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Comment by swartkrans | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, I don't think you are using the word "nerf" correctly here. "nerf" is a gaming term that means turning a powerful weapon into basically a nerf gun. It means to make something cause less damage or make something less dangerous. I'm not sure how the Nexus phones were ever causing damage to anyone. I think the terms you want are "made obsolete" or "planned obsolescence".

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http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nerf

To "nerf" means to weaken or make less dangerous. Google's forced obsolescence of Nexus devices is clearly making the devices weaker and less capable than they can be. I think the use of the word "nerf" was accurate and justified in this case.

It's also come to mean, in general, to make something less useful. You can "nerf" an alchemy or farming skill in an MMO, even if that doesn't have any combat ability.

Still, I don't think it's super appropriate, because there's nothing making the older phones worse, they just aren't getting better in the ways they obviously could.

> Still, I don't think it's super appropriate, because there's nothing making the older phones worse, they just aren't getting better in the ways they obviously could.

They released an update to the Galaxy Nexus that literally halved performance across the board and never addressed it. The Nexus 4 has had similar woes.

I don't think it's necessarily planned obsolecence so much as allocating less resources to testing and fixing issues on older devices, but to an end-user the result is similar.

If something's effectiveness is destroyed, it has been nerfed. I think being made obsolete is an appropriate time to use the word nerf, though I don't think the phones were in fact made particularly obsolete.

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