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Comment by throwawaaarrgh | Hacker News Reader

Recycle your electronics: https://www.consumerreports.org/recycling/how-to-recycle-ele...

I bought a certified refurbished phone recently that works as good as new (with a new battery) but is cheaper than a new phone. Even has a new IMEI. The side effect is it's better for the environment. https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/certified-re-newed-ph...

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Part of the problem is the ability to get a new battery for an older device. I was happy with my 4 year old phone, but needed a new battery. The only ones for sale had the same date of manufacture as mine and all the reviews said they were barely better than their old battery. It kills me that something so small and inexpensive as the battery was the reason I had to find a new phone.

Not to get too far off topic, but it sounds like this is going to be an issue with EVs too - I hope not.

At least with EVs there will be enough financial incentive for a 3rd party battery market. For phones it doesn't make sense to perform surgery to replace a battery, but for cars the savings will be worth it.

The problem is software support.

Once you stop getting security updates, it’s game over even if the hardware is still usable.

Root it yourself and do what you want.

I've always considered the whole "but the security!!!1" to be another form of planned-obolescence propaganda.

> Root it yourself and do what you want.

Thanks, but I have more important things to do.

> I've always considered the whole "but the security!!!1" to be another form of planned-obolescence propaganda.

Planned obsolesce? Of course. But why propaganda?

Having root on a machine doesn't remove the vulnerabilities in the kernel (which is so far away from mainstream it can't reasonably be patched).

>I've always considered the whole "but the security!!!1" to be another form of planned-obolescence propaganda.

So you would feel safe doing your online browsing (including banking) on windows xp?

Yes, especially because that depends far more on the browser than the OS. IMHO just using JS whitelisting and something like an adblocking HOSTS file will already eliminate most of the attack surface.

...and if you use something like Win9x, chances are the majority of malware binaries aren't even runnable either.

There have been tons of vulnerabilities in image and video decoders. Those have been causing massive attack surfaces in the browser, and this also affects people who use ad blockers and JS allowlists.

Even exploits that don't fundamentally require JS are often wrapped in JS for obfuscation/avoidance of detection.

I’m not so sure about this. I had apple replace battery on my iPhone 8 Plus. Battery life is not good compared to my iPhone 12.

A problem with phones are that updates are only for a few years on Android. One to three years or so.

How do you know if a refurbished device has a new battery?

Android F-Droid app store has battery condition checker apps that'll show how many charge cycles the current battery has on it.

Best I've found is 'cpu info' on F-Droid, it shows the battery health and other useful hardware stats. I checked on 4 devices (2 year old, 2 year old, 4 year old, 8 year old) and all reported battery health as 'Good', so not super detailed.

There is a massive amount of fraud surrounding unofficial batteries so I certainly wouldn’t put it past them to just reprogram the battery cycle count. It isn’t terribly hard to do.

The refurbisher tells you (Samsung themselves in this case)

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