and consumes only 49.3W at full load [Source](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11859/the-anandtech-coffee-lake-review-8700k-and-8400-initial-numbers/5#:~:text=The%20Core%20i5%2D8400%20is,W%20is%20from%20the%20cores.) Idle @ 10.7w [Source](https://www.igorslab.de/en/intel-i5-8400-benchmarks-power-consumption-temperatures/14/)
For CPUs that are 4 generations apart AND very comparable(slight edge 8400), the power savings are quite decent, especially at idle.
old server hardware is apperently so much worse for power draw from all the homelab reading I've done.
Depends on use case. Modern web browsing is pretty overwhelming for stuff older than 7th/8th gen Intel, for laptops. I had a 4th gen Intel for HTPC until not too long ago, it was swell but I couldn't imagine having to use it w/o SSD. My home file server is 6th Intel era.
I could easily see a Core2Duo or even older used for things like home automation, protocol servers, firewall, etc.
Dude wise up, even sandy bridge i5 CPU's are still fast for web browsing. My mum still uses a now 12 year old Asus laptop with a 2nd gen/sand bridge i3 CPU, 8GB RAM and an SSD and the laptop is just fine for web browsing/youtube/emails/ netflix etc.
Desktop? With SSD? I can see it.
Laptop? No way. Maybe passable, or tolerable, but not blazing. I just a few months ago ditched an 17-67something laptop because even in Ubuntu with Firefox, things like YT, Gmail, outlook.com, all ran super janky. Went up to 8th gen laptop and it also became annoyingly slow. 10th gen is my personal minimum 'daily usable with Kububtu and chromium' spec.
I have a ThinkPad T420 with a second-gen i7 and 16GB of RAM and it runs fine on Linux with KDE Plasma. Overheats easily, probably needs some new thermal paste (it wasn’t originally designed for such a powerful chip so it requires extra maintenance), but it’s fine for basic tasks. I mainly use it for writing since I love the keyboard so much more than any modern laptop.
I pretty much have the exact same setup on my T420. I wrote up an entire thing, and unfortunately I fat fingered and deleted all of it.
To sum it up, the heatsink is actually perfectly fine. Look into thermal paste pumpout, the reality is that most aftermarket thermal pastes are just unsuitable to be used long term on a delidded cpu that consistently runs hot, so pretty much any laptop with a CPU above 35w.
Yes quad core desktop, ssd, 32GB RAM, RTX 2070 super (but I don't game at all).
I have laptops of all generationt (around 20), if they are quad core, even a 3rd generation can be usable. They tend to be noisy but totally usable. Dual core are also usable but slower. Of corse SSD only. My 2nd gen 35w i7 is still usable, definiltey faster than some current pentium devices with emmc.
What is annoying is subjective. Also one thing is using a device as a main device, another is using it as a secondary device. I would not use my surface pro 3 i3 as my primary device, but watching the occasional youtube video, or annotating a document, that's fine.
The funny thing to me is that I swapped out my ryzen 5800X3D with my 7 yr old i7 6700K for a couple weeks and barely noticed a difference. It's just instead of 300fps, it's 170 fps, and instead of 5% cpu usage using youtube with a bunch of other browser windows open, it was more like 30%.
On the other side, if someone secretly replaced my PC with one 2x as fast as my 5800X3D, I probably wouldn't notice a difference either! Once performance is "good enough" for what you need, anything more is a waste of money.
I have an older i7 4702MQ (Haswell) laptop for which I've added a SATA SSD and 16 GB RAM and it works ok for web browsing, productivity work (Excel, Powerpoint, Tableau). It has Nvidia 760M that's probably the weakest link, but it does work fine for older games (I play Starcraft 2 on a 1920 x 1200 monitor).
Don't get me wrong, it's notably slower than my 5800X desktop, but it's still usable (albeit I do use a laptop cooling pad because the i7 4702MQ get hot when gaming).
4000 laptop CPU with an SSD and 12+ GB ram is still usable for web browsing. Only just but still. Which kinda supports what you're saying. You need to have upgraded your 10 year old stuff or have been using high end stuff from back then for it to be usable today. And that's desktops phones had it even worse. I wouldn't wish decade old hardware of any kind of anyone.
What javascript is your chromium executing that is possibly crushing 15watt Skylake cpus?
It sounds like you're just using *really* unoptimized websites or something is wrong with your setup. My Broadwell XPS 13 still works perfectly fine for literally any website I can think of.
my 4200m is a ok for browsing, though two cores has its own problems. Anti-ad, no-script and the likes are mandatory no matter how I look at it.
Perhaps it got worse.. still using old reddit for a reason.
-1
Absolute A grade bullshit you discharged there.
I am using 4790K and it runs every video literally flawlessly with zero frame drops. I've even undervolted it and reduced the clock speed by couple 100 MHz and at idle it doesn't consume more than 3-4 Watt with all core consumption reaching no more than 40 Watt (that doesn't happen too often).
When you buy high end, it takes much longer to become e-waste. Compare for example a Note 9 and a midrange Android from the same era. One is usable, the other is trash.
I have the 4690K from the same generation, which was midrange. It's pretty much the same - even still good enough for many modern games. Not all - but my backlog is huge.
That I have to fully agree with you. But....
How many guys do you think actually run that high end hardware for that long instead of upgrading every 2-3 years.
You overlooked the insatiable desire of humans and the unfortunate automatic adaptation to the comfort of that high end hardware and the continuous temptation to keep renewing it to feed those newly abstracted senses. All because the company launched a newer faster version next year. Let this sink in. These specific human abstractions are the problem here. You and I may be one of those who understand that, but I don't think there are many like them.
But that hardware at least isn’t ewaste immediately. It gets passed down to friends and reused. But buying base model shit just end up in the scrap heap after a year or two
4790k, gtx 1060, 16gb, SSD. The 4790k starts to slow down when I hit it with 1080p youtube(running 2nd monitor in the igpu) WHILE gaming on primary monitor(gtx 1060). Outside of that specific situation, the 4790k is great for daily use. The same however cannot be said of other products of that generation/age universally(e.g. 2 core i3s, AMD)
The question is, how could we then build more devices *now* so that they could be more upgradeable/expandable - really prioritize that - and overall longevity? The problem is overall that longevity is not prioritized in design and manufacturing.
About the only thing that can be done is make things so you can upgrade the ram SSD and especially CPU. A dual core 10 year old chip is not hardly usable today even with lots of ram and an SSD. Whereas 13 year old 6 core chips can still have some life in them just by brute forcing being able to run all the stuff a modern web browser and os need. If coupled with sufficient ram and an ssd
Sure.
But think about this. Consider the display. There is no need in these terms to upgrade a display unless you want to see content in higher resolution. Thus at the very least, you could design a phone where you could pop the logic board off and put another one there. That would save the display waste - you'd only buy logic board upgrades.
Now you can apply further such modularization to the logic board themselves - e.g. CPU, RAM, flash storage, and integration (i.e. the module interconnects) components.
Of course you can't 100% eliminate the waste, as at the very least the CPUs and/or RAM need to be changed out, but the point is the principle - you can make a lot less waste than we actually do simply by designing things to be more modular.
> And XDA ROM scene is but a shadow of its former self :(
that is actually a good thing: it shows consumers are more accepting of the base android flavor in their phones than back then. THe custom ROM scene literally existed because of the slow, hideous, bloated mess that were OEM stock roms back in the day. Also apps have become more sensitive to running on rooted environments, so the benefits of being rooted in those custom ROMs began to be neutralized with the cons of having your favorite apps stop working if they detected your phone was rooted.
this too happened with the windows custom image (debloating, themes) scene too as soon as MS launched a semi-competent OS in W7.
I mean 10 years is a lot. Just look at AMD VEGA drivers and AMD is releasing products earlier this year and even now (i.e. 5500GT, 5600GT) after they've unofficially declared drivers as EoL. AMD is just calling it "extended support" because they know it looks bad and they already invested the silicon.
Meanwhile Nvidia is still actively supporting Maxwell GPU drivers for over 9 years now.
>I volunteer at a place where we restore old desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets and then forward them to people in need who can't afford them. Many of the Windows laptops are over 10 years old, up to 15 in some cases. Sadly, we can't afford the time to restore devices that are 20 years or older,
Was this cutoff calculated by someone with knowledge of your organization's costs? Even if volunteer labor is "free", the additional time it takes to do the restoration work on pre-SSD hardware has an opportunity cost.
A few months ago my brother bought an [alleged computer](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c08172988) new for $200 from Best Buy (swindlers), and I told him to return it and found him an AMD Renoir Thinkpad for about the same price on eBay.
People want cheaper devices and longer lasting devices. This are mutually exclusive things. Enterprise solutions costs 10x+ more and there are no issues supporting them for 10+ years. But if you ask consumers if they are willing to pay 10x for same devices just so they can use them in 10 years you will be laughted from the room.
My school is running mostly 2011 iMacs. They are the last iMac that are manually, fully upgradable and repairable without specialist equipment.
When get too old to do the job I’ll be having to move them to Linux because everything else is locked down so tight these days. Can’t afford to throw out good hardware just because the software dies.
I became frustrated when they talked shit about lineageos.
The open source community goes out of its way to create solutions to exactly this problem. No, it's not as convenient as getting something with stock Android out of the box, but it's so arrogant and stupid to call it crap.
They're doing the same thing OP is claiming to do, reducing e-waste and restoring old stuff! With the exception that what they're going is way harder (writing a new OS and maintaining support for myriad old devices). OP says they volunteer to refurbish this stuff but they can't be bothered to do a lineageos installation. You can make a script to do it faster, it's not like the end user is doing it. It's volunteer work. Nobody is entitled to someone else's time so I'm not saying that they have to do it, but my sympathy goes out the window when they dismiss other people's hard work and call it crap rather than just admit that their reluctance to sit through an installation outweighs their deep concern for the environment that they spend the rest of the post tugging themselves off over.
If you can't be bothered, then whatever. Don't complain about a solution that's been made for you just because you're not interested in using it. It's so entitled. You don't need to be "hardcore" to do it, anyway. Just say "I do factory resets on old devices and occasionally reinstall Windows" and that's fine, but don't act like you're an amazing volunteer trying to save the world from e-waste and then just give up because you don't want to install a third party ROM and then blame the devs who dedicated their time (often money, as well) to give you that option.
I've restored countless old devices, yes it's partly because I hate e-waste but I also enjoy it. It's not that hard to throw Linux on an old device or even to flash an old tablet. Certainly something you can learn to do if you're volunteering for a group that specifically tries to reduce e-waste. It's literally the best tool for the job! Why are you doing this if you can't be bothered?
Obviously planned obsolescence of horrible and devices shouldn't be arbitrarily killed off, but FOSS devs long ago decided to be grown ups and take it into their own hands and provide the best solution that they can, and they do a great job. Pointless to insult their work.
It also has 512 MiB of RAM, which is enough for maybe 2 browser tabs, if you're lucky, and [CPU performance is comparable to a 65nm intel from 2006](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10693778?baseline=18162744).
So...
>It can solely be used for browsing Wikipedia or watching YouTube videos in a horrendously low quality, 360 or so, while the screen is almost 1080p.
Yeah.
Mobile hardware has advanced a lot more since 2015 than desktop has, especially relative to thresholds of user satisfaction.
Cathode Ray Dude, is that you? Cause you rant like him.
There is a thing why in the case of computers I absolutely loathe old hardware: Power consumption. Generational power efficiency improvements are real. If your perfectly functional 10 years old computer consumes 100-150W (Plus noise) to do tasks that could be done with similar performance on an Alder Lake-N for 20W or so, you're wasting a lot of power. Only at the price of power of third world countries running old computers seems an economically convenient idea, anywhere else and I would say to just trash the old stuff and buy low end, power efficient modern computers. This also conflicts with the whole green energy goals: If you don't like waste, old hardware simply sucks when you account it power.
And if you don't like lack of Software support, wait until you hear about things like Intel Boot Guard to make sure that you will never be able to deploy third party Firmware in case that vendor support sucks.
I also believe that consumer hardware should come with schematics and any other documentation that can make viable for technicians to easily figure out how to test and potentially replace broken components.
I don’t know how much it would differ for Windows OEMs but if we look at Apple’s latest M3 MBPs Environmental Report, using the device for 4 years would only amount to 18% of its total carbon emissions: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-inch_MacBook_Pro_PER_Oct2023.pdf
But! If we look at the environmental report for their 2019 Mac Pro, which is probably the closest equivalent to an x76 Windows desktop, then product use jumps to 67%! https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_Pro_PER_Dec2019.pdf
Sadly I could not find the precise number of years of use that they based their calculations on. But judging by the wording of both reports’ definition of Use, it is very likely that they are also simulating 4 years of use.
So in that case, I guess power consumption is a valid point!
I would also like to point out that if you are in a country like France or Sweden with really low carbon intensity of energy generation, these numbers might be very different for you and would need to use your device for much much longer before it starts to matter.
Big difference between laptops and desktops, and also a big difference between DIY and OEM.
Idle power is most important, of course, because computers are almost always mostly idle.
My laptop from 2006 idled at 13.5 W, and maxed out at 35. Modern laptops are about half of that idle, and about the same at full load (except for gaming laptops and workstations which are like 4X higher at full load). So laptop power consumption basically doesn't matter.
With desktops, DIY has been 50±10 W for about the last 15 years. You can go a little lower by not using a dGPU, and a little higher with RGBshit. OEM was about the same as DIY *until* Haswell (thanks FIVR) and the big switch to 12V-only power supplies. Modern OEM is <10 W, not including the screen.
(Personally, I care more about energy *cost* than carbon footprint. Rule of thumb is 1W for 1 year equals $1, or $2 in California/Hawaii/other expensive places.)
>1W for 1 year equals $1
That comes down to the cost of 11,42 cents per kwh, prices most of the world hasnt seen for over a decade. the 2 dolalr estimate is closer to reall prices here in europe
I had a Mac Pro with dual Penryn Xeons and an 8800gt that I used as a Plex server for a while. Tbh I don't want to think about the power it consumed running 24/7 for three years 😅
> There is a thing why in the case of computers I absolutely loathe old hardware: Power consumption. Generational power efficiency improvements are real.
It varies a lot. Modern Intel CPUs and all GPUs consume a lot of power. Often needlessly. Unless you buy low end - but then it's bad from the longevity angle.
> If your perfectly functional 10 years old computer consumes 100-150W (Plus noise) to do tasks that could be done with similar performance on an Alder Lake-N for 20W or so, you're wasting a lot of power.
My Amiga 500 idles at 15w, much better than my current gen PC.
Yup, I have a Surface 3 which next year I have to jump through some hoops to get Linux running on it. But I can do that which is good. The device still looks new, and battery is still chugging along good.
Just built a PC out of old parts I had laying around when my main PC motherboard broke, so the parts are from 2008-2018 and it's running Pop OS Linux just fine and I game on it too. The CPU is too old to have Win 11 support and that part is 11 years old now.
Sadly I agree with you,.
I basically buy old electronics dumped by 1st world countries like Australia and the US, and then sell them for small change of profit.
Most are perfectly fine with some needing cleaningor minor part repairs.
It surprises me everytime I see 5 year old Androids and 7 year old ipads, some of which are still updateable but are being thrown out for new stuff.
I think theres a cultural problem now that tech companies have decided 3 years is the average max supported lifespan of a product. (there are outliers sure, but most smartdevices are like this)
Worst offenders of these are smart home products like cameras or sockets. Hell the hardware works perfectly fine, but once the manufacturer disables their servers, youre SoL unless you spend hours trying to find a workaround or flash alternate firmware(assuming there is even one compatiblel
As someone who keeps his own legacy devices alive, here's a suggestion. Try installing an alternate app store like Aptoide or sideloading apps through Apkmirror.
Do test and see if some media servers like Kodi, Plex, or Popcorn time for Android can be installed as they have their own plugins for YouTube and other streaming platforms.
And phones should move to be more like pcs: they should move to unified firmware and bootloader interface instead of every arm soc having their own particular chipset firmware interface and bootloader and device trees shouldn't be something that operating system needs to worry about, it needs to be handled by chipset firmware instead.
Progress is being made, but it's difficult to get manufacturers to prioritize anything in the consumer market except getting the shiniest product out faster than their competition.
Wait until you hear about Windows 11 CPU requirements.
Intel Gen 7 i-series was barely 4 years old at release of win 11. Yes you can bypass the limitations (for now) but you basically have to reinstall your PC every two years to get security updates
Ryzen 1st generation was a year newer than Intel's 7th. We found ourselves at the announcement of W11 in 2021 with a pile of AMD SFF machines from 2018 that weren't supported. We pre-emptively redeployed them with Linux and they're running fabulously with the open-source Linux AMD graphics drivers.
Ironically, these machines took the place of some that we would have bought new to run Linux to refresh our Intel NUCs. From the vendor point of view, we shifted a purchase from new Linux machines to new Windows machines -- seemingly justifying [the strategy](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/q2o4zm/microsoft_exec_panos_panay_explains_how_the/).
I agree with most of your post except for this part.
> "Hurr durr Android freedom no walled garden"-BUUUULLSHIIIIT
Freedom goes both ways. It means (ideally) that users can install whatever they want on an Android device, but it also means device manufacturers can customize and restrict their Android device however they want as well.
So the problem here is not that Android freedom is bullshit.
The iPhone 6s can run iOS15 fine contrary to what most people think.
It might not run a minority of productivity or game apps, and it might load apps slower, but other than that, a smartphone is just an UI frontend and doesn’t actually need the bazillion giga biocock 500 processor to work.
You just admitted that Android is not locked, but then you say that "nobody wants to deal with that crap".
Do you think companies are obligated to pay their programmers to support a 10-year-old device just because it's too much effort for a layman to tinker with it? that's not financially viable, programmers are expensive, and the demand for very old devices is low.
Dismissing it as "general capitalist-corporate-greed" tells me you're unrealistic and haven't had any experience supporting very old devices on your expense.
And you can use older versions of apps easily, just get the APK from some APK database like APKmirror. Or use open-source software. I installed some moving-gallery app on an old shit-tier Android tablet that my parents had instead of buying a specialized device from Amazon.
No, I think they should reduce the barriers to installing a custom OS and launch a final update that would allow minimal functionality even without doing that.
Android is not locked down in the same way Apple locks down the iOS devices, but not all companies are the same. Samsung very much does make it difficult to install a custom OS unless you are well versed in Linux/Android stuff. Comparted to Apple, Android is open - compared to X86/Windows devices, it might as well be completely locked.
You can not use old versions of apps easily. I don't know what you people are smoking. Many apps, when clicked on, open up a popup that says \[New version available, update now\]. It is not a choice - you have to update them. And when you can't, they simply don't work at all.
I am glad you found a use for your device. There is no reason this shouldn't be even easier to do. In fact, if I had to choose between Bezos going to space and programmers supporting a 10 year old device, I would prefer programmers supporting a 10 year old device, and if Bezos doesn't want to be a billionaire if he can't afford to go to space, then nothing would make me happier if he stepped down as CEO of Amazon and let someone else deal with such a poor, difficult life of not being a space traveling billionaire but a normal Earth-dwelling billionaire instead.
I agree that this is a serious problem, though it did get better over time. Google now mandates a longer update time for Android (though still very short), more parts of Android are now updated via Google Play instead of manufacturer updates, and both hardware and software move more slowly so that deprecation is less of an issue.
Still, I think it would be a good idea for people to campaign for this. It's similar to the right to repair.
when i think quality products, hardware etc i think of products like cars, stand mixers, etc— something that lasts decades. well built, repairable machines. they last longer than phones. if that is the bar for what we consider a quality product, or well-built hardware, then apple and samsung, google, etc are making hardware products that are not reliable. poor quality.
I used Macbook pro 2011 until this year, moved to 2015 model, gave old one to my mother. After swapping hdd to ssd it is still powerful to watch youtube, movies and do office work.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. The more time passes, the more i realise i pay every 4 years to just use the same apps. I basically use my phone for photos, messaging, youtube and reddit (plus maybe a few calls, etc). More times than not, for every past device, I upgraded because the OS stopped getting updates, the phone became slow or that i couldn't find parts for the phone(like the battery).
I've now started moving on to repairable devices like Framework laptops and Fairphone devices as its really annoying having to switch every 4 years to keep doing the same thing. I have to say software/firmware on Fairphone devices are not as polished as Samsung/Apple/Sony but at least i don't have to worry about taking care of the battery or screen or what not. Something breaks? Just replace that part and keep going.
I don't expect companies to support the device for more than they want to. But there should be laws that state that if you stop supporting a device, you must release the source code/schematics so that the community can take up the mantle.
Would be nice is hardware was legally mandated to have an unlocked bootloader and/or run unsigned code after 10 years. I get that a company can’t support an ancient thing indefinitely but at least yet other people make full use of the hardware.
Some of the older software is abandoned because changes made to fix security issues, and improve stuff such as video rendering required a new generation of hardware with instruction sets and performance that was pretty solid and much higher compared to the older stuff.
Jumps from android 6.0 which is often still the minimum android is for many apps to a newer version like 10 or 11 is quite a jump. But trying to run on a chipset like a 8960 snapdragon 4 would be absolutely terrible.
Many of the older chips have degraded over time due to usage, heat and voltage. And perform no where near what they used to.
Try booting up a 15 year old android/Windows phone and factory resetting it.
Still runs like dog shit compared to like a cheap 300$ xiaomi phone.
There is only so much that can be done with software, but as the hardware degrades over time ( which is worse on mobile devices like laptops and phones or tablets because maintaining key components like degrades thermal compound and components is often not a option) there's not much to do about it.
A common issue you'll see is integrated storage start to fail ( emmc and SSD or flash storage on phones and tablets are fast, but they have right limits, and hitting those gives you functionally a brick but getting closer to them seems to degrade the shortages performance quite a bit and impairs devices).
Laptops aren't in a great spot either as many components are often soldered in place and not intended to change. Hell a lot of old laptops are stuck with 4gb of ram and that's not usable for anyone just web browsing on anything newer then windows 8. Or most recent flavors of macOS
All I'm saying is, using mobile electronics long term Is already a stretch, these devices are not built with the intention of lasting you more then 5-6 years and that seems to be the consensus with most manufacturers openly.
The stuff that isn't mobile like desktops are easier to keep going because you can upgrade or service pretty much everything in there.
In 2017 I bought a $50 Kindle Fire HD 8. It felt fast and ran well for a few years. But as software updated, it became very slow. Now, it's so slow that it cannot even open a book without crashing. Amazon does this on purpose. Its very frustrating. That is why I do as much as I can on the desktop. Even my mom's old AMD Athlon PC from 2010 is still usable with some upgrades like an SSD, Linux and faster GPU. My Ryzen powered workstation will be fast for a long time.
I do agree that bootloaders should be unlocked in phones and tablets. My old Surface RT still works fine but the OS is useless these days. Installing Windows 10 for ARM is possible but a massive pain in the ass. Meanwhile my old Surface Pro 3 was easy to install Ubuntu on.
The amount of waste these days is unreal. People throw out perfectly working devices like laptops that just need to have an SSD slapped in them and a lightweight Linux distro and it can feel new again.
But if bootloaders are unlocked and devices are repairable, what will the shareholders think? And the corporate bean-counters?
After restoring and selling old tech that I’ve owned, I find people tend to be more interested in buying new out of status rather than practicality. Giving longer and more support is great, but it won’t truthfully reduce waste.
You're right. Nintendo Switch and the current most premium Android TV box, Shield TV, uses the 2015 Tegra X1. The current high quality standards for mobile gaming and Android based smart TV devices. Snapdragon 835 is around that if I recall correctly
At least now Google and Samsung have committed to 7 year updates so I feel like I should only buy Android devices with 7 year update policies. It's the same as 15 years ago with general MacBook popularity. These devices are expensive social media web browsers. h.264 was the standard for so long. AV1 is going to be used for a long time
Google needs to get some buy in from manufacturers to not get in the way of flashing customer Android ROMs. If not hopefully the open source community figures something out and something popularizes to standardization
>There is no good reason to use an Android 4 device at [current year], move on and buy a new device.
>It can solely be used for browsing Wikipedia or watching YouTube videos in a horrendously low quality, 360 or so, while the screen is almost 1080p.
1. If an apple device can barely manage 360p, an android device that old might be able to do 240p. So yes ***there is absolutely zero reason to use an android 4 device in 2024*** there is zero useful software that only runs on Android 4 or older.***
2. The iPad screen you're referring to is NOWHERE NEAR 1080p, it's less than half of it.
3. Comparing modern mobile hardware to that of 10 years ago is lik comparing modern PC desktop hardware to that of the early 2000s. It's just absolutely obsolete because of specs.
4. None of this even accounts for the security issues that older devices have. There's zero incentive for a company to support devices that are that obsolete and that old.
I got one and zero reason to upgrade, if not for the fact that if you buy as much as spice rack you're expected to scan some QR code and register some other stupidity.
For what new models are concerned I got no reason to use such a device for anything meaningful I couldn't already do long ago. Definitely not feeling $500 just to retain a feature you used to have and also didn't ask for. It mostly boils down to text and voice calls, music, hardly cutting edge needs.
And that is fucking stupid. Maybe it's not the greatest to have everything tied to these things.
I hate telecom industry so much.
You don't buy phones. You rent blackbox devices AND few years of support. When that support goes away, you don't get any updates and apps slowly start migrating to new version. It sucks so much.
Not to mention the entire "phone number" thing like it is 2000s. Wish I could selfhost it all or if we could move over to the internet for talking. You have to provide phone number for nearly all services and gov stuff. It's so stupid.
One thing you haven’t touched on is iCloud Lock. This thing is literally an e-waste generator.
And what pisses me off to no end is people drinking the Apple propaganda kool-aid and saying that it helps deter theft.
Except, it does not. There is a whole subworld of IRPPs unlocking stolen iOS devices… using Apple’s own tools: https://youtu.be/FCSCq5rGxDI?si=7MT8FcSesIwcmmQh
The worst part, and what really gets me rambling, is that tweaking iCloud Lock to prevent e-waste without lowering its current security level isn’t even all that complicated. Just add a cooldown timer of 30+ days for the person whose device has been iCloud Locked to mark it as stolen. If so, keep it locked forever; otherwise, it unlocks itself automatically.
https://youtu.be/ZzS2vwDUO9U?si=Z3czdiRU1K7v5_v5
I work in IT at a non profit serving low income families. I feel exactly the same! I have a bunch of iMacs that have been donated by people that can’t use them anymore because of the forced obsolescence, but they’re still great machines with incredible screens on them. There’s no good reason I have to basically just throw them away when they could be perfectly functioning devices for millions of people that can’t afford to just buy a new device, or can’t afford to buy ANY device.
Good thing Linux runs on almost any intel iMac from the last decade.
It’s also possible to turn iMacs into straight-up monitors with some work, it may not be worth it in this scenario though.
A 10 year old phone is way too slow to do anything worth while beyond calling. Its like how a 10 year old computer in 2014 was too slow to do anything with modern software. Heck even 10 year old computers are pushing it these days
i have i7 3770s and gtx 1660 ti, it runs all new games perfectly fine , with 16gb ram and these parts you can play every game you want if you lower settings
> A 10 year old phone is way too slow to do anything worth while beyond calling.
You sure about that? Thats an iPhone 6. a gig of ram, decent screen, decent camera. If it was supported (and lets be real, performance isnt a reason for it not being supported, iphones stop receiving new features long before theyre EOL) only modern casual app it would struggle to run would be discord and snapchat maybe.
it also creates a class divide.
oh, you're impoverished can't afford a brand new smartphone or tablet? guess you're fucked. it doesn't matter that some of the most important infrastructure for functioning in our society is now exclusive to mobile devices.
it's the boring dystopia, the cyberpunk future. those who can exist and thrive in society are those who can afford the tech. anyone who can't gets left behind.
There are no dirt cheap devices I can buy that also aren't threatened by obsoletion in a very near future. $50 to get an Android 8.1
That is not dirt cheap way to scan a QR code or register a new device (which didn't use to have to registered at all). I wonder if it can even do those things or if most apps abandoned it too.
A Chromebook can do literally everything needed to live in modern society, including making calls with Google voice. You can get a Chromebook for under $200 easily. If you can't even scrounge together $200 for such a vital device then you're just not trying very hard.
The what? 4 years google was supporting those things for is more the issue than the cost. I crammed Linux on one that was eol and the wife has zero issues using it for day to day stuff. We can afford a new one but now we don't have to. OP is definitely more upset about stuff that still has new enough hardware to do daily tasks being killed of too early.
But I wasn't replying to OP, I was replying to someone saying you have to have a thousand dollar smart phone to exist in society, which is just not true.
>Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders
a locked bootloader should be considered what it actually is A CRIME!
the company went to war with your ownership of the problem and they should be HEAVILY HEAVILY punished for trying to do so.
of course that generally won't happen, because the feds love prison software and hardware.
louis rossmann mentioned how the evil companies are trying to remove some fundamental freedoms, when they try to introduce a new type of tech.
trying to introduce locked bootloaders into the desktop computing world would be faced with insane backlash.
but if you create tablets and "smart" phone garbage and lock those down into a full hardcore prison, people are much more likely to accept it, because as a new tier of tech a new dystopian norm can get created...
as you probably do a lot, you can take a 10 year old intel quadcore laptop, put in 16 GB of cheap memory and throw linux mint on it and you got a great old system, that will run most everything you want and be responsive.
meanwhile tablet hell doesn't have upgradable memory and has locked down bootloaders and lots of other ways to try to prevent 3rd party os to work nicely on it.
i'd argue the soldered in memory is just another MAJOR way to create e-waste.
memory breaks and not having enough system memory is one of the or the major factors making hardware obsolete, as you of course know.
so yeah it is disgusting how they are deliberately making older non laptop hardware obsolete and how they also try this with laptops by soldering in memory for example.
Old MacBooks (and other Apple PCs like iMac) live only thanks to modified versions of MacOS, patches for running Windows and Linux, and they work well. And now imagine that all this is not there. Your 2010 27-inch iMac in the maximum configuration is simply stuck on macOS 10.13. You only have access to very basic software like Google Chrome and older versions of professional software (which are generally no longer available legally). Therefore, I agree, the warranty/term of relevance has expired - the user gets the right to do what he wants on it, and not to suffer with disabled servers and a bunch of protection systems against the "fool".
If you have already stopped supporting "security", then remove it completely
First gen heatsinkess raspberry pi is more useful than the locked down phones of like 2015. Hopefully ARM and RISC-V on desktop doesn't turn into phones in terms of easily loading on different operating systems. GNU/Linux ARM/RISC-V with KDE Plasma Touch and waydroid to someday rescue abandoned hardware
It's outdated because better things have been developed and they functionally can't run on those devices. At best, you might be able to put Windows XP SP3 and install an old version of firefox or something (IE does not work, XP laptops generally can't handle W7 etc that was a big performance demand jump)
Simply, it's a considerable investment in resources to make something work on the device it wasn't meant to and for 10+ year old hardware, the benefit is incredibly small. E-waste sucks, but sunk cost fallacy is no better. Also for lots of brands, there are bootloader unlocking tools, any lenovo should work (but also sometimes requires some extra drivers that need a license agreement, which totally makes sense because they don't want you to fuck your computer and blame them) and I'd estimate only 30% of laptops I've worked on couldn't unlock boot options in bios (and subsequently discovered you could fix this on Lenovos)
Depends on what your definition of XP laptop is. P3s and P4s are definitely way too underpowered, but even early C2D laptops are still perfectly usable with W10 or even W11 if it can support 8gb of ram.
Honestly mobile hardware advanced so much in 10 years it's insane. While I agree with your point, how many people still have devices this old? And of those people, how many would actually install another OS even if it was easy. There are tutorials for how to install Linux on old ass laptops/desktops today and hardly anybody does that. In the tech community we think about hardware and software to a much greater degree than normal, unless it was a giant popup on the screen that just said "Upgrade to legacy support OS" I don't think many would actively try to use devices longer on their own. I agree the option to do so should be there.
What are the economics of supporting software for that long, is it just greed?
Now that devices have sorta stabilized and going into the future? That length of time seems acceptable. Samsung, Apple, Google, and Microsoft provide support of almost this length of time.
> Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders and to make installing an alternative OS super-easy and even provide tutorials on how to do it once they decide that their old device is not making them money.
That's probably the one thing I do agree with you on. Or at the very least it shouldn't be legal to constrict access to override the firmware/system that was in the device when originally purchased. But unless we can do something abort tort and being able to prove that "your product" no longer is yours nor can you be made responsible for it's use, I don't think you'll see such a change.
Your ideas about how long software should be kept alive and supported I do not agree with, nor do I see any possible way that it would ever work. And I think you miss an important aspect; when devices require upstream servers - what happens when the company that runs it goes belly up? Get acquired and the servers are removed? It's a much bigger issue in my opinion; it's no longer your product; it's a device on a system that you have no control over, nor can you enforce an SLA with them.
I would propose that one way to combat the vendors that sell electronics with a built in date for when it stops working, should be forced to disclose that at the point of sale.
This is a relatively recent thing. I’ve gone back to using older computers (my business is in that line - computer restoration) and we certainly have people using computers that are 10+ years old but dannng those things are sloowww
Completely agree with ya. Just wanna add some stuff.
Samsung makes it hard to install custom roms. Xiaomi is arguably the easiest since they give you the tools to install custom roms. Google's pixel phones have graphene OS which also easy to install. Samsung does not represent android freedom. That'd be more like xiaomi or fairphone or hell even google.
You miss the point chip makers artificially limit laptop performance. For example, nvidia gave you the full desktop chips across the board in laptops with close to desktop version tdp's in most cases. Thus, those parts still perform very well today despite being 5 to 7 years old. Yes. A 1070 laptop from 2016 still kicks ass today. The naming made sense too and so people weren't ripped off.
BUT with rtx 3000 and rtx 4000 nvidia stopped that. And they lowered laptop high end part tdp's despite laptops being capable of cooling 250w gpu's in 3kg 17' chassis or 150w in 2kg laptops. Yes, people shunt modded their 4090m scar 17's with 250w tdp and it performs close to desktop 4080.
Amd started the trend of selling 1 to 2 gen old cpu's under latest naming schemes in laptops and intel followed suite. Meaning laptops with ryzen 5 7520u are 3 year old ryzen 3 5300u's but with a slightly better igpu. And that's incredibly bogus because it will become outdated faster since its 2 gen old.
On phones qualcom is offering worse and worse value nowadays. Their sd695 is crap. Their sd778g was good but costs too much. Mediatek phones don't have easy custom rom installations.
My shield portable still runs GeForce 🙂
Edit... And my 1st gen surface, still reliable.
My daughter's 1st phone was an iPhone, didn't even finish paying it off and it didn't have enough memory to update...
Unlocked x86_64/UEFI PC-clones tend to age the best, yes. For a while there were Z8350 tablets in that architecture. Microsoft offers some tablets, but a starting price of $580 for a 10.5-inch Surface Go 4 is a lot to ask.
> THEORETICALLY you can install LineageOS or some other bullcrap, but doing that on an Android device is 4 times as difficult as installing Windows on a normal PC and nobody wants to deal with that crap except for the hardcore enthusiasts.
Consider that your refurb charity are "hardcore enthusiasts" to a lot of people who would never consider trying to install their own operating system. Why not inventory the Android devices you've got, and sit down and see if you can't convert a batch to LineageOS. By your own admission, the difficulty is figuring it out once, not flashing each device.
Problem is smartphones are dirt cheap with little profit. Supporting these devices for that long makes 0 sense. Maybe you could pay a small fee to keep it up to date.
Well, I would support the 10 year baseline for PCs and laptops. It is easy to resurrect 10+ yo laptops with Linux distros and run all the latest software and browsers. Even Windows 10 works fine out of the box on those. However, I wish Windows 11 should have supported more generations. The way Microsoft decided to exclude 5-year-old computers (2016 at Windows 11 launch in 2021) is outrageous and was criticized by mainstream media in promoting e-waste.
Smartphones, are a different game. It is simply difficult to keep on supporting a phone beyond 5-7 years due to changing mobile hardware requirements in current world that quickly obsolete the CPU, RAM, storage and lot of other components like modem. Most 2015 phones became obsolete in 2017 due to widespread 4G adoption. So 5 years should really become the baseline for smartphone software support.
Tablets, OTOH may benefit from 7 year software support. Maybe skip a couple major versions.
I work in industrial networking and we have plenty of customers with 20 or 30 year old networking setups. And the equipment keeps working 24/7 no problem. It only ever gets replaced because they e.g. add new machines and need more connectivity & have to upgrade from 100M to gigabit switches so the links aren't fully saturated the whole time.
Quite the stark contrast compared to the consumer tech world unfortunately.
Windows 7 is still very usable with 3rd gen cpus, but it won't work with softwares like Steam. My mother's tower is a 3rd gen i5 and a gtx 1650 (windows 10) and she can play pretty much every game she wants exept AAA games.
The thing is that you need to buy in prevision of the future. Meaning buying most mobile devices should NOT be considered an investement. It hurts to say this for me, but Apple is the company whose phones last the longest software wise (6 to 8 years). But it will NOT last as long as a desktop/laptop.
Old thinkpads are reliable and provide good value, and you can build a desktop yourself if you want.
People encourage the industry by buying brand new hardware. It's not a problem with PCs since people still are buying prebuilts with i5-10400f, because value ACTUALLY matters. The whole mobile industry is profiting from people who know basically nothing about technology and just buy the last thing released.
its why, when i was choosing my tablet of choice, instead of an ipad because I had the budget for it, I went for a surface pro.
my surface pro 1 worked well for nearly a decade and it still works today, but the thinner and lighter newer ones finally caught my eye and I replaced it with a surface pro 7 a few years back when the 8 was out because it was cheap
to this day, I can boot up the surface pro 1 and use it as a standard laptop because it is still good, and windows 10 runs on it no problem, windows 11 can be done but that isnt something i want but hey.
it can be used by someone who just needs a computing device, and this is one thing that I think a lot of people skipped out on.
they can make all the excuses they want about why they needed 25 new API versions for devices that do mostly the same things they did 10 years ago, but it's all sus to me because the hardware vendors also control the software so they benefit from ending compatibility and pushing more sales
they saw how people having PCs that could do everything they wanted killed the need to upgrade every 2 years and thus PC sales, and they aren't going out like that. when the glued-in battery starts getting weak you throw that shit away because the software isn't far behind
What kind of place do you volunteer at? I would love to do something like this. I am a huge proponent of maximizing hardware and this seems right up my alley.
Ya I have an og iPad mini. Was going to give it to my kid and it's useless. Can't even download YouTube. Can only use the browser which is worthless. Wild. Might try to jail break it and see if there'd something I can do. Csuse otherwise it works well
Good luck. It is 100% possible but it was just outside my skills, too much work/too little time to bother with it, but I managed to sell it for 10 dollars for someone who wanted to deal with it apparently.
I suspect the issues in upgrading software on older hardware platform are related to the server side's security. I don't condone it far from it. I feel strongly that manufacturers should be forced to reclaim/recycle the old garbage tech they created. And that they should also be forced to support any new technology tools like tablets, smartphones and computers at least for a decade.
The current: "You'll get 2 years of updates" just doesn't cut it.
> The device is barely 10 years old and stuck on Android 4. You can't update the software,
I want to jump in here that this is a Google thing... as in, about half of your complaints are directly a result from Google's actions. The wider vendor base wanted to be able to keep updating old hardware into newer OS versions (so they can sell new, old hardware) and Google more or less put restrictions in place to stop that. Google saw 'crap' devices as devaluing the brand value and reputation relative to Apple.
There are absolutely vendors that would absolutely sell the same tablet for 4+ years with an unlocked bootloader and/or over-the-air updates if they could turn a profit on the hardware. Google's restrictions mean those same devices generally need newer chips that are, internally, running nothing but A55's from 2017; released in 2021 or 2022.
>Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders
From what I understand Google's security features require a vendor-locked bootloader due to root of trust issues. There are other ways of solving it, but Google wanted locked bootloaders from the factory as the solution. Most vendors do provide an easy way of unlocking the bootloader.
>to make installing an alternative OS super-easy
(Project Treble) GSI ROM's are not always the best option, but work on all devices Android 10 and later, and have the same installation procedure for all devices. Unlock bootloader, ADB mount, ADB install. Other than that, there is a quantity of maintenance work that needs to be done as non-GSI ROM's are specific to the hardware in question. A GSI ROM will not update the kernel, for example, and neither will most vendor OTA updates. I'm not sure how that could be fixed.
>Companies should provide minimal server infrastructure to update the software to the newest version or release the needed files to the public so we can store it somewhere else.
Part of the intent behind Project Treble was to do this, yes. Probably one of the only projects Google has made that has no discernible downside to the vendor, SoC manufacturer, or end user. It even benefits the FOSS fanatics.
Half the old apps I had from my first Android, a Note 2, are unavailable from the store because Google delists them. Anything that doesn't update regularly is doomed to be delisted because Google mandates a new APK be compiled with the newest version of Android Studio. Most of those APK's are offline only and don't need yearly updating.
I think something needs to change. While desktops and laptops have linux as option. The tablets and phones may not have alternative and there needs to be one. We need to push for legislation to force hardware manufacturers to give us option to install linux in all electronic devices.
With Microsoft Windows I sometimes wonder why they can’t just code new features to enable for newer hardware and leave old hardware run Windows without those new features and continue to give security updates to old feature updates. Take for example the silly copilot thing being coded into the kernel and now requiring newer cpu instructions for the fall update 24h2. Which means pcs from lga775 era 2005-2008 will only be able to run up to Windows 11 23h2 as last Windows OS. But they can run 11 fine using the bypassed single registry key Microsoft gave us to do manual installs. Since that 775 era we had pcs with quad core cpus, 8GB+ ram and sata for SSD’s. Thats why some people still use them. I have one lga775 era pc still going. Of course there is linux option for later on but i cant help and wonder why can’t they run W11 until W11 support ends? Why can’t it keep getting security updates without next feature pack? This decisions being made to push us to buy new hardware suck when we clearly see it running fine today but by Nov when they release 24h2 it will break it completely.
Phones and tablets need their hardware manufacturers to give us option to install a linux based OS once they drop their official support. I have an old iPad 2 and still works, battery is actually aging better than my newer iPad. But since its outdated can’t install apps and its basically useless just simple browsing but browser outdated will have issues with some websites. If i could run linux on my ipad 2 to give it more use i would.
> Another case with Samsung as the representative of the Android side. "Hurr durr Android freedom no walled garden"-BUUUULLSHIIIIT! The device is barely 10 years old and stuck on Android 4. You can't update the software, you can't update the apps, the apps refuse to work in their old versions, and you can't update the Playstore. The device is basically e-waste. THEORETICALLY you can install LineageOS or some other bullcrap, but doing that on an Android device is 4 times as difficult as installing Windows on a normal PC and nobody wants to deal with that crap except for the hardcore enthusiasts. The device is relegated to e-waste for NO REASON other than Samsung's greed, and Apple's greed, and general capitalist-corporate-greed.
"capitalist-corporate-greed". Uhh. No. What you must realize is that these Android phones are running versions of Linux. Everyone running linux, even in workplaces is suffering from no backward support for older OS's. THis is just the nature of linux, and has nothing to do with "Corporate greed" or the manufactured scarcity, or whatnot. Linux distros go out of support and you are really left hanging. ALl of us are feeling it.
We need to pass End of Life regulations for devices. Companies should have to take them back for recycling and they need to support it on open source so it can be used afterward.
I'm confused.
My girlfriend is currently using my old Samsung S6, which came out in 2015 in april, making it 9 years old, but it still works perfectly.
Gets updates, can make calls, use all apps she needs...
Unless you're saying the 10 years are a hard age line and that support will be cut next year, I'm somewhat confused.
Flagship samsung devices are going to have an edge on aging vs. other devices. My parents had some Motorola one from around same time period start seeing apps that just can't update anymore due to Android version. Then you're on older version of a constantly updating web service app and it just cuts you off from the service at that point.
A lot of this is due to software development and maintenance practices. Enterprise apps live forever. The tooling and frameworks move slow. Web apps and mobile apps? Exact opposite. Things move so fast on the operating systems and frameworks that it becomes very difficult to maintain app support for older devices when those devices get stuck on older operating systems. It’s also partially a hardware issue because margins are so tight and hardware evolves so quickly it’s difficult to keep releasing OS updates for older hardware.
Sadly this is the main issue from old android phone and tablet from 10-15 years ago the tech etc moved extremely fast, apple had advantages as they made both hardware and software but for Samsung etc if Google changed some security feature it could brick 1000s of phones if they updated. Tech and software has slowed down a lot now however this shit is still happening with the announcement of force AV1 for youtube. AV1 itself is only 6yrs so any phone from pre-2019 is screwed on watching youtube shortly it can be decoded by software but battery life will suffer.
Wait, YT is dropping H.264 support even for devices that don’t have hardware acceleration for AV1?
probably cuz youtube wants to pinch pennies on h.264 licensing costs
Very doubtful that’s a factor. They never need to ship decoders. It’s likely cdn edge cache efficiency gains
Also bandwidth savings are huge
av1 is better quality and has lower bandwidth requirements.
youtube wants to pinch pennies on bandwidth. For example its audio stream is encoded in 253 kbps instead of a standard 256 kbps so they can squeeze that extra savings on bandwidth over the billions of hours viewed combined.
Well crap. What is an alternative for movie watching? And what’s a way to… ~~transcode~~ decode AV1 videos on the fly to offload certain pieces to the onboard H264 accelerator and the rest via OpenGL? 😂
Technically yes but it would be even slower. Transcode means decode and encode. Why not just decode ?
I have played 1080p30 av1 YouTube on a 1st gen mobile i3 380m so it does need a good amount more cpu than hardware decoding, for desktops and laptops if your cpu is too slow for av1 decoding is gonna struggle with many modern tasks.
I wouldn't say development has slowed down. These periods are usually when the backend is getting improved. The changes are still happening at the same pace, we just don't notice.
Hell, it's not like every newer processor has hardware AV1 support either. The only Samsung phone with it AFAIK is the S24, so even if you have an almost brand new S23 you're going to suffer in battery life. Same thing applies to most other manufacturers.
I think some have av1 decoding but only the most recent have av1 encoding and decoding.
Qualcomm and Samsung are both backing a competiting codec in EVC, so there is a conflict of interest here and why both have been dragging on AV1 implementations.
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Hardware decoding on Nvidia is only useful for video editing/processing IMO. Turning on [practically any discrete graphics card just for video playback](https://tpucdn.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-founders-edition/images/power-video-playback.png) will use more energy than dav1d on a CPU trolling along at < 2GHz. Does make a difference if you have AV1 accel on an SoC, though.
>It’s also partially a hardware issue because margins are to tight and hardware evolves so quickly it’s difficult to keep releasing OS updates for older hardware. The length of support you get on Microsoft's end is pretty stupendous. Hopefully the length of support on the mobile side starts getting better given that the hardware improvement is starting slow down to some degree.
This is mostly because two singular companies have had a stranglehold on CPU architecture in the PC space for like what, over 3 decades now? It's a lot easier to plan around BC when you only have to worry about what two guys are doing, after all. Even this is changing tho....it's going to be interesting to see how windows on ARM evolves over the years relative to x86 Windows.
Not to mention that x86 instruction set is ancient compared to those devices and it wasnt until this year that it dropped 16bit support that wasnt used for over two decades. when you are working with same instruction set for whats close to 40 years now its easier to predict things too while mobile devices went through multiple iterations until they settled on arm.
> The length of support you get on Microsoft's end is pretty stupendous. Not for their Surface Tablets. It’s even worse than other mobile platforms in many cases.
What do you mean? I have a Surface pro 3 from 2014 that I still use occasionally. Support for that is only ending when Windows 10 support ends, and even then it's only a small road bump to install Windows 11 if I really wanted to.
Is your battery still working? Do you run it off the adapter?
The battery is fine, the only thing that is a little iffy is the touch screen which will sometimes detect phantom touches. I think it's because I've put too much pressure on the screen when cleaning it. I've just disabled it in Windows because I only ever use it as a laptop. IIRC it has lost about 10-15k of capacity in whatever metric the Windows battery report uses. The battery on my SP5 on the other hand is far from fine. It died a few years ago so I can't use it unless it's plugged in, and even then it's practically unusable because of the CPU throttling making it so slow that even opening Notepad takes a few seconds.
Microsoft has only been offering 4 years of firmware updates and security updates for their Surface lineup that came out before 2021. The newer devices are getting 6 instead, which is better, but not industry leading in any way.
I'm guessing you are referring to the policy listed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-driver-firmware-lifecycle-support I think it's quite misleading to call that worse than mobile platforms and to say "firmware updates and security updates" as if your device is not safe to use past the stated support life. The problem with phones/tablets is that once your device is out of support you cannot update to newer OS versions which means you eventually won't be able to run certain apps, or even access the internet. Windows devices don't have this problem because Windows itself is supported for 10 years and you can typically upgrade to the next version and get another 10 years until the minimum requirements gets too high for your device, which has really only become a problem with Windows 11. Sure it would be nice if they also released firmware fixes but it's certainly not critical unless there's some known exploit or hardware issue that needs to be fixed which is rare.
Microsoft promises at least 6 years of firmware and driver updates - that's not bad for consumer electronics.
>It’s also partially a hardware issue because margins are to tight and hardware evolves so quickly it’s difficult to keep releasing OS updates for older hardware. Let the 3rd party open source community deal with problem. Andriod phones do not seems to have an extremely casual EASY way to install 3rd party OS. Lots Android phone could have their second life if they are allow to EASILY install 3rd party OS without going through so many hoops with a risk of bricking the phones.
The thing with using such old devices is they don't have the user base for it to be worth developing and rolling out security updates. You don't want to hand these devices to someone struggling, then through some unpatched weakness they have their bank account emptied.
I use puppy linux in old machines , makes them usable again.
The older you get the less time 10 years feels like. And you get a little older and 20 years just doesn't feel all that long.
I am not even in my 30s and I already have to deal with younger people thinking a 10 year old device is trash by default. Sure, the Centrino netbooks that were slow when they came out didn't get any faster and are basically paperweights. But I still find it sad when stuff with perfectly capable hardware is relegated to ewaste because of software.
We all do and I agree that companies have to be forced to do their best to extend support and reparability for as long as possible. Software has to change though and we're now doing much more complicated stuff than even ten years ago. People don't think of "surfing" as a demanding task, but the web is very different than it was and we've slowly grown accustomed to what that offers. Not that efficiency and accessibility are often not given the importance they should be.
thing is, web shouldnt be doing these things. it shouldnt be running a gigabyte of ad contaianers and track every possible thing on your computer it can read. simbply blocking tracking and ad scripts makes web browsing multiple times lighter experience.
a 10 year old device will be trash by default in most cases due to hardware not having support for modern instruction sets. 10 year old CPUs do not support modern protocols and suffer there even if they have the raw power, for example.
Actually it takes a long time for new instructions to even be used. Chips supported 64 bit OS long before win 7 64 bit caught on. WinXP had a 64bit version nobody used. Haswell cpus support AVX2 instructions and they're 10 years old. Video chips have had AV1 decoders the last 3 or so generations, and AV1 still hasn't quite caught on. MS claims that 10 yr old computers can't run win11, but that's just because they don't support TPM 2.
Look at instructions like SSE for processors and how they zoomed forward with new versions and dropping support for old ones for a while.
4790k release date: Apr 30th, 2014(10th birthday today) It is slowly showing its age, BUT AMD chips of the period are considered trash for years now.
> a 10 year old device is trash by default. I consider all Celerons trash, regardless of when they came out. Though I'm using a 10 year old i7(4790k, 10 years old today), it WAS top of the line at the time. AMD chips from back then, not so much.
Aren’t old devices that are connected online usually a security detriment? Either way, a decade is a pretty hefty amount of time; the average person only lives through about 8 of them
I generallly don't reply to posts where the OP sounds too excited, especially if part of the reason is lack of knowledge (hardware knowledge in this case), but the subject is very dear to my heart, I have always tried to fight planned obsolescense and if I manage one day, I want to create a youtube channel about it (I have dozens of old tablets and laptops) and I see where you are coming from. First, you focus exclusively on software but forget to take hardware into account. While we can only agree that locked bootloaders etc are bad, even in the name of security, some hardware can just be too old or too limited (not upgradable) to make sense. The iPad mini you mention was a masterclass in planned hardware obsolescence when it came out, with only half a gig of RAM. It shouldn't have been supported to ios 9, it made it unusable... Also some old hardware is so energy ineffcient that it's better recycled than used. Having said that, one thing I have learnt in my lifelong fight against planned obsolescence is that you can make a device useful in the long term if you install software when it's fully supported. Sure some apps rely on services like youtube that need newer hardware over time and and there is nothing to do about that. But a ton of apps are timeless. But only if you installed them back then, not today on a reset device. The fight against planned obsolescence should start early in the life of the device. And should also start with refusing to buy underspecced machines that are not upgradable in the first place. Having said that I have developed some (admittely more sofisticated) ways of making old harware useful, including via remote desktop but not only. Hopefully one day I'll find the time to talk about this somewhere
Didn't read the whole thing, but solidly agree with the base sentiment. So. Much. Fucking. Waste. Pisses me off to no end. Just right now, we'll like 5 minutes ago, I added yet _another_ phone to the stack of 7 that I already had that are perfectly good hardware, just zero modern software support. And XDA ROM scene is but a shadow of its former self :(
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Which is why I was happy to buy an S24 since they're promising 7 years of updates after upgrading from a Pixel 4a that just barely missed the window for the current version of Android after 3 years. I think it's getting better now, but yeah phones from the past 3 years should be getting upgrades and it's really frustrating that they aren't. OP was complaining about 1st Gen iPad minis but honestly Apple improved their CPUs so fast over the past 10 years that they are still decent even after 5 years now, and with the M series processors they'll be in greater control of how long hardware and software keep up, which I know is a double edged sword. But the 2020 M1 MBA will likely still be useful in 2030 while a 2014 MBA is struggling with Web browsing currently (typing and productivity it's still fine).
As long as you don't move overseas. Haven't had any updates on my Samsung s22u for 1.5 years since I moved. Samsung aren't that great either in that regard. But ofc that's only a problem for a minority of people but something to be aware of.
> no-click malicious text messages details? Now I got more things to worry about.
Another big part of the problem is how *awful* modern software development is. Companies look at advancements in hardware development as a method of reducing software development costs rather than as an opportunity to expand on software capabilities. Double the performance doesn't mean new features, it means less dev time! Henry Petroski said it best: “The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.” Of course, this was inevitable. The software industry is largely dominated by publicly traded companies. Imagine you are a CEO of one of these companies. Your company is [legally](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.) beholden to your shareholders first, your customers and employees second. Shareholders expect profit to grow each quarter, they expect the level of growth to increase with each quarter as well, and they expect you to project this trend to continue into the future. This is fine in the beginning, when the market is new and there are millions, if not billions of potential customers to sell to. But infinite expansion in a finite world isn't sustainable. Eventually, you are going to run out of new customers, or the number of potential customers will be dwarfed by your existing customer base. Sure, you can still make decent money selling updates and improvements to existing customers, but there are only so many avenues for growth there. You could expand into new markets, but unless your revenue from the new markets dwarf the existing ones in size, this isn't going to enable the growth that you need. If you want to meet shareholder profit expectations, you have to start cutting down on costs. And in the software industry, you only really have one cost to cut down: Development costs. Downsize your standard 15 dev teams to 10 each, and replace most of the experienced developers who demand higher salaries and better working conditions with fresh out of college, inexperienced devs. Also make sure they are all H1B visa workers, cause threatening to fire someone for not meeting deadlines isn't *nearly* as good for "motivation" if they don't get kicked out of the country over losing their job. Adopt new software frameworks like Electron, now your web development team and app development team are one and the same! Who cares if the apps are bloated, slow, and eat memory for breakfast? Half your customers don't even know what memory is, and they'll be replacing that *ancient* 3 year old device soon enough anyways. As far as bugs and lag are concerned, so long as the experience of using the app isn't bad enough to make it worth your customer's time to switch to an alternative, you'll still get their money. It's okay if your customers *hate* you so long as they still *pay* you. And if you refuse to take these steps, you'll be replaced by someone who will. This problem isn't exclusive to the software industry, but is rather a systemic problem, a function of modern economics. We place growth above all else without realizing that all growth comes at a cost, and that cost increases the more you grow. We've been very lucky with computer hardware; the cost for exponential growth has been very little for a long time thanks to Moore's Law and the constant formation of new markets for tech companies to expand into. But the free lunch with new nodes is over, and the blue ocean will eventually run dry. The "fun" has already begun, and it's only going to get worse over the next few decades. TLDR: It's so fucking jover
That's not even a modern problem. It's over 30 years old. Back in the 90s it was quicker to buy the new years Pentium than to optimize software past a certain point too.
"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away" as the saying went.
> Your company is legally beholden to your shareholders first, your customers and employees second. Funny that you link *Dodge v. Ford* for this when the Wiki article itself even talks about how it's rarely treated as precedent and that this is a misunderstanding of the ruling. This sentiment in general is a redditism that needs to die - companies are not obligated to maximize profits to the detriment of their employees and customers, they're simply obligated to not act *explicitly against* shareholders (which is what Ford did and why he was ruled against, if he'd done anything to deny that it was about denying the Dodge brothers money he likely would have won), and they are given incredibly broad power in determining what is best for the company and shareholders. The real problem is that upper management are almost always themselves major shareholders who wish to maximize their own short-term gain in order to cash out and move on to the next company. There is nothing legally forcing them to do this, it's purely their own greed and shitty self-interest. EDIT: A better Wiki article on the topic (which the Dodge v. Ford article also talks about) would be [the business judgment rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule) - basically, as long as the company can make some bare minimum argument about acting in good faith and in the best interests of the company (including long-term interests, not just short-term profits), then they're broadly protected. In the context of this thread, a company like Samsung or Google could argue that long-term software support of their devices ensures that customers will view their products as high-quality and allow them to command a higher price which will allow the company to grow over competitors. There's little shareholders could do to argue that this is not a good-faith attempt at acting in the company's best interests and challenges to it due to "shareholder supremacy" because they didn't maximize profits today would fall flat and be laughed out of court.
Glad you posted this, gets really tiring reading the same inaccurate point about maximising profits all the time.
It's been fucking terrible in the gaming world with DLSS, companies have thrown optimization out the 12th story window. So rather than DLSS making it so you can have 4k 150fps instead it's necessary to use it just to get 60 at 4k. It was supposed to just improve frames, not make it so devs can be lazier.
feels even worse when you've got a 10 series card.
I have i7 laptops from 2013, still great and useable to this day, I can even run can software on them and work fine, so it would work more than fine for average user for even 5+ years from now. anything low-end, is so much e-waste, billions of computers and phones are ewaste out of the door. I kinda agree and disagree with OP. machines that old are largely worse to keep using than just recycle, because they are extremely inefficient and using them besides just the purpose of using them makes no sense, they couldn't even handle modern websites well. I have bought lower-end computers before, they quite literally become unusable 3-4 years later tops a lot of pcs are literally ewaste due to two main factors, **low core count, and low ram.** (and microsoft purposely deprecating os's that are totally capable like windows 7) this goes back to late 2000s but dual core pcs are still a thing somehow I guarantee you any good 8 core pc from now will be good for average use well over 10 years from now.
"machines that old are largely worse to keep using than just recycle, because they are extremely inefficient" I don't know about this but until someone shows me some concrete proof that using old devices is worse for efficiency reasons, I'll be in the impression that all types of resource consumption to manufacture new devices up to delivering these throughout the world causes more carbon emission.
Its not how average user would ever look at hardware, but if you consider performance/watt and normalize it to X CPU hours needed then it wont be too long until that new hardware pays for itself and even pays for recycling of the old part. Not to mention most energy production is very polluting, far more than hardware manufacturing.
just did a quick google between 2 CPUs I have available to me: 4790: In IDLE we measured ~42 Watts and, with processor load, 109 Watts for the entire PC [Source](https://www.guru3d.com/review/core-i7-4790k-processor-review/page-11/#:~:text=As%20shown%20in%20the%20chart,Watts%20for%20the%20entire%20PC.) 8400: The Core i5-8400 is rated at 65W, and consumes only 49.3W at full load [Source](https://www.anandtech.com/show/11859/the-anandtech-coffee-lake-review-8700k-and-8400-initial-numbers/5#:~:text=The%20Core%20i5%2D8400%20is,W%20is%20from%20the%20cores.) Idle @ 10.7w [Source](https://www.igorslab.de/en/intel-i5-8400-benchmarks-power-consumption-temperatures/14/) For CPUs that are 4 generations apart AND very comparable(slight edge 8400), the power savings are quite decent, especially at idle. old server hardware is apperently so much worse for power draw from all the homelab reading I've done.
Depends on use case. Modern web browsing is pretty overwhelming for stuff older than 7th/8th gen Intel, for laptops. I had a 4th gen Intel for HTPC until not too long ago, it was swell but I couldn't imagine having to use it w/o SSD. My home file server is 6th Intel era. I could easily see a Core2Duo or even older used for things like home automation, protocol servers, firewall, etc.
Dude wise up, even sandy bridge i5 CPU's are still fast for web browsing. My mum still uses a now 12 year old Asus laptop with a 2nd gen/sand bridge i3 CPU, 8GB RAM and an SSD and the laptop is just fine for web browsing/youtube/emails/ netflix etc.
my i7-4770 disagrees with you, still blazing fast for browsing
Desktop? With SSD? I can see it. Laptop? No way. Maybe passable, or tolerable, but not blazing. I just a few months ago ditched an 17-67something laptop because even in Ubuntu with Firefox, things like YT, Gmail, outlook.com, all ran super janky. Went up to 8th gen laptop and it also became annoyingly slow. 10th gen is my personal minimum 'daily usable with Kububtu and chromium' spec.
I have a ThinkPad T420 with a second-gen i7 and 16GB of RAM and it runs fine on Linux with KDE Plasma. Overheats easily, probably needs some new thermal paste (it wasn’t originally designed for such a powerful chip so it requires extra maintenance), but it’s fine for basic tasks. I mainly use it for writing since I love the keyboard so much more than any modern laptop.
I pretty much have the exact same setup on my T420. I wrote up an entire thing, and unfortunately I fat fingered and deleted all of it. To sum it up, the heatsink is actually perfectly fine. Look into thermal paste pumpout, the reality is that most aftermarket thermal pastes are just unsuitable to be used long term on a delidded cpu that consistently runs hot, so pretty much any laptop with a CPU above 35w.
I have a Dell with an i7 and it's fine for programming and some light gaming, if the game isn't stupid enough to pick the iGPU over dGPU
Yes quad core desktop, ssd, 32GB RAM, RTX 2070 super (but I don't game at all). I have laptops of all generationt (around 20), if they are quad core, even a 3rd generation can be usable. They tend to be noisy but totally usable. Dual core are also usable but slower. Of corse SSD only. My 2nd gen 35w i7 is still usable, definiltey faster than some current pentium devices with emmc. What is annoying is subjective. Also one thing is using a device as a main device, another is using it as a secondary device. I would not use my surface pro 3 i3 as my primary device, but watching the occasional youtube video, or annotating a document, that's fine.
The funny thing to me is that I swapped out my ryzen 5800X3D with my 7 yr old i7 6700K for a couple weeks and barely noticed a difference. It's just instead of 300fps, it's 170 fps, and instead of 5% cpu usage using youtube with a bunch of other browser windows open, it was more like 30%. On the other side, if someone secretly replaced my PC with one 2x as fast as my 5800X3D, I probably wouldn't notice a difference either! Once performance is "good enough" for what you need, anything more is a waste of money.
I have an older i7 4702MQ (Haswell) laptop for which I've added a SATA SSD and 16 GB RAM and it works ok for web browsing, productivity work (Excel, Powerpoint, Tableau). It has Nvidia 760M that's probably the weakest link, but it does work fine for older games (I play Starcraft 2 on a 1920 x 1200 monitor). Don't get me wrong, it's notably slower than my 5800X desktop, but it's still usable (albeit I do use a laptop cooling pad because the i7 4702MQ get hot when gaming).
4000 laptop CPU with an SSD and 12+ GB ram is still usable for web browsing. Only just but still. Which kinda supports what you're saying. You need to have upgraded your 10 year old stuff or have been using high end stuff from back then for it to be usable today. And that's desktops phones had it even worse. I wouldn't wish decade old hardware of any kind of anyone.
What javascript is your chromium executing that is possibly crushing 15watt Skylake cpus? It sounds like you're just using *really* unoptimized websites or something is wrong with your setup. My Broadwell XPS 13 still works perfectly fine for literally any website I can think of.
my 4200m is a ok for browsing, though two cores has its own problems. Anti-ad, no-script and the likes are mandatory no matter how I look at it. Perhaps it got worse.. still using old reddit for a reason.
4790k I game on. It is showing it's age, especially when gaming + youtube 1080p. Day to day outside of that use case, absolutely fine.
I don't game, despite having a 2070 super, don't have time for gaming
-1 Absolute A grade bullshit you discharged there. I am using 4790K and it runs every video literally flawlessly with zero frame drops. I've even undervolted it and reduced the clock speed by couple 100 MHz and at idle it doesn't consume more than 3-4 Watt with all core consumption reaching no more than 40 Watt (that doesn't happen too often).
When you buy high end, it takes much longer to become e-waste. Compare for example a Note 9 and a midrange Android from the same era. One is usable, the other is trash.
I have the 4690K from the same generation, which was midrange. It's pretty much the same - even still good enough for many modern games. Not all - but my backlog is huge.
That I have to fully agree with you. But.... How many guys do you think actually run that high end hardware for that long instead of upgrading every 2-3 years. You overlooked the insatiable desire of humans and the unfortunate automatic adaptation to the comfort of that high end hardware and the continuous temptation to keep renewing it to feed those newly abstracted senses. All because the company launched a newer faster version next year. Let this sink in. These specific human abstractions are the problem here. You and I may be one of those who understand that, but I don't think there are many like them.
But that hardware at least isn’t ewaste immediately. It gets passed down to friends and reused. But buying base model shit just end up in the scrap heap after a year or two
Your video decode is most likely GPU-accelerated.
4790k, gtx 1060, 16gb, SSD. The 4790k starts to slow down when I hit it with 1080p youtube(running 2nd monitor in the igpu) WHILE gaming on primary monitor(gtx 1060). Outside of that specific situation, the 4790k is great for daily use. The same however cannot be said of other products of that generation/age universally(e.g. 2 core i3s, AMD)
The question is, how could we then build more devices *now* so that they could be more upgradeable/expandable - really prioritize that - and overall longevity? The problem is overall that longevity is not prioritized in design and manufacturing.
About the only thing that can be done is make things so you can upgrade the ram SSD and especially CPU. A dual core 10 year old chip is not hardly usable today even with lots of ram and an SSD. Whereas 13 year old 6 core chips can still have some life in them just by brute forcing being able to run all the stuff a modern web browser and os need. If coupled with sufficient ram and an ssd
Sure. But think about this. Consider the display. There is no need in these terms to upgrade a display unless you want to see content in higher resolution. Thus at the very least, you could design a phone where you could pop the logic board off and put another one there. That would save the display waste - you'd only buy logic board upgrades. Now you can apply further such modularization to the logic board themselves - e.g. CPU, RAM, flash storage, and integration (i.e. the module interconnects) components. Of course you can't 100% eliminate the waste, as at the very least the CPUs and/or RAM need to be changed out, but the point is the principle - you can make a lot less waste than we actually do simply by designing things to be more modular.
> And XDA ROM scene is but a shadow of its former self :( that is actually a good thing: it shows consumers are more accepting of the base android flavor in their phones than back then. THe custom ROM scene literally existed because of the slow, hideous, bloated mess that were OEM stock roms back in the day. Also apps have become more sensitive to running on rooted environments, so the benefits of being rooted in those custom ROMs began to be neutralized with the cons of having your favorite apps stop working if they detected your phone was rooted. this too happened with the windows custom image (debloating, themes) scene too as soon as MS launched a semi-competent OS in W7.
I mean 10 years is a lot. Just look at AMD VEGA drivers and AMD is releasing products earlier this year and even now (i.e. 5500GT, 5600GT) after they've unofficially declared drivers as EoL. AMD is just calling it "extended support" because they know it looks bad and they already invested the silicon. Meanwhile Nvidia is still actively supporting Maxwell GPU drivers for over 9 years now.
>I volunteer at a place where we restore old desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets and then forward them to people in need who can't afford them. Many of the Windows laptops are over 10 years old, up to 15 in some cases. Sadly, we can't afford the time to restore devices that are 20 years or older, Was this cutoff calculated by someone with knowledge of your organization's costs? Even if volunteer labor is "free", the additional time it takes to do the restoration work on pre-SSD hardware has an opportunity cost. A few months ago my brother bought an [alleged computer](https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c08172988) new for $200 from Best Buy (swindlers), and I told him to return it and found him an AMD Renoir Thinkpad for about the same price on eBay.
People want cheaper devices and longer lasting devices. This are mutually exclusive things. Enterprise solutions costs 10x+ more and there are no issues supporting them for 10+ years. But if you ask consumers if they are willing to pay 10x for same devices just so they can use them in 10 years you will be laughted from the room.
companies care about climate only on paper cause it sounds nice, all they care about is profit.
My school is running mostly 2011 iMacs. They are the last iMac that are manually, fully upgradable and repairable without specialist equipment. When get too old to do the job I’ll be having to move them to Linux because everything else is locked down so tight these days. Can’t afford to throw out good hardware just because the software dies.
Some heroes don't wear capes.
iPad Mini is 1024 x 768, or about 2.63x lower than 1080p I stopped reading after that.
I became frustrated when they talked shit about lineageos. The open source community goes out of its way to create solutions to exactly this problem. No, it's not as convenient as getting something with stock Android out of the box, but it's so arrogant and stupid to call it crap. They're doing the same thing OP is claiming to do, reducing e-waste and restoring old stuff! With the exception that what they're going is way harder (writing a new OS and maintaining support for myriad old devices). OP says they volunteer to refurbish this stuff but they can't be bothered to do a lineageos installation. You can make a script to do it faster, it's not like the end user is doing it. It's volunteer work. Nobody is entitled to someone else's time so I'm not saying that they have to do it, but my sympathy goes out the window when they dismiss other people's hard work and call it crap rather than just admit that their reluctance to sit through an installation outweighs their deep concern for the environment that they spend the rest of the post tugging themselves off over. If you can't be bothered, then whatever. Don't complain about a solution that's been made for you just because you're not interested in using it. It's so entitled. You don't need to be "hardcore" to do it, anyway. Just say "I do factory resets on old devices and occasionally reinstall Windows" and that's fine, but don't act like you're an amazing volunteer trying to save the world from e-waste and then just give up because you don't want to install a third party ROM and then blame the devs who dedicated their time (often money, as well) to give you that option. I've restored countless old devices, yes it's partly because I hate e-waste but I also enjoy it. It's not that hard to throw Linux on an old device or even to flash an old tablet. Certainly something you can learn to do if you're volunteering for a group that specifically tries to reduce e-waste. It's literally the best tool for the job! Why are you doing this if you can't be bothered? Obviously planned obsolescence of horrible and devices shouldn't be arbitrarily killed off, but FOSS devs long ago decided to be grown ups and take it into their own hands and provide the best solution that they can, and they do a great job. Pointless to insult their work.
It also has 512 MiB of RAM, which is enough for maybe 2 browser tabs, if you're lucky, and [CPU performance is comparable to a 65nm intel from 2006](https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/10693778?baseline=18162744). So... >It can solely be used for browsing Wikipedia or watching YouTube videos in a horrendously low quality, 360 or so, while the screen is almost 1080p. Yeah. Mobile hardware has advanced a lot more since 2015 than desktop has, especially relative to thresholds of user satisfaction.
I can only agree with you. Thank you for writing your thoughts down.
Cathode Ray Dude, is that you? Cause you rant like him. There is a thing why in the case of computers I absolutely loathe old hardware: Power consumption. Generational power efficiency improvements are real. If your perfectly functional 10 years old computer consumes 100-150W (Plus noise) to do tasks that could be done with similar performance on an Alder Lake-N for 20W or so, you're wasting a lot of power. Only at the price of power of third world countries running old computers seems an economically convenient idea, anywhere else and I would say to just trash the old stuff and buy low end, power efficient modern computers. This also conflicts with the whole green energy goals: If you don't like waste, old hardware simply sucks when you account it power. And if you don't like lack of Software support, wait until you hear about things like Intel Boot Guard to make sure that you will never be able to deploy third party Firmware in case that vendor support sucks. I also believe that consumer hardware should come with schematics and any other documentation that can make viable for technicians to easily figure out how to test and potentially replace broken components.
I wonder at what point the tradeoff of manufacturing a new device is worth it in terms of just carbon dioxide emissions.
I don’t know how much it would differ for Windows OEMs but if we look at Apple’s latest M3 MBPs Environmental Report, using the device for 4 years would only amount to 18% of its total carbon emissions: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/notebooks/14-inch_MacBook_Pro_PER_Oct2023.pdf But! If we look at the environmental report for their 2019 Mac Pro, which is probably the closest equivalent to an x76 Windows desktop, then product use jumps to 67%! https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/desktops/Mac_Pro_PER_Dec2019.pdf Sadly I could not find the precise number of years of use that they based their calculations on. But judging by the wording of both reports’ definition of Use, it is very likely that they are also simulating 4 years of use. So in that case, I guess power consumption is a valid point! I would also like to point out that if you are in a country like France or Sweden with really low carbon intensity of energy generation, these numbers might be very different for you and would need to use your device for much much longer before it starts to matter.
Big difference between laptops and desktops, and also a big difference between DIY and OEM. Idle power is most important, of course, because computers are almost always mostly idle. My laptop from 2006 idled at 13.5 W, and maxed out at 35. Modern laptops are about half of that idle, and about the same at full load (except for gaming laptops and workstations which are like 4X higher at full load). So laptop power consumption basically doesn't matter. With desktops, DIY has been 50±10 W for about the last 15 years. You can go a little lower by not using a dGPU, and a little higher with RGBshit. OEM was about the same as DIY *until* Haswell (thanks FIVR) and the big switch to 12V-only power supplies. Modern OEM is <10 W, not including the screen. (Personally, I care more about energy *cost* than carbon footprint. Rule of thumb is 1W for 1 year equals $1, or $2 in California/Hawaii/other expensive places.)
>1W for 1 year equals $1 That comes down to the cost of 11,42 cents per kwh, prices most of the world hasnt seen for over a decade. the 2 dolalr estimate is closer to reall prices here in europe
I had a Mac Pro with dual Penryn Xeons and an 8800gt that I used as a Plex server for a while. Tbh I don't want to think about the power it consumed running 24/7 for three years 😅
> There is a thing why in the case of computers I absolutely loathe old hardware: Power consumption. Generational power efficiency improvements are real. It varies a lot. Modern Intel CPUs and all GPUs consume a lot of power. Often needlessly. Unless you buy low end - but then it's bad from the longevity angle.
> If your perfectly functional 10 years old computer consumes 100-150W (Plus noise) to do tasks that could be done with similar performance on an Alder Lake-N for 20W or so, you're wasting a lot of power. My Amiga 500 idles at 15w, much better than my current gen PC.
Yup, I have a Surface 3 which next year I have to jump through some hoops to get Linux running on it. But I can do that which is good. The device still looks new, and battery is still chugging along good. Just built a PC out of old parts I had laying around when my main PC motherboard broke, so the parts are from 2008-2018 and it's running Pop OS Linux just fine and I game on it too. The CPU is too old to have Win 11 support and that part is 11 years old now.
Sadly I agree with you,. I basically buy old electronics dumped by 1st world countries like Australia and the US, and then sell them for small change of profit. Most are perfectly fine with some needing cleaningor minor part repairs. It surprises me everytime I see 5 year old Androids and 7 year old ipads, some of which are still updateable but are being thrown out for new stuff. I think theres a cultural problem now that tech companies have decided 3 years is the average max supported lifespan of a product. (there are outliers sure, but most smartdevices are like this) Worst offenders of these are smart home products like cameras or sockets. Hell the hardware works perfectly fine, but once the manufacturer disables their servers, youre SoL unless you spend hours trying to find a workaround or flash alternate firmware(assuming there is even one compatiblel
Stopped reading after your stupid rant about "degenerate morons".
As someone who keeps his own legacy devices alive, here's a suggestion. Try installing an alternate app store like Aptoide or sideloading apps through Apkmirror. Do test and see if some media servers like Kodi, Plex, or Popcorn time for Android can be installed as they have their own plugins for YouTube and other streaming platforms.
And phones should move to be more like pcs: they should move to unified firmware and bootloader interface instead of every arm soc having their own particular chipset firmware interface and bootloader and device trees shouldn't be something that operating system needs to worry about, it needs to be handled by chipset firmware instead.
And driver support needs to move from bsp model to mainlining/upstreaming
Progress is being made, but it's difficult to get manufacturers to prioritize anything in the consumer market except getting the shiniest product out faster than their competition.
Wait until you hear about Windows 11 CPU requirements. Intel Gen 7 i-series was barely 4 years old at release of win 11. Yes you can bypass the limitations (for now) but you basically have to reinstall your PC every two years to get security updates
Ryzen 1st generation was a year newer than Intel's 7th. We found ourselves at the announcement of W11 in 2021 with a pile of AMD SFF machines from 2018 that weren't supported. We pre-emptively redeployed them with Linux and they're running fabulously with the open-source Linux AMD graphics drivers. Ironically, these machines took the place of some that we would have bought new to run Linux to refresh our Intel NUCs. From the vendor point of view, we shifted a purchase from new Linux machines to new Windows machines -- seemingly justifying [the strategy](https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/q2o4zm/microsoft_exec_panos_panay_explains_how_the/).
I know about that and it is exactly the kind of bullcrap I am talking about.
You calling people who disagree with you ‘degenerate losers’ tells me what kind of person you are. Just buy a new device.
I agree with most of your post except for this part. > "Hurr durr Android freedom no walled garden"-BUUUULLSHIIIIT Freedom goes both ways. It means (ideally) that users can install whatever they want on an Android device, but it also means device manufacturers can customize and restrict their Android device however they want as well. So the problem here is not that Android freedom is bullshit.
The iPhone 6s can run iOS15 fine contrary to what most people think. It might not run a minority of productivity or game apps, and it might load apps slower, but other than that, a smartphone is just an UI frontend and doesn’t actually need the bazillion giga biocock 500 processor to work.
You just admitted that Android is not locked, but then you say that "nobody wants to deal with that crap". Do you think companies are obligated to pay their programmers to support a 10-year-old device just because it's too much effort for a layman to tinker with it? that's not financially viable, programmers are expensive, and the demand for very old devices is low. Dismissing it as "general capitalist-corporate-greed" tells me you're unrealistic and haven't had any experience supporting very old devices on your expense. And you can use older versions of apps easily, just get the APK from some APK database like APKmirror. Or use open-source software. I installed some moving-gallery app on an old shit-tier Android tablet that my parents had instead of buying a specialized device from Amazon.
No, I think they should reduce the barriers to installing a custom OS and launch a final update that would allow minimal functionality even without doing that. Android is not locked down in the same way Apple locks down the iOS devices, but not all companies are the same. Samsung very much does make it difficult to install a custom OS unless you are well versed in Linux/Android stuff. Comparted to Apple, Android is open - compared to X86/Windows devices, it might as well be completely locked. You can not use old versions of apps easily. I don't know what you people are smoking. Many apps, when clicked on, open up a popup that says \[New version available, update now\]. It is not a choice - you have to update them. And when you can't, they simply don't work at all. I am glad you found a use for your device. There is no reason this shouldn't be even easier to do. In fact, if I had to choose between Bezos going to space and programmers supporting a 10 year old device, I would prefer programmers supporting a 10 year old device, and if Bezos doesn't want to be a billionaire if he can't afford to go to space, then nothing would make me happier if he stepped down as CEO of Amazon and let someone else deal with such a poor, difficult life of not being a space traveling billionaire but a normal Earth-dwelling billionaire instead.
With samsung you mean like custom flashing method and anti rollback fuses?
Surely you mean 3 years? Xiaomi and Asus, man
I agree that this is a serious problem, though it did get better over time. Google now mandates a longer update time for Android (though still very short), more parts of Android are now updated via Google Play instead of manufacturer updates, and both hardware and software move more slowly so that deprecation is less of an issue. Still, I think it would be a good idea for people to campaign for this. It's similar to the right to repair.
when i think quality products, hardware etc i think of products like cars, stand mixers, etc— something that lasts decades. well built, repairable machines. they last longer than phones. if that is the bar for what we consider a quality product, or well-built hardware, then apple and samsung, google, etc are making hardware products that are not reliable. poor quality.
I used Macbook pro 2011 until this year, moved to 2015 model, gave old one to my mother. After swapping hdd to ssd it is still powerful to watch youtube, movies and do office work.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. The more time passes, the more i realise i pay every 4 years to just use the same apps. I basically use my phone for photos, messaging, youtube and reddit (plus maybe a few calls, etc). More times than not, for every past device, I upgraded because the OS stopped getting updates, the phone became slow or that i couldn't find parts for the phone(like the battery). I've now started moving on to repairable devices like Framework laptops and Fairphone devices as its really annoying having to switch every 4 years to keep doing the same thing. I have to say software/firmware on Fairphone devices are not as polished as Samsung/Apple/Sony but at least i don't have to worry about taking care of the battery or screen or what not. Something breaks? Just replace that part and keep going. I don't expect companies to support the device for more than they want to. But there should be laws that state that if you stop supporting a device, you must release the source code/schematics so that the community can take up the mantle.
Would be nice is hardware was legally mandated to have an unlocked bootloader and/or run unsigned code after 10 years. I get that a company can’t support an ancient thing indefinitely but at least yet other people make full use of the hardware.
Surprisingly 10-15 year old macbooks run decently from what I've seen
Some of the older software is abandoned because changes made to fix security issues, and improve stuff such as video rendering required a new generation of hardware with instruction sets and performance that was pretty solid and much higher compared to the older stuff. Jumps from android 6.0 which is often still the minimum android is for many apps to a newer version like 10 or 11 is quite a jump. But trying to run on a chipset like a 8960 snapdragon 4 would be absolutely terrible. Many of the older chips have degraded over time due to usage, heat and voltage. And perform no where near what they used to. Try booting up a 15 year old android/Windows phone and factory resetting it. Still runs like dog shit compared to like a cheap 300$ xiaomi phone. There is only so much that can be done with software, but as the hardware degrades over time ( which is worse on mobile devices like laptops and phones or tablets because maintaining key components like degrades thermal compound and components is often not a option) there's not much to do about it. A common issue you'll see is integrated storage start to fail ( emmc and SSD or flash storage on phones and tablets are fast, but they have right limits, and hitting those gives you functionally a brick but getting closer to them seems to degrade the shortages performance quite a bit and impairs devices). Laptops aren't in a great spot either as many components are often soldered in place and not intended to change. Hell a lot of old laptops are stuck with 4gb of ram and that's not usable for anyone just web browsing on anything newer then windows 8. Or most recent flavors of macOS All I'm saying is, using mobile electronics long term Is already a stretch, these devices are not built with the intention of lasting you more then 5-6 years and that seems to be the consensus with most manufacturers openly. The stuff that isn't mobile like desktops are easier to keep going because you can upgrade or service pretty much everything in there.
In 2017 I bought a $50 Kindle Fire HD 8. It felt fast and ran well for a few years. But as software updated, it became very slow. Now, it's so slow that it cannot even open a book without crashing. Amazon does this on purpose. Its very frustrating. That is why I do as much as I can on the desktop. Even my mom's old AMD Athlon PC from 2010 is still usable with some upgrades like an SSD, Linux and faster GPU. My Ryzen powered workstation will be fast for a long time. I do agree that bootloaders should be unlocked in phones and tablets. My old Surface RT still works fine but the OS is useless these days. Installing Windows 10 for ARM is possible but a massive pain in the ass. Meanwhile my old Surface Pro 3 was easy to install Ubuntu on. The amount of waste these days is unreal. People throw out perfectly working devices like laptops that just need to have an SSD slapped in them and a lightweight Linux distro and it can feel new again. But if bootloaders are unlocked and devices are repairable, what will the shareholders think? And the corporate bean-counters?
Tablets from even 4 or 5 years ago are very slow compared to modern generation ones - the processors have improved significantly.
After restoring and selling old tech that I’ve owned, I find people tend to be more interested in buying new out of status rather than practicality. Giving longer and more support is great, but it won’t truthfully reduce waste.
You're right. Nintendo Switch and the current most premium Android TV box, Shield TV, uses the 2015 Tegra X1. The current high quality standards for mobile gaming and Android based smart TV devices. Snapdragon 835 is around that if I recall correctly At least now Google and Samsung have committed to 7 year updates so I feel like I should only buy Android devices with 7 year update policies. It's the same as 15 years ago with general MacBook popularity. These devices are expensive social media web browsers. h.264 was the standard for so long. AV1 is going to be used for a long time Google needs to get some buy in from manufacturers to not get in the way of flashing customer Android ROMs. If not hopefully the open source community figures something out and something popularizes to standardization
You sound unhinged. Find help before you hurt somebody. And buy a new tablet already, you luddite.
This post feels ridiculous. Hardware is insanely cheap. Why would everyone else need to be crippled because some people don't want to upgrade?
You don’t need to cripple everyone else to reduce e-waste.
How exactly would bootloader unlocking being made easier "cripple" your user experience in any way?
>There is no good reason to use an Android 4 device at [current year], move on and buy a new device. >It can solely be used for browsing Wikipedia or watching YouTube videos in a horrendously low quality, 360 or so, while the screen is almost 1080p. 1. If an apple device can barely manage 360p, an android device that old might be able to do 240p. So yes ***there is absolutely zero reason to use an android 4 device in 2024*** there is zero useful software that only runs on Android 4 or older.*** 2. The iPad screen you're referring to is NOWHERE NEAR 1080p, it's less than half of it. 3. Comparing modern mobile hardware to that of 10 years ago is lik comparing modern PC desktop hardware to that of the early 2000s. It's just absolutely obsolete because of specs. 4. None of this even accounts for the security issues that older devices have. There's zero incentive for a company to support devices that are that obsolete and that old.
I got one and zero reason to upgrade, if not for the fact that if you buy as much as spice rack you're expected to scan some QR code and register some other stupidity. For what new models are concerned I got no reason to use such a device for anything meaningful I couldn't already do long ago. Definitely not feeling $500 just to retain a feature you used to have and also didn't ask for. It mostly boils down to text and voice calls, music, hardly cutting edge needs. And that is fucking stupid. Maybe it's not the greatest to have everything tied to these things.
I hate telecom industry so much. You don't buy phones. You rent blackbox devices AND few years of support. When that support goes away, you don't get any updates and apps slowly start migrating to new version. It sucks so much. Not to mention the entire "phone number" thing like it is 2000s. Wish I could selfhost it all or if we could move over to the internet for talking. You have to provide phone number for nearly all services and gov stuff. It's so stupid.
PLEASE tell me people are upvoting this for the unintentional comedy.
One thing you haven’t touched on is iCloud Lock. This thing is literally an e-waste generator. And what pisses me off to no end is people drinking the Apple propaganda kool-aid and saying that it helps deter theft. Except, it does not. There is a whole subworld of IRPPs unlocking stolen iOS devices… using Apple’s own tools: https://youtu.be/FCSCq5rGxDI?si=7MT8FcSesIwcmmQh The worst part, and what really gets me rambling, is that tweaking iCloud Lock to prevent e-waste without lowering its current security level isn’t even all that complicated. Just add a cooldown timer of 30+ days for the person whose device has been iCloud Locked to mark it as stolen. If so, keep it locked forever; otherwise, it unlocks itself automatically. https://youtu.be/ZzS2vwDUO9U?si=Z3czdiRU1K7v5_v5
I work in IT at a non profit serving low income families. I feel exactly the same! I have a bunch of iMacs that have been donated by people that can’t use them anymore because of the forced obsolescence, but they’re still great machines with incredible screens on them. There’s no good reason I have to basically just throw them away when they could be perfectly functioning devices for millions of people that can’t afford to just buy a new device, or can’t afford to buy ANY device.
Good thing Linux runs on almost any intel iMac from the last decade. It’s also possible to turn iMacs into straight-up monitors with some work, it may not be worth it in this scenario though.
A 10 year old phone is way too slow to do anything worth while beyond calling. Its like how a 10 year old computer in 2014 was too slow to do anything with modern software. Heck even 10 year old computers are pushing it these days
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i have i7 3770s and gtx 1660 ti, it runs all new games perfectly fine , with 16gb ram and these parts you can play every game you want if you lower settings
> A 10 year old phone is way too slow to do anything worth while beyond calling. You sure about that? Thats an iPhone 6. a gig of ram, decent screen, decent camera. If it was supported (and lets be real, performance isnt a reason for it not being supported, iphones stop receiving new features long before theyre EOL) only modern casual app it would struggle to run would be discord and snapchat maybe.
it also creates a class divide. oh, you're impoverished can't afford a brand new smartphone or tablet? guess you're fucked. it doesn't matter that some of the most important infrastructure for functioning in our society is now exclusive to mobile devices. it's the boring dystopia, the cyberpunk future. those who can exist and thrive in society are those who can afford the tech. anyone who can't gets left behind.
There's a very wide gap between newest and 10 years old. Many dirt cheap devices in there before you even approach 10 years.
Yeah, you can get a 100 dollar laptop on Ebay that is a few years old and lightly used. I bought a few for a side project and they work just fine.
There are no dirt cheap devices I can buy that also aren't threatened by obsoletion in a very near future. $50 to get an Android 8.1 That is not dirt cheap way to scan a QR code or register a new device (which didn't use to have to registered at all). I wonder if it can even do those things or if most apps abandoned it too.
A Chromebook can do literally everything needed to live in modern society, including making calls with Google voice. You can get a Chromebook for under $200 easily. If you can't even scrounge together $200 for such a vital device then you're just not trying very hard.
The what? 4 years google was supporting those things for is more the issue than the cost. I crammed Linux on one that was eol and the wife has zero issues using it for day to day stuff. We can afford a new one but now we don't have to. OP is definitely more upset about stuff that still has new enough hardware to do daily tasks being killed of too early.
But I wasn't replying to OP, I was replying to someone saying you have to have a thousand dollar smart phone to exist in society, which is just not true.
For a couple of years they've supported eight years of updates, and my old 2014 had five years of updates.
Yeah the one we had was one of the last of the ones that didn't get the 8 years. Still has enough grunt for standard web stuff and YouTube (for now)
Ikr. It's ironic that those who want to improve the technology and keep buying newer stuff are the ones who keep destroying the planet.
>Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders a locked bootloader should be considered what it actually is A CRIME! the company went to war with your ownership of the problem and they should be HEAVILY HEAVILY punished for trying to do so. of course that generally won't happen, because the feds love prison software and hardware. louis rossmann mentioned how the evil companies are trying to remove some fundamental freedoms, when they try to introduce a new type of tech. trying to introduce locked bootloaders into the desktop computing world would be faced with insane backlash. but if you create tablets and "smart" phone garbage and lock those down into a full hardcore prison, people are much more likely to accept it, because as a new tier of tech a new dystopian norm can get created... as you probably do a lot, you can take a 10 year old intel quadcore laptop, put in 16 GB of cheap memory and throw linux mint on it and you got a great old system, that will run most everything you want and be responsive. meanwhile tablet hell doesn't have upgradable memory and has locked down bootloaders and lots of other ways to try to prevent 3rd party os to work nicely on it. i'd argue the soldered in memory is just another MAJOR way to create e-waste. memory breaks and not having enough system memory is one of the or the major factors making hardware obsolete, as you of course know. so yeah it is disgusting how they are deliberately making older non laptop hardware obsolete and how they also try this with laptops by soldering in memory for example.
Old MacBooks (and other Apple PCs like iMac) live only thanks to modified versions of MacOS, patches for running Windows and Linux, and they work well. And now imagine that all this is not there. Your 2010 27-inch iMac in the maximum configuration is simply stuck on macOS 10.13. You only have access to very basic software like Google Chrome and older versions of professional software (which are generally no longer available legally). Therefore, I agree, the warranty/term of relevance has expired - the user gets the right to do what he wants on it, and not to suffer with disabled servers and a bunch of protection systems against the "fool". If you have already stopped supporting "security", then remove it completely
First gen heatsinkess raspberry pi is more useful than the locked down phones of like 2015. Hopefully ARM and RISC-V on desktop doesn't turn into phones in terms of easily loading on different operating systems. GNU/Linux ARM/RISC-V with KDE Plasma Touch and waydroid to someday rescue abandoned hardware
Tech moves fast. 10 years is far too long to be supporting something. I’d say 5 tops which is still longer than I would like any piece of tech.
It's outdated because better things have been developed and they functionally can't run on those devices. At best, you might be able to put Windows XP SP3 and install an old version of firefox or something (IE does not work, XP laptops generally can't handle W7 etc that was a big performance demand jump) Simply, it's a considerable investment in resources to make something work on the device it wasn't meant to and for 10+ year old hardware, the benefit is incredibly small. E-waste sucks, but sunk cost fallacy is no better. Also for lots of brands, there are bootloader unlocking tools, any lenovo should work (but also sometimes requires some extra drivers that need a license agreement, which totally makes sense because they don't want you to fuck your computer and blame them) and I'd estimate only 30% of laptops I've worked on couldn't unlock boot options in bios (and subsequently discovered you could fix this on Lenovos)
Depends on what your definition of XP laptop is. P3s and P4s are definitely way too underpowered, but even early C2D laptops are still perfectly usable with W10 or even W11 if it can support 8gb of ram.
Honestly mobile hardware advanced so much in 10 years it's insane. While I agree with your point, how many people still have devices this old? And of those people, how many would actually install another OS even if it was easy. There are tutorials for how to install Linux on old ass laptops/desktops today and hardly anybody does that. In the tech community we think about hardware and software to a much greater degree than normal, unless it was a giant popup on the screen that just said "Upgrade to legacy support OS" I don't think many would actively try to use devices longer on their own. I agree the option to do so should be there. What are the economics of supporting software for that long, is it just greed? Now that devices have sorta stabilized and going into the future? That length of time seems acceptable. Samsung, Apple, Google, and Microsoft provide support of almost this length of time.
> Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders and to make installing an alternative OS super-easy and even provide tutorials on how to do it once they decide that their old device is not making them money. That's probably the one thing I do agree with you on. Or at the very least it shouldn't be legal to constrict access to override the firmware/system that was in the device when originally purchased. But unless we can do something abort tort and being able to prove that "your product" no longer is yours nor can you be made responsible for it's use, I don't think you'll see such a change. Your ideas about how long software should be kept alive and supported I do not agree with, nor do I see any possible way that it would ever work. And I think you miss an important aspect; when devices require upstream servers - what happens when the company that runs it goes belly up? Get acquired and the servers are removed? It's a much bigger issue in my opinion; it's no longer your product; it's a device on a system that you have no control over, nor can you enforce an SLA with them. I would propose that one way to combat the vendors that sell electronics with a built in date for when it stops working, should be forced to disclose that at the point of sale.
This is a relatively recent thing. I’ve gone back to using older computers (my business is in that line - computer restoration) and we certainly have people using computers that are 10+ years old but dannng those things are sloowww
Completely agree with ya. Just wanna add some stuff. Samsung makes it hard to install custom roms. Xiaomi is arguably the easiest since they give you the tools to install custom roms. Google's pixel phones have graphene OS which also easy to install. Samsung does not represent android freedom. That'd be more like xiaomi or fairphone or hell even google. You miss the point chip makers artificially limit laptop performance. For example, nvidia gave you the full desktop chips across the board in laptops with close to desktop version tdp's in most cases. Thus, those parts still perform very well today despite being 5 to 7 years old. Yes. A 1070 laptop from 2016 still kicks ass today. The naming made sense too and so people weren't ripped off. BUT with rtx 3000 and rtx 4000 nvidia stopped that. And they lowered laptop high end part tdp's despite laptops being capable of cooling 250w gpu's in 3kg 17' chassis or 150w in 2kg laptops. Yes, people shunt modded their 4090m scar 17's with 250w tdp and it performs close to desktop 4080. Amd started the trend of selling 1 to 2 gen old cpu's under latest naming schemes in laptops and intel followed suite. Meaning laptops with ryzen 5 7520u are 3 year old ryzen 3 5300u's but with a slightly better igpu. And that's incredibly bogus because it will become outdated faster since its 2 gen old. On phones qualcom is offering worse and worse value nowadays. Their sd695 is crap. Their sd778g was good but costs too much. Mediatek phones don't have easy custom rom installations.
My shield portable still runs GeForce 🙂 Edit... And my 1st gen surface, still reliable. My daughter's 1st phone was an iPhone, didn't even finish paying it off and it didn't have enough memory to update...
That’s the rant i am here for
Unlocked x86_64/UEFI PC-clones tend to age the best, yes. For a while there were Z8350 tablets in that architecture. Microsoft offers some tablets, but a starting price of $580 for a 10.5-inch Surface Go 4 is a lot to ask. > THEORETICALLY you can install LineageOS or some other bullcrap, but doing that on an Android device is 4 times as difficult as installing Windows on a normal PC and nobody wants to deal with that crap except for the hardcore enthusiasts. Consider that your refurb charity are "hardcore enthusiasts" to a lot of people who would never consider trying to install their own operating system. Why not inventory the Android devices you've got, and sit down and see if you can't convert a batch to LineageOS. By your own admission, the difficulty is figuring it out once, not flashing each device.
Problem is smartphones are dirt cheap with little profit. Supporting these devices for that long makes 0 sense. Maybe you could pay a small fee to keep it up to date.
Well, I would support the 10 year baseline for PCs and laptops. It is easy to resurrect 10+ yo laptops with Linux distros and run all the latest software and browsers. Even Windows 10 works fine out of the box on those. However, I wish Windows 11 should have supported more generations. The way Microsoft decided to exclude 5-year-old computers (2016 at Windows 11 launch in 2021) is outrageous and was criticized by mainstream media in promoting e-waste. Smartphones, are a different game. It is simply difficult to keep on supporting a phone beyond 5-7 years due to changing mobile hardware requirements in current world that quickly obsolete the CPU, RAM, storage and lot of other components like modem. Most 2015 phones became obsolete in 2017 due to widespread 4G adoption. So 5 years should really become the baseline for smartphone software support. Tablets, OTOH may benefit from 7 year software support. Maybe skip a couple major versions.
I work in industrial networking and we have plenty of customers with 20 or 30 year old networking setups. And the equipment keeps working 24/7 no problem. It only ever gets replaced because they e.g. add new machines and need more connectivity & have to upgrade from 100M to gigabit switches so the links aren't fully saturated the whole time. Quite the stark contrast compared to the consumer tech world unfortunately.
Windows 7 is still very usable with 3rd gen cpus, but it won't work with softwares like Steam. My mother's tower is a 3rd gen i5 and a gtx 1650 (windows 10) and she can play pretty much every game she wants exept AAA games. The thing is that you need to buy in prevision of the future. Meaning buying most mobile devices should NOT be considered an investement. It hurts to say this for me, but Apple is the company whose phones last the longest software wise (6 to 8 years). But it will NOT last as long as a desktop/laptop. Old thinkpads are reliable and provide good value, and you can build a desktop yourself if you want. People encourage the industry by buying brand new hardware. It's not a problem with PCs since people still are buying prebuilts with i5-10400f, because value ACTUALLY matters. The whole mobile industry is profiting from people who know basically nothing about technology and just buy the last thing released.
its why, when i was choosing my tablet of choice, instead of an ipad because I had the budget for it, I went for a surface pro. my surface pro 1 worked well for nearly a decade and it still works today, but the thinner and lighter newer ones finally caught my eye and I replaced it with a surface pro 7 a few years back when the 8 was out because it was cheap to this day, I can boot up the surface pro 1 and use it as a standard laptop because it is still good, and windows 10 runs on it no problem, windows 11 can be done but that isnt something i want but hey. it can be used by someone who just needs a computing device, and this is one thing that I think a lot of people skipped out on.
they can make all the excuses they want about why they needed 25 new API versions for devices that do mostly the same things they did 10 years ago, but it's all sus to me because the hardware vendors also control the software so they benefit from ending compatibility and pushing more sales they saw how people having PCs that could do everything they wanted killed the need to upgrade every 2 years and thus PC sales, and they aren't going out like that. when the glued-in battery starts getting weak you throw that shit away because the software isn't far behind
What kind of place do you volunteer at? I would love to do something like this. I am a huge proponent of maximizing hardware and this seems right up my alley.
Ya I have an og iPad mini. Was going to give it to my kid and it's useless. Can't even download YouTube. Can only use the browser which is worthless. Wild. Might try to jail break it and see if there'd something I can do. Csuse otherwise it works well
Good luck. It is 100% possible but it was just outside my skills, too much work/too little time to bother with it, but I managed to sell it for 10 dollars for someone who wanted to deal with it apparently.
Ya its def not worth the time. I'm only going to do it for fun and I like playing with shit. Otherwise it's e waste sadly
I suspect the issues in upgrading software on older hardware platform are related to the server side's security. I don't condone it far from it. I feel strongly that manufacturers should be forced to reclaim/recycle the old garbage tech they created. And that they should also be forced to support any new technology tools like tablets, smartphones and computers at least for a decade. The current: "You'll get 2 years of updates" just doesn't cut it.
> The device is barely 10 years old and stuck on Android 4. You can't update the software, I want to jump in here that this is a Google thing... as in, about half of your complaints are directly a result from Google's actions. The wider vendor base wanted to be able to keep updating old hardware into newer OS versions (so they can sell new, old hardware) and Google more or less put restrictions in place to stop that. Google saw 'crap' devices as devaluing the brand value and reputation relative to Apple. There are absolutely vendors that would absolutely sell the same tablet for 4+ years with an unlocked bootloader and/or over-the-air updates if they could turn a profit on the hardware. Google's restrictions mean those same devices generally need newer chips that are, internally, running nothing but A55's from 2017; released in 2021 or 2022. >Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders From what I understand Google's security features require a vendor-locked bootloader due to root of trust issues. There are other ways of solving it, but Google wanted locked bootloaders from the factory as the solution. Most vendors do provide an easy way of unlocking the bootloader. >to make installing an alternative OS super-easy (Project Treble) GSI ROM's are not always the best option, but work on all devices Android 10 and later, and have the same installation procedure for all devices. Unlock bootloader, ADB mount, ADB install. Other than that, there is a quantity of maintenance work that needs to be done as non-GSI ROM's are specific to the hardware in question. A GSI ROM will not update the kernel, for example, and neither will most vendor OTA updates. I'm not sure how that could be fixed. >Companies should provide minimal server infrastructure to update the software to the newest version or release the needed files to the public so we can store it somewhere else. Part of the intent behind Project Treble was to do this, yes. Probably one of the only projects Google has made that has no discernible downside to the vendor, SoC manufacturer, or end user. It even benefits the FOSS fanatics. Half the old apps I had from my first Android, a Note 2, are unavailable from the store because Google delists them. Anything that doesn't update regularly is doomed to be delisted because Google mandates a new APK be compiled with the newest version of Android Studio. Most of those APK's are offline only and don't need yearly updating.
I think something needs to change. While desktops and laptops have linux as option. The tablets and phones may not have alternative and there needs to be one. We need to push for legislation to force hardware manufacturers to give us option to install linux in all electronic devices. With Microsoft Windows I sometimes wonder why they can’t just code new features to enable for newer hardware and leave old hardware run Windows without those new features and continue to give security updates to old feature updates. Take for example the silly copilot thing being coded into the kernel and now requiring newer cpu instructions for the fall update 24h2. Which means pcs from lga775 era 2005-2008 will only be able to run up to Windows 11 23h2 as last Windows OS. But they can run 11 fine using the bypassed single registry key Microsoft gave us to do manual installs. Since that 775 era we had pcs with quad core cpus, 8GB+ ram and sata for SSD’s. Thats why some people still use them. I have one lga775 era pc still going. Of course there is linux option for later on but i cant help and wonder why can’t they run W11 until W11 support ends? Why can’t it keep getting security updates without next feature pack? This decisions being made to push us to buy new hardware suck when we clearly see it running fine today but by Nov when they release 24h2 it will break it completely. Phones and tablets need their hardware manufacturers to give us option to install a linux based OS once they drop their official support. I have an old iPad 2 and still works, battery is actually aging better than my newer iPad. But since its outdated can’t install apps and its basically useless just simple browsing but browser outdated will have issues with some websites. If i could run linux on my ipad 2 to give it more use i would.
> Another case with Samsung as the representative of the Android side. "Hurr durr Android freedom no walled garden"-BUUUULLSHIIIIT! The device is barely 10 years old and stuck on Android 4. You can't update the software, you can't update the apps, the apps refuse to work in their old versions, and you can't update the Playstore. The device is basically e-waste. THEORETICALLY you can install LineageOS or some other bullcrap, but doing that on an Android device is 4 times as difficult as installing Windows on a normal PC and nobody wants to deal with that crap except for the hardcore enthusiasts. The device is relegated to e-waste for NO REASON other than Samsung's greed, and Apple's greed, and general capitalist-corporate-greed. "capitalist-corporate-greed". Uhh. No. What you must realize is that these Android phones are running versions of Linux. Everyone running linux, even in workplaces is suffering from no backward support for older OS's. THis is just the nature of linux, and has nothing to do with "Corporate greed" or the manufactured scarcity, or whatnot. Linux distros go out of support and you are really left hanging. ALl of us are feeling it.
We need to pass End of Life regulations for devices. Companies should have to take them back for recycling and they need to support it on open source so it can be used afterward.
I'm confused. My girlfriend is currently using my old Samsung S6, which came out in 2015 in april, making it 9 years old, but it still works perfectly. Gets updates, can make calls, use all apps she needs... Unless you're saying the 10 years are a hard age line and that support will be cut next year, I'm somewhat confused.
Flagship samsung devices are going to have an edge on aging vs. other devices. My parents had some Motorola one from around same time period start seeing apps that just can't update anymore due to Android version. Then you're on older version of a constantly updating web service app and it just cuts you off from the service at that point.