I wonder about the software to run such a phone: wouldn't it need to be somewhat minimal and not offer feature upgrades -- only security fixes -- over the life of the phone? Otherwise I would think this phone would suffer the same fate as any five year old Android or iPhone: the bloat of new features overwhelms the old phone's hardware and you're left with a disappointing or frustrating experience. That said, I love the goals of this project and hope it succeeds. And if it can run Graphene OS I'll pre-order one now!
Presumably you'd be able to swap out some hardware to be able to increase ram/processor performance. If I were designing this as a real product I'd still make some choices similar to the megacorps (yearly product releases being one) but change what the product is (the new line of cameras, said ram/processors, etc) that would slot into the existing machine. Rather than selling you a 1000+ dollar phone every couple of years I'd sell you the option to customize a phone to meet your needs.
but change what the product is (the new line of cameras, said ram/processors, etc)
I'm trying to imagine how much bigger this "phone" is going to be now that it has, say, a socketed CPU and slots for RAM. Will cargo pants still cut it, or do I need to go to a messenger bag for carrying my new "phone"?
Since we were perfectly capable of creating working graphical, internet connected software with a few megabytes of RAM in the 90'd I sometimes wonder if the availability of gigabytes of memory isn't the problem instead of progress. Seems like programmers will use it all and are driving the upgrade threadmill which causes working hardware to be discarded.
>Sorry guys. Because of intense lobbying from Big Tech – and a lack of ambition from politicians – products like the 10 Year Smartphone remain a dream.
It smells like bullshit, NO one is lobbying against it...but also not for it.
I don't understand how lobbying from Big Tech makes a product like a 10 Year Smartphone unattainable/just a dream. In what way is this the case? I can't help but think economics and consumer preference is what made the current state what it is. In other words, I don't see how said lobbying would stop some company from trying to make a 10 year smartphone.
So this whole thing is just a push for Right to Repair laws?
I get that most hardware companies want to go full John Deere/Apple on this, but that's an issue with the hardware/software integration. An iPhone is made of the same general components as any other phone, but the special sauce is the easy of use from the software for many consumers.
I don't think most people actually want a 10 year phone, the same way most people don't want to drive a functional but utilitarian car. They want a name brand that reflects their values, and most people don't value being able to cheaply and efficiently fix things. If they did, we wouldn't have had the same erosion of R2R.
That said, this page pissed me off massively because I do like this stuff (We grow herbs/veggies, repair/mend our clothes, usually cook our own meals) and this was a set up for a fucking lobbying campaign on a continent I don't reside on. When I see groups like this supporting causes I also support I usually warn people AWAY from them and towards other, less "clever" people attempting to address the issue without these tactics.
A quick web search for "apple lobbying against right to repair" will give you many results. Apple is not the only one. Here is one article, as an example:
Plenty of companies are actively working behind the scenes to stop anyone at all from repairing products. That's what right to repair is all about (it's not an obligation to repair). Here's a better example https://www.wcvb.com/article/5-investigates-ads-over-massach...
I think Apple is smart enough not to be so public in their support of an unpopular policy
Phones from 10 years ago don't work any more because wireless companies are dropping 3G. AT&T literally sent me a free phone that just arrived out of the blue. Will this 10 year phone will also include replacing the transmitter, modem, and antenna layout?
If the goal is to make parts replaceable to reduce waste, what is the difference between keeping a phone for five years and throwing it away to buy a new one, then keeping that for five years, vs replacing all the parts in "one" phone over a ten year period? Two complete sets of parts are used.
My son has a six year old phone. When he lost it, he wanted the same model, which we bought used. It still has the latest software, because it's not android.
What is the difference between ten people owning ten 10 year phones, and ten people each handing down a phone that one person bought new?
Depends on your needs. If you're selling a phone as a set of individual component parts, I'm never going to buy the latest/greatest camera because I don't use my phone for that. That means that over the 5 years I own this hypothetical phone you don't need to make all those extra cameras. Also casing and other elements that would stay from version to version.
Do I think this solves e-waste? No, but it would be nice to have some of these options.
> Phones from 10 years ago don't work any more because wireless companies are dropping 3G.
This is because of a phase mismatch - a phone bought 10 years ago would have been in the middle of the 3G lifetime. 3G started getting adopted in 2002-ish and had ~200M users in 2007 according to WP[1]. That's between a 13 and 20 year window for usage - which overlapped with 4G during the tail decade (or so), so, in fact, there's a good chance that a 10-year-old phone would work today because it could have been released with a 4G radio (and, if it was built to be a 10-year phone, it absolutely would have had one).
> If the goal is to make parts replaceable to reduce waste, what is the difference between keeping a phone for five years and throwing it away to buy a new one, then keeping that for five years, vs replacing all the parts in "one" phone over a ten year period? Two complete sets of parts are used.
Different parts have different Mean Times Between Failure (MTBF), so you don't end up replacing all parts at equal rates. CPUs tend to last far longer than batteries and screens - having a repairable phone means that you can replace the battery several times over a 10-year lifespan, whereas you're almost never going to replace the CPU.
That is, buying two five-year phones results in you paying for two CPUs, two batteries, two baseband modems, and two of everything, regardless of which component in the first actually failed. Buying one ten-year repairable phone results in you paying for one CPU, one baseband modem, one display driver, ..., ...and two batteries. Far less e-waste. Every time a non-repairable phone breaks, you have to throw the whole thing out. Most times a repairable phone breaks, you can fix what's broken.
Additionally, he MTBF of a composite, non-repairable device is lower than the MTBF of its least reliable component - meaning that (theoretically - I'm ignoring the durability costs of building dis-integrated devices) it's more expensive to build a single, non-repairable device that lasts five years than to build a device composed of components that will individually last five years each.
> What is the difference between ten people owning ten 10 year phones, and ten people each handing down a phone that one person bought new?
As it stands, most phones sold nowadays won't last 10 years, so the latter scenario doesn't really happen. Some manufacturers (Apple) make relatively reliable devices, but those come with severe freedom and privacy restrictions (the argument is that reparability should be a right, not a feature of a particular company), and their devices are infamously non-repairable.
>Buying one ten-year repairable phone results in you paying for one CPU, one baseband modem, one display driver, ..., ...and two batteries.
Which is it? I need to be able to replace everything or just the battery?
Is there a problem with replacing batteries in current phones? The free phone I got from AT&T came with the battery separate, so that one is fine. I have had third parties replace batteries in iPhones.
>but those come with severe freedom and privacy restrictions
Ironically, I find the opposite is true, because my freedoms and privacy are not violated by Apple, but by the shitware you find on Android phones. And if you mean the "freedom" to choose between paying Apple or Epic, well I prefer the freedom to choose a phone that just works. If you value the "freedom" of paying Epic, then you have the freedom to buy an Android phone. But you don't really want Freedom, you want what you want to apply to everyone else. I choose Apple. You don't have to. Demanding that my preference be eliminated is the antithesis of Freedom.
>their devices are infamously non-repairable
non-repairable by others. I've had iPhones repaired by Apple several times. Like the Epic issue, you could buy an Android phone which would meet all your requirements, but you want an Apple phone, and then complain that it doesn't have the "freedoms" of an Android phone. You seem unable to see that the very reasons why you want the Apple phone are a direct result of the policies you complain about. Put the other way, the reasons you don't want an Android are because they have "Freedom" that allows malware to proliferate, or are "repairable" but manufacturing tolerances caused by having to fit multiple parts from multiple vendors means things break or disconnect or you get a bad batch, and the assembler can't support upgrades to the new OS because it's just too expensive to support all the different combinations of driver binaries, so old, unpatched Android for you forever.
Make your 10 year phone. The company wont be around in 10 years and you'll have a rooted virus fest or a brick. The planet wont be around in 10 years, but fuck me, you'll have done your part right? Look at me and my ten friends! There's gigatons of CO2 to support the internet and mobile phone network, but I replaced my mobile phone battery instead of buying a new phone!
> Each time one of these phones is made, it creates between 40 and 80kgs of CO2 (the same as a 3 hour drive).
Is that compelling to anyone? If you asked me to trade my new phone for a 9 year old phone, and in exchange I am allowed to drive for 3 hours, I would keep my current phone. I'd probably give up driving for a week for a phone that's just a year newer.
My first thought was, "3 hours of driving; really? That's it? Then why am I on the fence about buying $LATEST?" I really did think it would have been a higher number.
Smartphone for 10 years seems like a bit of a stretch. The technology is evolving exponentially. iPhone is only 13 years old (the phone which popularised smartphones around the world) and I‘m pretty sure in 10 years we would be using something totally different than a smartphone as its replacement. I really don‘t understand why would want to use the same phone for 10 years.
Further, this would be a nightmare to developers when it comes to supporting the software for the phone. They would definitely reach a point where introducing new features are arduous due to tight requirement of backward compatibility.
It doesn't really feel to me like smartphone technology is evolving exponentially anymore. The difference between the phone I have now and the phone I had 3 years ago is very, very small compared to the phone I had 3 years ago and the one I had 6 years ago.
Although a pain requiring backwards compatibility is an incredibly strong force in helping remains competitive in the market that is one of the reasons Windows continues to stick around despite it's many other copious flaws.
The iPhone is probably your best bet for a 10 year smartphone. The 6S is 6 years old, runs the newest IOS and is still being updated, Apple will replace the battery for $50 ($70 in the newer iPhones).
Apple's SOC's are years ahead of the competition and they support the devices longer than any other company. And Apple will exist in 10 years when this company likely won't. I say that as an Android user since the HTC Evo.
I bought my previous smartphone 5 years ago. I would still use it, if it wasn't for very serious Android security issues which are not fixed due to support expiry (3 miserly years).
I don't perceive any difference with my new one, which is a newer generation. But maybe it's because I don't spend my life glued to a mobile phone.
I'm pretty sure though, that I would have been very happy to use it for other 5 years. Heck, I'd be happy even to use my very old Galaxy S3 (but not the S2 ;)), which unfortunately broke.
The iPhone 5s still receives security updates and is now 8 years old. And it's not on Apple's "vintage and obsolete" list, which means they still have repairs available. So it's not quite a "10 Year Smartphone" yet, but it's already a "8 Year Smartphone"
But I think the call for the Right for Repair is needed. Mandating companies provide (at least security) updates and keep parts availability for 10 years seems like a good thing. I doubt Apple will keep supporting the 5s forever, and even so that's currently the oldest smartphone with current security updates. The next closest (outside of iPhones) is Samsung at 4 years and Google at 3 years.
Even if the phones will get slower and don't get fancy new features, I know plenty of people that are still happily using 5+ year old phones. And manufacturers should definitely be required to provide security updates long past that point.
My mother just recently updated from the 5s, simply because she dropped it. She used it daily for phone calls, texts, and looking at photos of grandkids. She switched to the iPhone 6.
Back in 2017 I found my old iPhone 3GS in a drawer. It booted up fine and held a charge for a couple of hours. Amazingly it even connected to the App Store and could still download apps I'd bought 8 years previously.
I gave it to my daughter who just started secondary school here in the UK. She had to have it switched off at school, and switched it on when she left so a few hours of charge was fine until she got home. I got her a new phone that Christmas, but for a few months she got good use out of it.
Apple does have a very good reputation for building reliable products (with a few notable ~~keyboards~~ exceptions) and providing security updates - but I think that there's an argument to be made that that should be an expectation of phones in general, and not limited to Apple.
If one wants a slightly lighter-touch regulation strategy, instead of directly mandating that "a phone must have security updates for n years", legislation could require that (a) CO2 emission cost used to manufacture (b) MTBF (c) warranty period and (d) guaranteed security+OS update lifetime be included on the packaging (like nutrition labels). Then, when shopping, consumers can see that the $700 phone has a 5 year MTBF (and is repairable) while the $400 phone has a 2 year MTBF - similar to the unit prices that are already included on grocery store price tags.
In the video he says he has owned 125 smartphones in the last 7 years. Apparently hes going through 17 smartphones a year. Seems ridiculous. I don't even think I have surpassed 10 smartphones in my lifetime.
Same. I'm on my sixth smartphone (if we're only counting post-iPhone). The author could be a tech reviewer who carries three phones around at a time to review them. Not sure if that counts as ownership, however I'm not the person to define that.
The fake 5 and 1 star reviews on this page are very off-putting, and do not bode well for anyone asking me to trust them for the next decade.
And that's completely setting aside how unworkable this would be in reality (think about things like hardware support for encryption standards and codecs in use in 2032).
Even if the OS gets security patches for 10 years, does anyone think app developers are going to continue improving and supporting their apps on this thing?
The whole page is bullshit to argue for Right to Repair, et. al. Not that Right to Repair isn't important, but being weaselly on your web page is unlikely to gain supporters. Go ahead and click that "Get the Phone" button. Haha! We really want you to sign a letter that no one will read!
The whole concept doesn’t seem thought out at all. First of all, if you want a phone that comes close to this concept, Apple has a pretty good track record. Second, the reason why it doesn’t make sense is because hardware technology changes/improves in a decade by a good margin and renders your phone incompatible besides basic functionality.
The version to version changes in the initial years of iPhone were generational leaps but lately since iPhone8 onwards everything feels incremental. I do not think Smart phones 10 years from now are not that remarkably different from today at the foundational level. There we many marginal improvements and perhaps one or two distinctive features.
The main problem with this is it would basically hand the market over to Apple. They're the only company with the vertical integration to be capable of supporting all their hardware and software properly for this sort of time span. Hence their ability to already support their devices solidly for twice as long as the longest supported Android devices.
All the Android manufacturers, with the exception of Samsung, rely on their parties for hardware components and therefore device driver binaries that would need supporting and patching. And all of them including Samsung rely on Google for OS patches (well, except Google). Third party firmware is why Google struggles to support their devices for more than 3 or 4 years.
A lot of manufacturers wouldn't even exist after 10 years. Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, all gone in the last 10 years. HTC were big back in 2011 but gave up on phones a few years ago. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting.
I agree with you in principle but I think writing this regulation, in a way that actually solves the problem and is not trivial to work-around, is much harder than you think.
Here's an example: The other day I was using a lidar sensor has a very well documented API, into its c-library. I do have the source for that c-library, and can build it, but it's calling into the part which doing many undocumented things because the part itself has a micro inside it and it has been updated since the documentation was written. And that c-library comes with a binary file that is filled with micro firmware and magic numbers that were determined by the factory during calibration. I have no idea how those measurements represent or how they were made, not that I can reproduce them anyway.
Is this sensor compliant? And, it probably was compliant once, but now is it still? Because the sensor itself changed, even though the C API remained constant.
Also, many parts, like this sensor, are made internationally: hardware is from one country, firmware is from another, company headquarters are a third.
I think the problem with this kind of reasoning is that need to have a lot of faith in this mythical 'anyone' person to minimally provide you with timely, trustworthy security updates. Bonus points for keeping up with the more advanced features of newer phones.
I've got a drawer full of 2000's era 'open source' hardware where the possibility is there but nobody bothered to create a good working operating system.
> The main problem with this is it would basically hand the market over to Apple.
Phone makers can just decide to build better SoC (or to purchase better ones) that are easier to keep working when you update the Kernel.
Or they are free to run Android on top of an easier Kernel to work with.
What we're seeing is Apple innovating and writing good software for almost 30 years since the NeXT purchase. Investing in good tech is just like compound interests, it pays over time.
> ...it would basically hand the market over to Apple. They're the only company with the vertical integration to be capable of supporting all their hardware and software properly for this sort of time span.
Microsoft has no trouble supporting Windows and Windows Server for 10 years, and they're installed on innumerable number of different hardware configurations. The core issue is that Android's OS stack was built without a properly decoupled hardware abstraction layer (HAL), necessitating the phone's OEM, the SOC manufacturer and the carrier to all work together to prep an OS update. Google tried addressing this in Android 8 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/google-hopes-to-fix-...), but even now, an OEM still needs a carrier's input when prepping a new Android OS update, and there's still simply no motivation from either.
Hardware for smartphones have gotten so good that they can handle all of my core use-cases with ease: texting, web browsing, calling, maps, GPS, photography, etc. I don't need the most demanding specs to handle the latest video games and such. The hardware improvements happening every year mean nothing to me. Wow, 20% faster than the previous generation? That's great! But it doesn't impact me because, again, I already have a great performant experience with current specs. Given this, I see no reason why a cell phone shouldn't last ten years as is. Just make battery replacements possible and it should be good to go. Software updates that make the phone sluggish at this point is an excuse for programming laziness as an incentive to continue the churn of giving up your money to the same companies.
I suspect that, after the battery, screens are the next thing to get broken. With a non-repairable phone, all it takes is 1 out of n components for the entire thing to be rendered non-functional.
App developers largely use new phones that have more, and faster, resources than the phones that most people use. Over time, some apps become slower on older hardware because of the bloat introduced by developers that use fast new phones.
That bloat occurs up and down the stack, and at some point perfectly good older phones just can't run the bloat without being really slow or crashing.
The best phone of 2011 was probably the iPhone 4S. I didn't have this model, but I did use its predecessor the iPhone 4.
I remember hanging onto that phone for about 3 years I think, and replacing a battery somewhere along the way, so I thought I'd remind myself how that process went since it wasn't stuck in my memory anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI30NPW5Kls
Turns out that one could actually open the case with a Phillips screwdriver. 3 screws to pull total. A little bit of glue behind the battery.
Obviously things have changed quite a bit, but I could see hanging onto that phone and replacing components as they died. Would I actually want to be using that phone now? Probably not. Should we insist on things being that easy to fix? Almost certainly.
Ive changed the batteries on about half a dozen iPhones for myself, family and friends. I think the most recent was a 6s. The third party kits are cheap and it only takes 5 or 10 minutes to check a video or two and 5 minutes to do the job.
I don't understand the fuss about glue, for the phones I worked on it was just a small blob of tacky gel that came un-stuck and then re-stuck again pretty easily.
I recently dug up an old 4S and was surprised the battery managed to get a few days of standby usage.
While making phone calls still works, the software side is problematic. It's 32-bit which and totally unsupported. It won't reliably connect to iCloud. Hardware wise the wifi won't connect to my WPA2 router and the memory is too small to fit a modern website in the browser which means the phone will hang a while when browsing to the wrong URL.
Still a nice phone to look at, no wonder they reused the design a bit for the iPhone 12.
People seem to be missing the biggest reason why phones can't be updated permanently - it's because of SoC vendors like Qualcomm.
Their SoCs include proprietary drivers in order to run Linux on them, and because of that the kernel can never be updated. This means important features and security fixes can't be applied, as you can upgrade to the latest version of Android but the kernel underneath remains ancient.
Until SoC vendors are forced to support much longer timeframes, or ideally upstream their drivers, then we're never going to get phones which can last 10 years.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadBased on what's actually being promised on that page, this sounds like wish-casting. There's no mention at all of swapping out CPU/RAM for upgrades.
I'm trying to imagine how much bigger this "phone" is going to be now that it has, say, a socketed CPU and slots for RAM. Will cargo pants still cut it, or do I need to go to a messenger bag for carrying my new "phone"?
It smells like bullshit, NO one is lobbying against it...but also not for it.
I get that most hardware companies want to go full John Deere/Apple on this, but that's an issue with the hardware/software integration. An iPhone is made of the same general components as any other phone, but the special sauce is the easy of use from the software for many consumers.
I don't think most people actually want a 10 year phone, the same way most people don't want to drive a functional but utilitarian car. They want a name brand that reflects their values, and most people don't value being able to cheaply and efficiently fix things. If they did, we wouldn't have had the same erosion of R2R.
That said, this page pissed me off massively because I do like this stuff (We grow herbs/veggies, repair/mend our clothes, usually cook our own meals) and this was a set up for a fucking lobbying campaign on a continent I don't reside on. When I see groups like this supporting causes I also support I usually warn people AWAY from them and towards other, less "clever" people attempting to address the issue without these tactics.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-20/microsoft...
I think Apple is smart enough not to be so public in their support of an unpopular policy
If the goal is to make parts replaceable to reduce waste, what is the difference between keeping a phone for five years and throwing it away to buy a new one, then keeping that for five years, vs replacing all the parts in "one" phone over a ten year period? Two complete sets of parts are used.
My son has a six year old phone. When he lost it, he wanted the same model, which we bought used. It still has the latest software, because it's not android.
What is the difference between ten people owning ten 10 year phones, and ten people each handing down a phone that one person bought new?
Do I think this solves e-waste? No, but it would be nice to have some of these options.
This is because of a phase mismatch - a phone bought 10 years ago would have been in the middle of the 3G lifetime. 3G started getting adopted in 2002-ish and had ~200M users in 2007 according to WP[1]. That's between a 13 and 20 year window for usage - which overlapped with 4G during the tail decade (or so), so, in fact, there's a good chance that a 10-year-old phone would work today because it could have been released with a 4G radio (and, if it was built to be a 10-year phone, it absolutely would have had one).
> If the goal is to make parts replaceable to reduce waste, what is the difference between keeping a phone for five years and throwing it away to buy a new one, then keeping that for five years, vs replacing all the parts in "one" phone over a ten year period? Two complete sets of parts are used.
Different parts have different Mean Times Between Failure (MTBF), so you don't end up replacing all parts at equal rates. CPUs tend to last far longer than batteries and screens - having a repairable phone means that you can replace the battery several times over a 10-year lifespan, whereas you're almost never going to replace the CPU.
That is, buying two five-year phones results in you paying for two CPUs, two batteries, two baseband modems, and two of everything, regardless of which component in the first actually failed. Buying one ten-year repairable phone results in you paying for one CPU, one baseband modem, one display driver, ..., ...and two batteries. Far less e-waste. Every time a non-repairable phone breaks, you have to throw the whole thing out. Most times a repairable phone breaks, you can fix what's broken.
Additionally, he MTBF of a composite, non-repairable device is lower than the MTBF of its least reliable component - meaning that (theoretically - I'm ignoring the durability costs of building dis-integrated devices) it's more expensive to build a single, non-repairable device that lasts five years than to build a device composed of components that will individually last five years each.
> What is the difference between ten people owning ten 10 year phones, and ten people each handing down a phone that one person bought new?
As it stands, most phones sold nowadays won't last 10 years, so the latter scenario doesn't really happen. Some manufacturers (Apple) make relatively reliable devices, but those come with severe freedom and privacy restrictions (the argument is that reparability should be a right, not a feature of a particular company), and their devices are infamously non-repairable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3G#Adoption
Which is it? I need to be able to replace everything or just the battery?
Is there a problem with replacing batteries in current phones? The free phone I got from AT&T came with the battery separate, so that one is fine. I have had third parties replace batteries in iPhones.
>but those come with severe freedom and privacy restrictions
Ironically, I find the opposite is true, because my freedoms and privacy are not violated by Apple, but by the shitware you find on Android phones. And if you mean the "freedom" to choose between paying Apple or Epic, well I prefer the freedom to choose a phone that just works. If you value the "freedom" of paying Epic, then you have the freedom to buy an Android phone. But you don't really want Freedom, you want what you want to apply to everyone else. I choose Apple. You don't have to. Demanding that my preference be eliminated is the antithesis of Freedom.
>their devices are infamously non-repairable
non-repairable by others. I've had iPhones repaired by Apple several times. Like the Epic issue, you could buy an Android phone which would meet all your requirements, but you want an Apple phone, and then complain that it doesn't have the "freedoms" of an Android phone. You seem unable to see that the very reasons why you want the Apple phone are a direct result of the policies you complain about. Put the other way, the reasons you don't want an Android are because they have "Freedom" that allows malware to proliferate, or are "repairable" but manufacturing tolerances caused by having to fit multiple parts from multiple vendors means things break or disconnect or you get a bad batch, and the assembler can't support upgrades to the new OS because it's just too expensive to support all the different combinations of driver binaries, so old, unpatched Android for you forever.
Make your 10 year phone. The company wont be around in 10 years and you'll have a rooted virus fest or a brick. The planet wont be around in 10 years, but fuck me, you'll have done your part right? Look at me and my ten friends! There's gigatons of CO2 to support the internet and mobile phone network, but I replaced my mobile phone battery instead of buying a new phone!
Is that compelling to anyone? If you asked me to trade my new phone for a 9 year old phone, and in exchange I am allowed to drive for 3 hours, I would keep my current phone. I'd probably give up driving for a week for a phone that's just a year newer.
That, and I drive a Nissan Leaf.
Further, this would be a nightmare to developers when it comes to supporting the software for the phone. They would definitely reach a point where introducing new features are arduous due to tight requirement of backward compatibility.
Apple's SOC's are years ahead of the competition and they support the devices longer than any other company. And Apple will exist in 10 years when this company likely won't. I say that as an Android user since the HTC Evo.
I don't perceive any difference with my new one, which is a newer generation. But maybe it's because I don't spend my life glued to a mobile phone.
I'm pretty sure though, that I would have been very happy to use it for other 5 years. Heck, I'd be happy even to use my very old Galaxy S3 (but not the S2 ;)), which unfortunately broke.
But I think the call for the Right for Repair is needed. Mandating companies provide (at least security) updates and keep parts availability for 10 years seems like a good thing. I doubt Apple will keep supporting the 5s forever, and even so that's currently the oldest smartphone with current security updates. The next closest (outside of iPhones) is Samsung at 4 years and Google at 3 years.
Even if the phones will get slower and don't get fancy new features, I know plenty of people that are still happily using 5+ year old phones. And manufacturers should definitely be required to provide security updates long past that point.
I gave it to my daughter who just started secondary school here in the UK. She had to have it switched off at school, and switched it on when she left so a few hours of charge was fine until she got home. I got her a new phone that Christmas, but for a few months she got good use out of it.
If one wants a slightly lighter-touch regulation strategy, instead of directly mandating that "a phone must have security updates for n years", legislation could require that (a) CO2 emission cost used to manufacture (b) MTBF (c) warranty period and (d) guaranteed security+OS update lifetime be included on the packaging (like nutrition labels). Then, when shopping, consumers can see that the $700 phone has a 5 year MTBF (and is repairable) while the $400 phone has a 2 year MTBF - similar to the unit prices that are already included on grocery store price tags.
And that's completely setting aside how unworkable this would be in reality (think about things like hardware support for encryption standards and codecs in use in 2032).
Even if the OS gets security patches for 10 years, does anyone think app developers are going to continue improving and supporting their apps on this thing?
All the Android manufacturers, with the exception of Samsung, rely on their parties for hardware components and therefore device driver binaries that would need supporting and patching. And all of them including Samsung rely on Google for OS patches (well, except Google). Third party firmware is why Google struggles to support their devices for more than 3 or 4 years.
A lot of manufacturers wouldn't even exist after 10 years. Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, all gone in the last 10 years. HTC were big back in 2011 but gave up on phones a few years ago. I'm sure there are more I'm forgetting.
1. All phones should allow the bootloader to be unlocked, without compromising security, so that the user can install any OS on it.
2. All hardware parts should provide details of an API so that anyone can make device drivers for them for any OS.
Here's an example: The other day I was using a lidar sensor has a very well documented API, into its c-library. I do have the source for that c-library, and can build it, but it's calling into the part which doing many undocumented things because the part itself has a micro inside it and it has been updated since the documentation was written. And that c-library comes with a binary file that is filled with micro firmware and magic numbers that were determined by the factory during calibration. I have no idea how those measurements represent or how they were made, not that I can reproduce them anyway.
Is this sensor compliant? And, it probably was compliant once, but now is it still? Because the sensor itself changed, even though the C API remained constant.
Also, many parts, like this sensor, are made internationally: hardware is from one country, firmware is from another, company headquarters are a third.
I've got a drawer full of 2000's era 'open source' hardware where the possibility is there but nobody bothered to create a good working operating system.
Phone makers can just decide to build better SoC (or to purchase better ones) that are easier to keep working when you update the Kernel.
Or they are free to run Android on top of an easier Kernel to work with.
What we're seeing is Apple innovating and writing good software for almost 30 years since the NeXT purchase. Investing in good tech is just like compound interests, it pays over time.
Microsoft has no trouble supporting Windows and Windows Server for 10 years, and they're installed on innumerable number of different hardware configurations. The core issue is that Android's OS stack was built without a properly decoupled hardware abstraction layer (HAL), necessitating the phone's OEM, the SOC manufacturer and the carrier to all work together to prep an OS update. Google tried addressing this in Android 8 (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/google-hopes-to-fix-...), but even now, an OEM still needs a carrier's input when prepping a new Android OS update, and there's still simply no motivation from either.
Software seems to be progressing quickly enough, and it seems like it may be a reasonable choice soonish for those who can live without iOS/Android.
Upgradable? Not so much, but that would be much harder for smartphones when basic things like in-screen fingerprint or front camera get adopted.
I have a Fairphone 2 as my main phone (released in 2015) and I am running Lineage based on Android 10.
That bloat occurs up and down the stack, and at some point perfectly good older phones just can't run the bloat without being really slow or crashing.
With the wide angle cameras, half a TB of storage, phones should be able to do everything a dashcam can do.
I remember hanging onto that phone for about 3 years I think, and replacing a battery somewhere along the way, so I thought I'd remind myself how that process went since it wasn't stuck in my memory anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI30NPW5Kls
Turns out that one could actually open the case with a Phillips screwdriver. 3 screws to pull total. A little bit of glue behind the battery.
Obviously things have changed quite a bit, but I could see hanging onto that phone and replacing components as they died. Would I actually want to be using that phone now? Probably not. Should we insist on things being that easy to fix? Almost certainly.
I don't understand the fuss about glue, for the phones I worked on it was just a small blob of tacky gel that came un-stuck and then re-stuck again pretty easily.
While making phone calls still works, the software side is problematic. It's 32-bit which and totally unsupported. It won't reliably connect to iCloud. Hardware wise the wifi won't connect to my WPA2 router and the memory is too small to fit a modern website in the browser which means the phone will hang a while when browsing to the wrong URL. Still a nice phone to look at, no wonder they reused the design a bit for the iPhone 12.
Their SoCs include proprietary drivers in order to run Linux on them, and because of that the kernel can never be updated. This means important features and security fixes can't be applied, as you can upgrade to the latest version of Android but the kernel underneath remains ancient.
Until SoC vendors are forced to support much longer timeframes, or ideally upstream their drivers, then we're never going to get phones which can last 10 years.
Once a device can use sophisticated software, it becomes easy to make it obsolete by changing the software.
A 10 year device is not the solution, the solution is very long term software.
Developers already know how to write long term software, as opposed to short term software. Ubuntu already has LTS.