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Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

The attitude that even cheap phones are throwaways is troubling to me. Not just because throwing away $200-300 seems reasonable to people here that average people can afford to do this regularly, but mostly because every phone cheap or not, takes resources to produce, many of which are non renewable, resources to ship and distribute and sure they're recyclable, but I'd be willing to be not a lot of people put the effort in to actually recycle them.

Continuing to produce new phone after new phone with only slight improvements between each new model with the expectation that people will just buy a new one rather than upgrade parts or repair old ones is just completely and utterly wasteful from an environmental stand point.

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The environment isn’t being wasted, it’s being spent. The only way to stop waste is to reach the point where you make a phone so good you don’t need a new phone for a very long time. We may be reaching that point soon within the next decade. That will require constant progress year after year.

Good phones are in many cases being obsoleted with forced updates. 5SE, for instance. It's impossible to stick to a phone that you like, it will eventually stop functioning properly way before the phone's physical death.

Wasted vs. spent is simply a matter of perspective/semantics. From a sustainability standpoint it's totally wasteful. The idea that we could make a perfect product is also kind of silly. Consumer demand in this society is largely driven by novelty.

You're forgetting planned obsolescence. It's not a coincidence that battery life drops off a cliff and performance issues crop up right at the 1 year mark for most phones.

> The only way to stop waste is to reach the point where you make a phone so good you don’t need a new phone for a very long time. We may be reaching that point soon within the next decade.

Do you seriously think manufacturers would ever do that?

Hehehe They tried that with light bulbs in the US. The electric companies colluded to crush it and it became the start of planned obsolescence. I think Eastern Germany under Soviet rule made an amazingly cheap and efficient light bulb, but it didn't survive the fall of the Berlin wall - not enough money in it.

> "We may be reaching that point soon within the next decade. That will require constant progress year after year."

How are we not there already? What does your phone do today that it couldn't do five years ago, and is that thing actually so important as to justify five years of ewaste? And what do you think it doesn't do today that a few more years will fix?

The biggest problems right now are fragile hardware (a phone should not shatter when dropped), poor repair-ability (particularly battery replacement, which should be a trivial matter) and shitty wasteful software that has fewer features than it did years before but somehow uses more ram and more CPU time because the industry is obsessed with hiring the cheapest most inexperienced developers.

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