Comment by csnover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by csnover | Hacker News Reader

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The OP said old devices, not old OS versions. In other words, the lack of software support is the problem, not the hardware.

I used a smartphone that was released in 2014 until the end of 2020. It worked perfectly fine, and would have continued to work perfectly fine—except for the software. The GPS date rollover happened and there was no official update to fix it to the new epoch. VoLTE support in custom ROMs was impossible (because this feature is locked in a closed-source binary blob), so it couldn’t make phone calls once my provider turned off their 3G network. Otherwise, it was fast and worked fine.

When I gave up and looked for a replacement, I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone. Lower-resolution non-OLED screens, lower benchmark scores, no wireless charging, no waterproofing, no replaceable batteries, no unlocked bootloaders. The idea that newer hardware is objectively superior is simply untrue.

> most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone.

Unlikely. Top of the line then was a Note 4; 3 GB RAM, 32 GB storage, Snapdragon 805 quad-core (Geekbench 5 score--around 154/449).

Mid-range now--

Motorola One 5G Ace, $349 https://www.amazon.com/Motorola-battery-Unlocked-Camera-Silv...

6 GB RAM, 128 GB storage, Geekbench 5 score 660/1888

PLUS 5 G

So-2x RAM, 4x storage, 4x CPU + 5G.

At about half of the price of the Note 4 when it came out.

I think you’re probably right about the performance (though I did typo ‘2021’ instead of ‘2020’, so the specific model you mention wasn’t available at the time). I do remember feeling very surprised that contemporary mid-range phones seemed to have worse benchmarks on PassMark, but my old phone model (Galaxy S5) seems to be conspicuously absent as I look again, so I wonder if there was a data issue. It’s also possible that I misread something, or that the devices I was looking at weren’t representative of the best of the mid-range market at the time due to carrier restrictions and essential-to-me features (e.g. headphone jack) that have been getting cut from newer phones.

In any case, I regret bringing this specific point up, both because I try not to say things which are inaccurate, but also because I feel like it has distracted from the main point: my old phone did everything that most people do on their phones (phone calls, chats, video streaming, music streaming, web browsing, light gaming) with no performance/memory/storage problems, had a (subjectively) better feature set than many more recent models, and the only reason I had to buy a new one anyway was because the manufacturer made it impossible to keep the software up-to-date.

The OP said old devices, but in response to someone complementing support for old software -- you can see where the change in topic might lead to difficulties in communication?

Unfortunately, board support packages from the system-on-chip manufacturer limit kernel upgrades. Even then, Project Treble should make it easier to upgrade to newer versions of higher-level components. But Treble was introduced with Android 8.0, so while newer phones should be able to be upgraded more easily, that doesn't help hardware of the era you're referring to.

In any case, the problem isn't with app developers and older versions of Android -- although I'm happy that many try to mitigate the hardware vendors' lack of support. It's that phone hardware is insufficiently open or standardised (in contrast to x86) meaning that OS vendors can't support it.

I had a similar situation, where my 2015 Samsung S6 still seemed as good or better than most the mid to low range phones I saw in 2020, and open source support for the old phone through Lineage was spotty at best (one person would update new releases maybe). I eventually got a Samsung A51 which has about equivalent specs in most cases but has a slightly bigger screen.

It's sad how mostly fine hardware (just one replaceable component is bad) gets left behind, but it's not entirely limited to phones. A couple years back I had to replace the main board of my son's computer because the old gateway it was that came with windows 7 or 8 and that was updated to windows 10 stopped being supported in one of the fall or spring patch rollups. Windows 10 had worked on the computer for about a year, that mainboard wasn't supported in the update, so the update never applied cleanly. I understand dropping old system support eventually (even though the Linux kernel still supports everything, that doesn't always mean you can get really old systems to boot a modern distro without problem), but I would rather it wasn't mid-way through the OS lifetime. :/

> I found that most low- and mid-range phones sold in 2021 have slower hardware with fewer features than my 2014-era flagship phone

Slower hardware doesn't mean equally outdated, and I honestly can't back up your claim with any data. A $30 Android Tracphone on Amazon has 1-2 orders of magnitude more storage, a 50% bigger battery, twice the cores, a bigger screen, better camera, and 4g (compared to the flagship phones in 2011).

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09238C448/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_fa...

The features you mention (wireless charging, screen type) have nothing to do with app or OS support.

Modern low- to midrange phones certainly have more RAM and storage than your 2014 phone, which matters more than the raw benchmark scores.

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