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Comment by slantyyz | Hacker News Reader

>> The implication being that in the last 5+ years the PC industry has failed to offer 600 million users a compelling reason to upgrade

Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable.

Well if the compelling reason to upgrade is "painfully slow and unusable", then maybe a >= 5 year old PC that still works isn't a bad thing. If I'm not mistaken, my 2011 MBP's quad core i7 can still outperform the CPUs in today's Macbook Airs (the most popular Mac notebooks) in terms of pure processing power.

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Compelling reason why I had to upgrade my iPhone 3G, iPhone 4 and original iPad after less than 3 years? Painfully slow and unusable.

Exactly. Upgrading is a cost; not just money but also time. I upgraded my 1st gen iPad's OS exactly once (5 -> 6 I think) and it was a completely horrendous experience, involving PC iTunes.

The main driver of PC upgrades, apart from improved games, is bloat and the slow deterioration of Windows installations. It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC.

I still have my original iPad, but it's used for a very limited set of things as the browser is crashy and many apps aren't available for its OS.

Users want neither forced upgrades, manufactured obsolescence, nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud.

I still have all three of those iOS devices (and my wife's now retired 4S) mentioned in my original post.

The saddest thing?

The iPhone 4 has only one easy job to do. Play music in my bedroom. It can't even do that reliably. My iPhone 3G (now a desk clock) is more stable than the 4.

There's a reason I left iOS for Android on the phone side and Windows on the tablet side. I've been burned enough that I don't care to be burned again. Granted, Apple's devices are probably less prone to bloat now that Federighi took over from Forstall, but there's nothing compelling for me on the iOS side right now. A Pencil-enabled Mini would be very interesting, but that's about it.

The hardware of the Iphone is nice. I'd like it but with in an Android OS (and an MicroSD card slot). But then again, I wouldn't be willing for pay for that, so I'll continue using my used LG3 I picked up for like 200$.

I'd like an Android phone with the update availablity of iOS. Nexus is the closest contender, but they still stop supporting devices after about 1,5 - 2 years.

(Lenovo) Motos are pretty good with this.

I've had a G and X Play, and update support has been pretty good.

I have a G3 like the GP... Unlocked, with latest nightly (Marshmallow) builds of Cyanogenmod. Pretty painless.

You can argue that Google and the OEMs should be making these upgrades easier and more widely available... And they should... But at least 3rd-parties filling in is an option in many cases. You can shop around to find the combination of hardware and software support that you want.

The problem with getting locked into a walled garden - no matter how nice it is - is that you're still locked in when winter comes.

How did you get that phone unlocked? How did you install Marshmallow? How did you install Cyanogenmod? How did you even find out about all this?

Seems kinda painful.

Nexus 5 is 2½ years old and is still supported.

> nor bogus SaaS rentalware like Adobe Creative Cloud

Eh, as SaaS goes, at least Adobe's has some compelling reasons to use it, the biggest one being cost. Sure, you'll pay more in the long run, but try telling someone trying to start out a small business that they should shell out multiple thousands of dollars for Adobe CS, or multiple hundreds of dollars per individual program if buying a la carte. That's the situation my Fiance was in, and I was finally able to move her to Adobe's SaaS offering and off of pirated Adobe CS because $40/mo is much easier to swallow than the prior cost. That they offer tech support, she can easily migrate computers, and there's no virus' bundled with the installer are all good selling points when coming from that side.

> It's not as bad as it used to be but reinstalling the OS and cleaning the fans can often substantially improve an old PC.

And if you're reinstalling the OS anyway, add an SSD (at least for the system files). This gives a substantial performance boost on most old PCs for under 100 $/€.

Though, if you buy a cheap SSD, I would be careful not to depend on it for important data. Cheaper SSDs often have very low write endurance, and using them as the OS drive where there will be swap and hibernation files, as well as potentially large install and update activity, can drive them to a quick death.

Is it no longer standard operating procedure to disable hibernation when you put an SSD in?

In any case, with an SSD, my boot times from cold start have been faster than coming back from hibernation were with rust disks. Plus, clean starts are less likely to leave things in a fubar state than the often-buggy hibernation

Completely agree. I have a 5 year old Asus K54C (i3-2330m model).

About a year ago I upgraded RAM from 3GB to 6GB, which dealt with most of my multitasking and "large files in memory" issues.

About 2 months ago I bought a Samsung Evo 250GB SSD for under €90. This solved just about every other frustration I had with the machine - slow boot times, slow program load times etc.

The only issue I really have now is maxing out one core too easily and having the fan spin up loudly. Investigations reveal a CPU upgrade is possible.[0]

I have no intention of buying another laptop for a further 12-24 months, even if the plastic case of this one is held together with super glue and tape.

[0] https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/433227-asus-x54c-bbk9...

I concur with you on not wanting forced upgrades and manufactured obsolescence.

But I have found rentalware (specifically Adobe Creative Cloud as I use it) to be a somewhat positive experience. Adobe pushes out updates frequently enough where you see positive increment in productivity without it being an annoying update. Plus it has bought the price within affordable range for people like me who can afford the software if we save up enough for a few years but not the down payment in one go. Having the payment broken down over months makes it more manageable. I have been a convert from a pirate to a legitimate paying user just because of this. Straight out licenses for adobe's software cost more than some kidney operations in my country before this SaaS model.

Jetbrains has also moved onto a SaaS model. If they continue with legitimate updates every few months, then that subscription is also worth paying for.

The only subscription I do not see any benefit in, as a individual developer, is Microsoft Office 365. That's more aimed at business's whose full life depends on the software.

> The only subscription I do not see any benefit in, as a individual developer, is Microsoft Office 365. That's more aimed at business's whose full life depends on the software.

If the Office 365 subscription (for businesses) only included the Office suite, then I'd agree with you, but it also includes hosted email (for your own domain) and 1TB of OneDrive storage. To put that in perspective, Google Apps is a comparable product that offers hosted email, and it costs around the same but only includes 30GB of storage.

On paper at least, the subscription provides quite a bit of value. If only OneDrive for Business wasn't a piece of crap...

Point well noted.

My iPad 2 barely functions now. Kind of pathetic really.

Surely true, phone hardware was quite 'limited' at first, unlike PC which were mostly capable of swallowing any task thrown at them (unless transcoding 1080p in real time or rebuilding LFS counts). On PC the main issue is: subpar and/or unsupported GPU (to avoid burning the main cpu for entertainment), absence of SSD, bad software stack.

>> Surely true, phone hardware was quite 'limited' at first

Well here's my problem with that argument. The 3G, 4 and iPad 1 were quite fast until the bloated OS upgrades started coming out.

The one thing that would keep me from being bitter is if Apple offered an easy way to downgrade to the original OS version of each one.

I don't run a lot of apps. The most important apps to me are the ones that come with the phone. If that meant living without some apps and new features but being able to keep the devices in use longer, I would have surely made that trade-off.

True, but I can also understand how for some time iPad 1 level hardware was just a bit too limiting. Now the bloated upgrades, as I said, did also help forcing users to "want" the new one more.

The thing that saddens me is that, business will always do that, it's the survival gene by making profit. On the other hand we could have nice open source, legit good software layers but it just doesn't happen the right way on smartphones so we're stuck with android / ios and their tricks.

>> Now the bloated upgrades, as I said, did also help forcing users to "want" the new one more.

My experience after switching to Android is not that though. Most of the major releases, including the upcoming N, offer performance improvements.

Granted, I don't know what that says about the code base, whether it was already so vastly inefficient that they find tons of room for improvements or whatnot, but it's definitely a refreshing change from iOS for me.

True, after version 7 iOS became too demanding. Ironically I had much love for first OSX releases that got better even on 1st gen iMac until 10.5 I believe. Apple put that gene to rest ..

Google wins when you upgrade Android, Apple wins when you buy a new iDevice. The different priorities shouldn't be surprising at all.

That's irony, since Apple has a ~80% adoption rate for iOS 9 and Google has an adoption rate of <40% for Android 5+.

I long ago switched away from iPhones to Android devices, but I'd be lying if I didn't admit that Apple's public commitment to privacy and Android's recent security woes didn't make me think twice about what the next phone in my pocket will be. I look at the system updates page on my Moto X longingly, but it still says February 1st is the most recent update available. Not sure how long I'll have to wait but I hope I don't get exploited in the meantime.

> That's irony, since Apple has a ~80% adoption rate for iOS 9 and Google has an adoption rate of <40% for Android 5+.

But I also wonder what the story is behind that adoption rate discrepancy.

Apple makes their own phones, so they can push out upgrades easily. Most of the Android phones sold were made by Samsung right? And Samsung has a a wide variety of phone models and penchant for making mods that slow down updates and/or make them infeasible for other models.

Aging iPhones also tend to become less enjoyable (carefully selected words) to use on their last viable OS update, so people tend to either upgrade to the latest iPhone or switch platforms.

Speaking of Moto X'es, I just got a notification for an update right now, while my wife who has the same model on the same network got her notification over a week ago. I'm guessing they like to stagger their updates?

I think part of the Android version spread has to do with prepaid phones. At least 2 of my family members regularly lose/destroy their cheap Android phones and then replace them. These cheaper phones ($30 - $60) are usually running an older 4.x version (until recently, often 3.x).

All valid points, but it hasn't always been this way. There is a model for profitably and sustainably running a business that builds solid products and then services them.

We often act as though the world we live in is the only way things could have possibly proceeded, but after WW2 U.S. manufacturing invented the idea of the consumer to cope with manufacturing capacity built up during war time.

We are still effectively living in a manufacturing boom time created by a war machine.

I've pretty much gotten to the point of upgrading my hardware only when continuing to use my current hardware is more painful.

Is this slowness//clunkiness liveable for what I'm doing? When the answer is "no" more days than "yes", it's time for me to go shopping. Until then, I'm ok with typing on something you might find on the Millennium Falcon.

The irony of those comments is that one of the Mac's selling points is that after 5 years the average person can still expect it to be a decent machine running the latest OS and not corrupted by bloatware.

(My six year old PC laptop is an incredibly heavy piece of junk that crashes all the time due to the combination of corrupted hard disk and Vista, and it actually is sad that I still occasionally find a cause to use it, not least because it's still the least unreliable device for running Skype that I own)

This is why Chromebooks are brilliant devices for a lot of users. You lose out on functionality, but you completely avoid bloat. They reliably boot in 6-8 seconds and stay responsive with a dozen tabs open, even with a puny little Atom or ARM processor.

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