Okay but I’d rather hear this from someone who is actually using a 5+ year old phone, not a guy who has a 1 year old work phone that he “plans” to keep for an undefined amount of time. Everyone says this and then they break it and decide the cost of a repair isn’t worth it, or just cave to the first trade in deal they receive in their inbox. There is a lot of virtue signalling about e-waste and the environment from these tech reviewers and influencers on YouTube but very few of them actually follow their own guidelines.
I have a Galaxy S10e, purchased the day it launched, 6 March 2019. Today, March 25 2024, it is 5 years old.
My phone is in good physical shape and running fine. The battery isn’t quite what it used to be, but it loads web pages and apps well, the UI is responsive, I look at new phones and there’s not a single thing there I want. When my previous phone, an S4 Mini, was this old (yes I had an S4 Mini in service for 5 years) it was getting kind of slow, there were apps in the app store that wouldn’t run, I had replaced the battery…I still wasn’t really looking forward to upgrading. My S10e is…fine. If it kept getting updates, I’d gladly keep it in service.
What’s more, I look out at what they’re advertising on phones now and I’m like “don’t need that. Actively don’t want that. Want to not have that. Okay the anti-glare coating would be nice. Don’t need AI. Don’t need titanium. I don’t game on my phone…”
What’s more, I look out at what they’re advertising on phones now and I’m like “don’t need that. Actively don’t want that. Want to not have that. Okay the anti-glare coating would be nice. Don’t need AI. Don’t need titanium. I don’t game on my phone…”
Yeah I know what you mean. Somewhere in that 2017/18/19 period phones suddenly began losing a lot of what I would consider important features like the option for a truly small size, headphone jacks, SD card slots and 16:9, uninterrupted displays and I don’t feel like any of the improvements since have justified that. I think the only thing that may force me to switch permanently to a newer device is if the 3G shutdown in Australia renders my older phones unusable. At the moment I’m using an XZ1 Compact and it’s still enjoyable to use because it nails so many of those features that I just can’t get in a newer device. I bought a secondhand razr 2023 at the start of the year but found I just preferred using older phones.
Are you really getting updates though? Samsung latest phones are expected to be getting updates for 7 years but as far as I know the s10 range isn’t officially supported anymore. Samsung don’t need to provide security updates to your phone anymore. I think the last one was Q4 of 2023 and it made the news because it was unexpected.
The S10e does have good custom ROM support so perhaps that’s how they’re getting Android updates.
and then they break it and decide the cost of a repair isn’t worth it
Yep, that was me with my previous phone, which I did indeed have for over 5 years.
But there’s another major factor to it.
I use Android phones, which get official software updates for only a couple years (3 years for the most part). This includes security updates.
So when I got my current one it was one of only two I even considered, because only those two manufacturers promised 5 years of (security) updates at the time.
It has gotten better though, but except for Fairphone they’re still all very hard or impossible to repair.
My anecdote…I used my last phone until it died. It was around 4 years old and the eMMC storage failed from age, making the device a suddenly totally unusable brick. Before then, it had gotten very slow and laggy over time and the battery life degraded to be pretty sucky…barely surviving the workday on standby in my pocket.
From my experience, I don’t know that I would necessarily advise using a device for that long. The battery just gets too shitty and its sudden death made it a bit of a scramble to buy a new phone. Granted, my previous phone was fairly low end, but even with a high end device, batteries degrade to almost unusable levels after a few years. I know it sucks for the environment, but it seems like less of a headache to keep a phone for only like 2-3ish years and then upgrade it while it’s still working as opposed to waiting for it to irreparably bork itself.
Edit: If you’re able to do a battery replacement, I will say that it does change the conversation somewhat. But long gone are the days of easily user serviceable battery replacements for most phones. Yes, there are obscure phones out there that make it easier to swap out the battery, but these phones aren’t exactly prominent.
I mean, makes sense that people would rather get a new phone that costs the same as a repair.
That said, had been using a S5 myself for five years before the phone died. As I ain’t that big on mobile gaming (and the ones I play don’t demand much), the phone did all I needed to. Currently using a S10+, because that’s the last Galaxy S model with both headphones and SD support.
I’ve got a friend whose earpiece on their iPhone stopped working. They could repair it, or upgrade for basically the same price. Their iPhone is a few years old at this point (3 years I think, maybe older), which is crazy to me. But it’s true. When something breaks the cost of replacement is often on par with the cost of repair for small tech like phones. Th system is basically rigged to make you upgrade. Also, with a work phone, the upgrade schedule isn’t up to him. It’s up to the IT department and the corporate office. They may decide to buy new phones next year or something.
Using a pixel 4a still. OS is unsupported and battery life has gone down the drain. I’m holding out for the Pixel 8a because Google has pledged 8 years of support. I really wish decent phones came in sub-6.1" size, but days just what I’m working with. Losing the headphone jack will suck.
I have a Redmi Note 8, i think. It’s att least 5 years old, maybe 6. I have no reason to change it.
I sadly became one of those people last year. I had every intention of keeping my Pixel 5A for a long time but when faced with a $250 repair bill I bought a used pixel 6 for $240 instead of fixing it. I do regret it because the battery life and antenna on the 6 is awful compared to the 5a.
I bought my LG V30 July 30, 2018. Still using it. The battery is of course not awesome but I’m not really a hard user so I get by. I installed a custom ROM around 2020. I’m on Lineage os 21 now. It’s perfectly fine. I guess I’ll upgrade somewhere this year cause the back cover seems to be coming off. I’m in no hurry though.
I’d like replaceable batteries to come back.
Every single phone upgrade since 2012 was because the battery would get so bad, it lasts less than an hour.
And before someone goes, “Ah try ifixit”, the cost of the replacement parts was as much or more than just getting another used phone from like swappa. I’ve done the financial math countless times.
I miss buying batteries for like $20 and watching the phone become new again.
Which phones are you buying that have batteries that cost hundreds of dollars? Every battery replacement I’ve ever done cost waaaaaay less than the cost of a replacement phone.
I as well. At the very least, we need some fucking differences in the market. Every phone doesn’t have to be the same. Imagine the car market if all we could buy were Chrysler 300s. It looks sleek and nice but will crap out on you in a couple years and doesn’t really fit in well with your career as a general contractor. When it dies, you have to go buy another one and start the cycle over.
It seems like each new version of Android locks down the file system in some new way that breaks a core part of something I do, so I actively don’t want to upgrade.
I can’t root my phone because I need my banking apps readily avaliable right now.
I’m still bitter about USB mass storage being removed for only MTP. MTP sucks, any time I use it for more than a few small files it always ends up dying partway through.
Yea, don’t waste time with MTP. It’s a hack to enable some access. It’s always been unstable.
Use some kind of network sync tool instead. Syncthing, Resilio Sync, Foldersync, etc.
That’s why I stick with Android 12, all my banking apps work just fine with magisk’s DenyList. Heard that’s getting tricky on 13 or 14.
And I absolutely need root to add system-wide adblocking and security features like Ice Box and Storage Isolation.
This is why I’ve ended up keeping my Pixel 4 on Android 10. I’ve made backups and flashed the latest versions, only to come back because every time they’ve broken something I need the phone to do.
It makes me glad that this is a secondary phone because I can happily keep it on this ancient version of Android and not give a shit about the security.
Yo, write better titles. I thought this was a video about how they didn’t want to upgrade to Android 15 or something. But it’s not. It’s just about not buying a new phone every two years 😆 In my opinion buying a new replacement isn’t ‘upgrading’.
Personally, although the terms have become increasingly blurred over the years, I refer to changing to a new version of software (including an OS, and both ideally with some improvements) as updating it rather than upgrading.
I reserve upgrade more for changes of hardware with some form of improvement over its predecessor. I’d suspect I may not be alone in this, but I dunno how common it may be. When switching to a mix of both, I simply say I’m getting a new [insert specific device depending on which].
Although I’d hesitate to call many new phones an all-around upgrade when they’re either removing features (headphone jack/expandable storage) or getting more cumbersome to hold (can you even call some modern phones a handset anymore?).
Why I refuse to upgrade to a new phone - 8 minutes video explaining why it’s not that interesting to upgrade buy new phones nowadays
I think that’d fit better.
But you all made me look it up on Wikipedia: “Upgrading is the process of replacing a product with a newer version of the same product. In computing and consumer electronics an upgrade is generally a replacement of hardware, software or firmware with a newer or better version, in order to bring the system up to date or to improve its characteristics.”
I’m confused. Maybe because so many people use those terms wrongly. And I suspected them doing that. But I think I’d still like to refuse using the same term for describing upgrading a computer with an additional $35 RAM stick and buying a new $2.500 gaming rig.
You upgrade your phone when you can no longer use the previous one. What other reason would there be? They’re all the same anyway.
10+ years ago, it was very common to get an upgrade to your phone ever two years (or less). And at the time, there was a lot more variability in phones. And I mean in more than just battery life, storage capacity, camera quality, processor, etc. There used to be a variety of form factors to consider, sizes, genuinely different features and functionalities. The iPhone came about in 2009, and other smart phones soon followed, but even then there were still phones with physical keyboards, digital keyboards with stylus typing, flip phones, etc. Once smart phones completely dominated the market and all the manufacturers started just copying each other’s features and designs, eventually we got to the status quo of today where they’re all essentially the same. The only major difference now is the OS, and that’s largely just down to iOS vs Android.
Why I don’t watch YouTube videos -
It’s 8 minutes long and contains less than a minute’s worth of information, and is a complete waste of time
We’ll get an AI to caption and then summarise the transcript of the video that’s 8 mins long because the user (understandably) wanted to monetize the video.
I wonder if this was Google’s plan all along …
An AI that can turn YouTube videos into written articles? Take My Money! I have been wanting this for a long time, I far far prefer stuff in writing to videos, I dont take information from audio/video anything like as well
I totally agree with you, I’d much rather read some bullet points then sit through a video.
I think YouTube automatically generates transcripts already, and GPT can summarise text easily.
