the person that decided to wipe the URL upon scrolling through the bottom of the article, without putting it on the history stack, should have a wooden stake put through their eyeball
History API is one of worse thing introduced to web. And it is only created to cater to the SPA developer who don't want to see # tag in their URL. With the all the APIs in HTML5 I think we ought to take a step back and get ride of some these.
The History API is super useful, not sure why you don't like it. For ex: I can load some data from API, update the url with History API, then if the user refreshes the page they get the correct url but I just saved them a ton of bandwidth and time by not having to refresh the whole page.
I've never seen that done, sounds like a bug in the website because there's not reason to do that. It's also an easy fix: close the tab and don't use websites that do that.
You can choose to update the history stack or not. For example, this page uses the History API to update the url without changing the browser history stack:
It breaks the expectations user have about browser. It is very snaky way to try to make a browser what it is not, all in the name of making SPA just to make a trend. It is one of thing most annoying about the IT industry, that it is a more about fashion then about tech.
I have quite a pile of old phones and tablets in a cabinet. They're all broken in one way or another, I'm not sure what to do with them. This article is about things that work and are reasonably recent. They get refurbed and reused.
Samsung for example often has very good trade in discounts, where they take back broken smartphones. On Samsung EPP sites, sometimes there are great trade-in deals.
You can still send non-functioning items back to Apple to be recycled if you want. You can take it an Apple store or go through the mail-in process. They tear them apart and salvage the parts.
I still have an iPhone 3GS. It's fun to turn it on occasionally to scare the kids. Unsurprisingly some apps no longer function because they need cloud services that were discontinued.
Depending on where you live, your state (if in the US) probably has an electronics recycling program. If there's a Best Buy near you, they'll recycle old phones and tablets as well.
I've never had any difficulty giving away broken phones/tablets on craigslist. Someone is collecting them for parts and refurbishing them. Most broken consumer electronics are relatively easy to fix for someone with moderate troubleshooting skills.
People have given good suggestions, but don’t feel guilty throwing them in the trash. I know there is taboo to throw away prized possessions, but phones are small and the trash is big.
I know the desire to hoard electronics. I have all my early smartphones cause they are special. Current phones are boring and not worth collecting. What changed my mind was breaking a cheap phone while fixing it, it instantly became trash. I don’t know if could throw away working phone but broken ones are garbage.
Same. I only replace phones or tablets after they're totally broken. Even after updates stop coming, I'll switch to Lineage (and only buy devices that can be boot unlocked). I DIY repaired my last phone (after buying its replacement) just so I have a working backup phone in the drawer.
While Back in the Box does resell some Android devices, the majority are iPhones and iPads, said its chief executive, Ari Marinovsky. A big reason is that Apple updates device software for more years than its competitors do.
That seems like the key to all of it. A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support to be worth spending hundreds of dollars on for budget minded buyers.
Software no longer being updated and battery dying (and no longer worth the cost of replacement) seem to be the only reasons other than physical damage to replace a smartphone these days. Until I accidentally shattered the screen a month ago I was more than happy to stick with my Galaxy S9, my new phone is nice but other than the battery lasting the whole day and regular security updates I'm not seeing much difference from my nearly 5 year old previous phone.
I think, to the GP's point though, that even though phones are having these significant tech refreshes, they're not significant enough to a growing number of end users to chase. I'm right there with him, tbh. I broke an iPhone 8's screen a couple years ago, and had to replace it. Had that phone not been damaged, I would have kept it for a couple more years.
My iPhone 8 is still going strong! It has a bright spot in the middle of the screen, the battery isn't what it used to be, and the camera is clearly not as good as the newer iPhones that my extended family all have. But it's not bad enough to justify spending hundreds of dollars to replace it quite yet.
The refresh rate escalation is a complete jerkoff bit of tech spec nonsense. "Far better cameras" is an exaggeration, as most are marginally better. iPhones have been incredibly fast since the XR, almost five years ago.
There was a period of dramatic progress but now things have largely settled. I recently replaced a 12 Pro with a 14 Pro and it is likely nothing at all changed. There is zero impact in my life. Have the 12 Pro waiting in my drawer for my son with an XR to upgrade, but he doesn't even want the hassle of doing the transfer and then setting up the apps that don't properly migrate data.
AT&T offered me $1000 for a 2 year old phone. It only cost me about $200-$300 for my new phone with a much better camera sensor. I could care less about other features including speed but now that I have young kids my camera is important.
The screen refresh and always on Lock Screen are added bonuses.
Perfect username for the reference you made in your comment.
"Many people change their phone every year." I expect that to be one of the things that immediately changes with our current, fantastic economy in the US.
I think many people in this forum don’t change their phones as often because we view phones as limiting computing devices. I am using a 2nd Gen. iPhone SE. The newer iPhones don’t seem so appealing that I feel left out.
Very few people upgrade every year. The average lifespan of a mobile phone is 2.5 years.
In the late 2000s that length of time was lower because phones were improving by leaps and bounds every year but now phones are waterproof, have more resilient screens, cost more, and performance increases between models have slowed.
My new phone has the same screen size as my old phone, and my old phone had a big enough screen that I'd need to sew custom pockets onto my pants if I went any bigger. New phone has a better refresh rate but all that does is kill the battery faster in exchange maybe things look slightly smoother when playing games, but the games I play on my phone don't really benefit from the increased refresh rate so I just keep it at the default 60Hz.
Flash storage degradation is an issue for old phones as well and it's not fixable. It could be worked around with buying a phone with huge flash, but people usually prefer cheaper ones (and manufacturers charging 1000% premium not helping of course).
I've never actually experienced this on a personal device (anecdata, I know). But my dayjob for many years has been in embedded systems and working with flash devices and even there, as long as you don't design the product to write to the flash in ways which will kill it (aka: Tesla logging and eMMC) then I honestly expect that modern flash devices have quite enough write endurance for >99% of customer uses.
Yes, those 1% who wear out their flash are going to be furious and complain online and even just 1% of phone buyers is still millions of people.
I used to always download lots of podcasts instead of streaming them and had a lot of Spotify auto-playlist saved locally. This used to cause a lot of write cycles on my devices. I would also usually end up with the smaller storage size version of the devices, so it would use a good percentage of the storage for this usage pattern.
Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice.
I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.
> I've never actually experienced this on a personal device
I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.
Not yet. I also build robots and various gadgets as a hobby, and most of those write more heavily to SD cards than my phone does. I've only worn out one card in those machines over the years. Flash memory can take a truly huge number of write cycles.
But I like replaceable cards anyway. It's a cheap way to minimize the use of on-board flash that is difficult or impossible to replace.
iPhone battery replacements, at an Apple store with 1st party parts and labor, now seem to be about $90 for many models. That's reasonable enough that I would definitely choose it over a slightly less expensive 3rd party repair or DIY and instead of buying a new phone if I was otherwise happy.
iPhone screen replacements at an Apple store seem to be in the $200-300 range, which is expensive enough that I'd consider other options, including just buying a refurb phone from a reputable reseller.
Well, I've never hired someone to replace a battery, so I clearly don't know the going rates. $100 was steep enough that it caught me by surprise, though.
Fair enough. It's a "what the market will bear" sort of thing in the end. I wouldn't be willing to buy a piece of equipment that required such an expense just to replace a battery, but I'm certainly not going to say anyone else is wrong for being willing to.
I just found it surprising that it was that steep.
I'd certainly prefer it if I could change the battery myself. I can, I have the tools for it but doing it will also cost me $49 plus the time to do it... it seemed worth it for Apple to do it.
It's not like they can just click a new one in place. $50 for a quality battery and $40 to pay someone a living wage to mount it in half an hour doesn't sound excessive to me.
Oh, I almost forgot Apple replaced one of my earlier iPhones for free because the old one didn't boot with the new battery. No questions asked, even got a free loaner phone for the few hours until replacement was delivered. I wonder how many $25 battery replacement shops give that amount of service and warranty.
It's really a shame. I have a bunch of fully-functional phones and tablets laying around that work fine, even with strong batteries, but became forcibly obsolete due to Apple (and others) 1. dropping software support and 2. deliberately sabotaging the devices against being repurposed with alternative software. This never happens with computers. I have a computer from the early 2000s still happily plugging away running useful things on Linux. It is a disgrace what consumers have allowed phone manufacturers to get away with support-wise.
I use one of my old iPhones to run under my pillow every night with a sleeping app, wrapped in a faraday cage pouch to reduce emf concerns. Works well for me.
Interesting, I've got a bunch of old iPhones in a drawer and would be interested in doing some sleep tracking. What app are you using/any idea how old of an iPhone would still work for this?
The app I use is called "sleep cycle"; it is old. I don't know if i'd be able to download it now from the app store, honestly probably not, I haven't tried, but I already had it downloaded onto the phone.
basically, the app judges your current phase of sleep by sensing your movements, and purports to wake you up at the optimal moment. It seems to work for me, which is good enough for me, after all. YMMV?
But if you're unable to download it now, I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I hope you figure it out!
Creating artificial product categories, taxonomy, is why we’re in this predicament.
Semantic woo is leveraged to decide a smartphone is not a general purpose computer such that corporate entity can label it new thing and set new expectations.
Intellectual property law and protections need to be thrown in the garbage, no device sold without being unlocked.
It’s thought policing when I’m convinced a general purpose computer (smartphone) is something else altogether. We live in a carceral society that’s extracting our agency to coddle a handful of replaceable figureheads.
Smartphones are computing appliances. You can sometimes put a new OS on them to make them into feasible GP computers, but that's not what they're designed to be.
That there's a GP computer inside isn't that meaningful. There's one inside "smart" TVs, too, but those TVs are still just appliances.
> 2. deliberately sabotaging the devices against being repurposed with alternative software.
This is why my old iPad 2 is sitting in a box somewhere. Old Android phones got wiped, bootloader unlocked, and the latest version of LineageOS, etc. they could handle. They mostly get used as readers, fancy remotes, or media players (older ones in airplane mode when not powered off fully for security reasons).
This does happen with computers. Windows 8.1 stopped getting support in January. There are lots of computers that don’t meet requirements for Windows 10. The timeframe is much longer than smartphones. Linux is special case that low requirements mean works on anything and is kept updated for everyone. But Linux distributions do stop supporting old releases, but the new release works for a long time.
The point was that those old computers aren't locked into running Windows and so you can install Linux on them and keep using them for something instead of chucking them in the garbage pile; the same is not true of many phones and is certainly not true of an iPhone.
It happens at the operating system level, but on a desktop computer the hardware is not inexorably tied to the OS. When Windows stops supporting 8.1, you can easily install Linux.
I'm in the process of replacing my 7 year old personal computer but it is completely my choice to do it. My old PC is perfectly functional and is going to reused for a different purpose. If it wasn't for the fact that I have something to do with the old machine I'd probably put off buying a new one for another year or two.
Honestly, the increased RAM is probably the nicest part of my new phone and not having to wait for large apps to reload has been the biggest quality of life improvement. That said, I don't feel like it justifies the price of a new phone by itself, mostly because large apps are usually games and if I have to switch back and forth between a game and some other app constantly then I probably should not be playing games.
Yup, also still very happy with my Galaxy S9, now running an unofficial version of LineageOS 19 (though I am still rocking the original battery from 4 years ago and it shows, I need to look into replacing it soon). Really want to hold off replacing it for as long as possible as with phones nowadays there always seems to be a catch like either no headphone jack, no sd card slot, a notch, etc. while this one still does it all.
> A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support
I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. An iPhone 12 (2.5 years old) will Geekbench at 2,000 single-core. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (a month old) will Geekbench at 1,700-1,900. Apple's phones just really hold up performance wise for a good while.
A Pixel 5 from October 2020 will Geekbench at 770 compared to 2,000 for the similar-age iPhone 12. Even a Pixel 7 Pro from October 2022 hits 1,400. When Apple is shipping CPUs with a multi-year head start, older devices are still going to be pretty good. Snapdragon 888s from 2 years ago hit 1,200-1,300. Those devices aren't going to feel as snappy as long as a 2.5 year old iPhone 12 getting 2,000.
Apple's software commitment is a big part of it, but the fact that their devices are years ahead CPU-wise also matters.
The Android ecosystem also means that there are budget, non-used phones out there which compete and drive down the price of used devices. Do you want to buy a used Galaxy S21 or would you rather get a new OnePlus Nord or Moto G? Apple doesn't offer you a lot of choice in new phones at a budget price. There's no $150 new iPhone out there, but there's plenty of new budget Android phones ready to take your dollars instead of buying a quality used Android phone.
Why should I pay $350 for your used Galaxy S21 when I can get a shiny new phone for less than that? Yes, the new phone might have a slower processor and worse display/camera, but it's new! Even if you would buy the quality used device, many wouldn't which will drive down the price (due to increased competition from substitutes).
> I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs.
I'm still using the iPhone X I bought at launch. Performance is not an issue at all. Aside from a cracked screen and camera glass, the only real driver for me to replace it is the lightning connector. When they add USB-C I'll probably get a new phone - not before then.
I use keepgo.com, but there are many other sources, depending on how much data you need. For example, my middle kid is on an eSIM from Hong Kong, on the 3HK network.
My kids are usually on wifi at school or home, so the esim doesn't need to have much data. Just want enough to be able to text them, use "find my iPhone", etc. So a 365-day eSIM is great, and cheap.
Downside for the Hong Kong sim is that TikTok doesn't work on the phone at all if it detects a Hong Kong sim. That's fine for my youngest, but it was a deal killer for the others. So now they have an eSIM from Orange in France via Keepgo.
It's amazing that these eSIMs work fine in North America, and are so cheap. For Canada, especially, it's amazing I can get service for my kid for $3-$4 a month.
Oh please. They support hardware for the iOS releases far longer than Android phone manufacturers do and they still release security updates for at least one previous release.
If you can find someone who will pay more than $30 for your 6s, you are free to do so.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadhttps://wakatime.com/pricing
Click the toggle to show yearly pricing and the url is updated, but you can still press back to go to whatever previous page you visited.
Then, this page DOES update the history stack when the url changes: https://wakatime.com/dashboard
Click the date range and select a new range, notice the url changes but also you can press back to go to your previous date range.
1. Go to page you came from prior to that site
2. Go to the top of the page, stay on the site
If you picked 1, then "without putting it on the history stack" is the correct choice.
I know the desire to hoard electronics. I have all my early smartphones cause they are special. Current phones are boring and not worth collecting. What changed my mind was breaking a cheap phone while fixing it, it instantly became trash. I don’t know if could throw away working phone but broken ones are garbage.
That seems like the key to all of it. A 2 year old iPhone (or to be fair, Google Pixel now) still has enough years of support to be worth spending hundreds of dollars on for budget minded buyers.
Hundreds of millions change their phones every year, which is why there's supply for the used market.
Billions of people don't change their phones every year, because they can't afford to or don't care to.
Knock on wood!
There was a period of dramatic progress but now things have largely settled. I recently replaced a 12 Pro with a 14 Pro and it is likely nothing at all changed. There is zero impact in my life. Have the 12 Pro waiting in my drawer for my son with an XR to upgrade, but he doesn't even want the hassle of doing the transfer and then setting up the apps that don't properly migrate data.
Exactly. "Oh look! It's so smooth when I scroll back and forth!"
I actually stop scrolling to read, but I guess I might be in the minority.
The screen refresh and always on Lock Screen are added bonuses.
"Many people change their phone every year." I expect that to be one of the things that immediately changes with our current, fantastic economy in the US.
Very few people upgrade every year. The average lifespan of a mobile phone is 2.5 years.
In the late 2000s that length of time was lower because phones were improving by leaps and bounds every year but now phones are waterproof, have more resilient screens, cost more, and performance increases between models have slowed.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/smartphone-users-are-waiting...
The lifespan increase pattern is mirroring the personal computer upgrade cycle, but more rapidly.
I've never replaced a phone sooner than 5 years after I got it, but I know I'm a weirdo.
Yes, those 1% who wear out their flash are going to be furious and complain online and even just 1% of phone buyers is still millions of people.
Eventually the read speeds would get intolerably slow. Launching applications or rehydrating them would take forever as the storage would just be so slow compared to when the device was new. Rebooting would take 10 minutes or more. This failure mode pushed me to upgrade at least twice.
I now just stream the majority of my data, and on-board storage has ballooned so I don't end up rewriting that high of a percentage of the overall storage that often. It was easy to cycle through all the storage when the on-board was 16GB but at 128GB+ it takes a bit longer to burn through it all.
I haven't, either. But then, I'm aware of the limited life of flash, so I only purchased phones I can put an SD card into, and then almost all of the data I store on the phone gets written to the card. I'd rather wear the card out than the embedded flash.
But I like replaceable cards anyway. It's a cheap way to minimize the use of on-board flash that is difficult or impossible to replace.
iPhone screen replacements at an Apple store seem to be in the $200-300 range, which is expensive enough that I'd consider other options, including just buying a refurb phone from a reputable reseller.
$90 to replace a battery seems outrageously overpriced to me.
I just found it surprising that it was that steep.
basically, the app judges your current phase of sleep by sensing your movements, and purports to wake you up at the optimal moment. It seems to work for me, which is good enough for me, after all. YMMV?
But if you're unable to download it now, I don't have a good solution for you, sorry. I hope you figure it out!
Smartphones are computers.
Creating artificial product categories, taxonomy, is why we’re in this predicament.
Semantic woo is leveraged to decide a smartphone is not a general purpose computer such that corporate entity can label it new thing and set new expectations.
Intellectual property law and protections need to be thrown in the garbage, no device sold without being unlocked.
It’s thought policing when I’m convinced a general purpose computer (smartphone) is something else altogether. We live in a carceral society that’s extracting our agency to coddle a handful of replaceable figureheads.
War is peace. Apple is anti-1984.
That there's a GP computer inside isn't that meaningful. There's one inside "smart" TVs, too, but those TVs are still just appliances.
This is why my old iPad 2 is sitting in a box somewhere. Old Android phones got wiped, bootloader unlocked, and the latest version of LineageOS, etc. they could handle. They mostly get used as readers, fancy remotes, or media players (older ones in airplane mode when not powered off fully for security reasons).
How we allowed this to be the case for our pocket computers is beyond me.
You want the two of your heaviest apps you want to use together to fit in RAM, to be able to switch between them.
https://source.android.com/docs/core/architecture/kernel/and...
But usually after 3 years (5 for tablets) the thing is too slow to use anyway.
I think part of it is also that older iPhones still have good processors due to Apple's substantial lead in mobile CPUs. An iPhone 12 (2.5 years old) will Geekbench at 2,000 single-core. The latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 (a month old) will Geekbench at 1,700-1,900. Apple's phones just really hold up performance wise for a good while.
A Pixel 5 from October 2020 will Geekbench at 770 compared to 2,000 for the similar-age iPhone 12. Even a Pixel 7 Pro from October 2022 hits 1,400. When Apple is shipping CPUs with a multi-year head start, older devices are still going to be pretty good. Snapdragon 888s from 2 years ago hit 1,200-1,300. Those devices aren't going to feel as snappy as long as a 2.5 year old iPhone 12 getting 2,000.
Apple's software commitment is a big part of it, but the fact that their devices are years ahead CPU-wise also matters.
The Android ecosystem also means that there are budget, non-used phones out there which compete and drive down the price of used devices. Do you want to buy a used Galaxy S21 or would you rather get a new OnePlus Nord or Moto G? Apple doesn't offer you a lot of choice in new phones at a budget price. There's no $150 new iPhone out there, but there's plenty of new budget Android phones ready to take your dollars instead of buying a quality used Android phone.
Why should I pay $350 for your used Galaxy S21 when I can get a shiny new phone for less than that? Yes, the new phone might have a slower processor and worse display/camera, but it's new! Even if you would buy the quality used device, many wouldn't which will drive down the price (due to increased competition from substitutes).
I'm still using the iPhone X I bought at launch. Performance is not an issue at all. Aside from a cracked screen and camera glass, the only real driver for me to replace it is the lightning connector. When they add USB-C I'll probably get a new phone - not before then.
My daughter currently has my old iPhone SE2. Coupled with a cheap 365-day eSIM, and it's perfect for a young teen.
https://esimdb.com is a good resource.
My kids are usually on wifi at school or home, so the esim doesn't need to have much data. Just want enough to be able to text them, use "find my iPhone", etc. So a 365-day eSIM is great, and cheap.
Downside for the Hong Kong sim is that TikTok doesn't work on the phone at all if it detects a Hong Kong sim. That's fine for my youngest, but it was a deal killer for the others. So now they have an eSIM from Orange in France via Keepgo.
It's amazing that these eSIMs work fine in North America, and are so cheap. For Canada, especially, it's amazing I can get service for my kid for $3-$4 a month.
I don't think teens (at least in this part of Canada), even know their own phone numbers, let alone make traditional voice phone calls :-)
Sure, with a working battery it can still be useful to somebody but it has very little remaining market value.
So Apple has rigged the deck in their favor? Usually that gets a government investigation in the US.
If you can find someone who will pay more than $30 for your 6s, you are free to do so.