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Comment by chaostheory | Hacker News Reader

The status quo is great. You have yearly releases that are stable and allow anyone to upgrade without fear of the new model coming out like with traditional video game consoles.

No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.

Also, the OS and apps need to take advantage of new hardware, so it’s not a surprise if your seven year old phone becomes slower.

If you don’t like the status quo then I would go with a non-iOS and non-android phone like pine phone, Mairena, librem, or anything else that based on a more open Linux distro.

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I think it's interesting that you cite video game consoles as a negative. I'd argue the opposite, I think phones should be more like them.

With video game consoles, you have a single device where micro-optimizations are constantly done, new features are added, and all software can be purpose-built to work really well on that specific hardware. All of that for ~7 years means a really fantastic user experience and a massive community of people that have collectively worked through solutions to common problems and forced the company's hand on defects (joycon drift, for example). It also means tons of high-quality hardware-specific accessories, both from the company that made the console and from third parties.

I don't see why it couldn't be that way - I see people overstating the hardware revisions. Apple, sure, they innovate. Qualcomm? Hah.

For about five years it seemed like every flagship spanning generations was the same SoC

Meanwhile Apple always do the best (and their older chip like A14 is already enough in today IMO), Qualcomm often hits and miss. Their flagship chip made by Samsung fab is tend to be bad battery life and heat. SD888 to 8 Gen2 upgrade is huge than expected for me.

> No one is forcing you to buy anything you don’t want.

Yes they are, by refusing to release security updates for older models.

I don't want to buy a new phone, but likely will have to due to support ending so they can sell more high margin hardware.

The life cycle of Apple Phones for updates is 6 years. On Android, it’s about 2 - 6 years.

If you don’t like the terms, go with a Linux distro phone. There is choice now.

For Google it's been consistently 3 years lately.

Also Linux distro phones aren't practical ways to participate in society unfortunately.

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