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Choosing to Skip the Upgrade and Care for the Gadget You've Got (nytimes.com) 183

Posted by msmash from the to-upgrade-or-not dept.
The New York Times has run a piece on its "Tech Fix" section, in which it argues, citing a user's experience, why skipping an upgrade might not be a bad idea, and how you could hold on to your existing device for a little longer. The story revolves around Vincent Lai, who dug up a Palm Treo, a smartphone that was disconnected last decade, and found that with little tweaks, the phone still had some life in it. From the article: Mr. Lai's behavior might be extreme, but his experience with the Palm Treo illustrates there is another way: If you simply put some maintenance into electronics as you would a car, you can stay happy with your gadgets for years. It is part of a movement of anti-consumerism, or the notion of cherishing what you have rather than incessantly buying new stuff. Signs of this philosophy are spreading: Industry data suggests that consumers are waiting longer to upgrade to new phones than they have in the past. [...] When smartphones and tablets were fairly sluggish and limited in abilities compared with computers, there was a compelling reason to buy a new mobile device every few years. But now the mobile gadgets have become so fast and capable that you can easily keep them much longer. "A five-year-old computer is still completely fine now," Mr. Wiens said. "We're starting to hit that same plateau with phones now."The article also shares some tips such as clearing up storage and getting your device's battery replaced -- which costs roughly $20 to $40 -- that can help you get the max out of your phone and tablet. There's one more aspect, which the aforementioned article doesn't talk about. If you have an old iDevice -- iPhone or iPad -- upgrading to the latest available version of the operating system could substantially slow it up. Not upgrading, however, exposes your device to a range of security attacks. It's a tough choice.
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Choosing to Skip the Upgrade and Care for the Gadget You've Got More

Choosing to Skip the Upgrade and Care for the Gadget You've Got

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  • Missing the point on software security updates (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2016 @11:50AM (#51956707)

    What about software fixes for security bugs?

    • Re:Missing the point on software security updates (Score:4, Interesting)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:08PM (#51956871) Homepage Journal

      If software stops adding new features for one damn second, the bugs in general begin to trend towards zero.
      Hopefully your product had a life cycle where there was a support/maintenance phase that allowed for some time for bug fixes instead of new whizbang features.

      For the pedantic aspies: I'm speaking only in broad terms, not absolutes that apply in every situation.

    • Re:Missing the point on software security updates (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Penguinisto ( 415985 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:18PM (#51956957) Journal

      What about software fixes for security bugs?

      What I'm about to say will be considered heresy, but...

      Given that most Android phone OSes do not receive updates of any kind (let alone security fixes), well, what's the problem? I say that mostly in jest, mind you, but the vast majority of Android phones out there, even 4-year-old ancient critters, are most likely going to remain unexploited and untouched for as long as they are capable of running. Most users don't stray from the Play Store, they don't really add anything that they don't already know and trust, and to be honest, they will never see a problem as long as they don't sideload iffy crap off of Russian servers or suchlike.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      What we really need to see is a distributive mix: OS, and application, get distributed independently.

      OS: the kernel and supporting libraries. These get a 'long term support', primarily for security purposes. They'd largely be paired to the hardware, I imagine, due to such things tend to get support.
      App: the user experience 'shim', and several versions of these should be able to run on the same underlying OS (as well as, conceivably, different versions of the OS/libraries, so multiple versions of eg. Android

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mlts ( 1038732 )

        This is why I make sure to buy from HTC, Nexus phones, or a company which allows for bootloader unlocking. I pulled out an old HTC Desire HD that I used in 2011, grabbed a CM rom from the OpenDesire Project, slapped it on there, and now have a device which gets updates.

        What would be nice would be the phone makers selling their device, and one able to pick their OS of choice, just like with desktop computers. This way, one can go with AOSP, CM, a phone company provided build, Google Experience, or whatever

  • Missed the main reason (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @11:54AM (#51956747) Homepage Journal
    The reason the 5 year old computer is "just fine" is because the party is over: microprocessors are not getting faster at the rate they once were. The 5 year old computer is within an order of magnitude of power as todays computers. People expect computers to get faster and faster, but they aren't at the rate we have been used to. We are hitting physical limits of digital chip technology. This means that things like AI and "the singularity" that slashdotters dream of will likely never happen, unless we come up with a totally new way of computing. And don't say "quantum computing" either. Quantum computers are currently snakeoil, and even when they come into existence they will be only useful for a narrow set of problems.

    • Yes, unless you're a "PC Master Race" gamer.

      • Unless you are using a dual gpu system (this is when the limitations of pcie x1 become apparent) a 5 year old i7 can keep up with any of the fastest cards.

      • And not even then. The PC part is just fine, the only gains to be had are with the video card. My home gaming rig has an i5 chip and motherboard from 2010 in it and it works great, the only improvements I've made to it were an SSD boot drive, bumped the RAM up a while back and a new video card last year. I don't expect to have to spend a nickel on it for the next couple of years unless a component actually dies.

    • Yep, IPC improvement is minimal these days. The slowing PC market is beacuase of a "fast enough" philosophy. Most people with PCs own C2Ds that aren't going to be replaced until the PSU dies, and maybe not even then.

      • Most people with PCs own C2Ds that aren't going to be replaced until the PSU dies, and maybe not even then.

        Thats when I make my move and pick up their "broken" computer at their tagsale.

    • Re:Missed the main reason (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:09PM (#51956881) Homepage

      5 year old servers are the same. 8 core 2.9ghz Xeon processors from 2010 with 64gb ram and some cheap SATA SSD drives stuffed in to the SAS cage gives me far FAR more processing power than we need.

      Nothing sold by intel as brand new right now is not worth buying over dumping a few hundred into "outdated" hardware that already does more than we need it to do.

      • in fact, recent usb chipsets have broken usb audio on both linux and win7 (all that I have that I can test with). uac2 audio is very broken in many usb/audio dongles and it seems to be the chipset that is bad since both win7 and all linux flavors have stutter/jitter issues that make it unusable for 24/96 audio (even 16/44 stutters).

        go to a usb2 chipset from 3 years ago or more, works fine for all dongles and all os's.

        wonder what intel did to break audio. I have to use older systems for my audio playback,

        • Re:Missed the main reason (Score:5, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 21, 2016 @01:44PM (#51957707)

          Don't plug USB mice into a port on the same host controller as your USB audio. Don't plug USB audio devices into a USB 3 port with a hard drive hanging off of it.

          USB audio really needs USB 2.0 speeds to be usable. And not just bandwidth, but actual timing. It needs a certain amount of bus time per second, the bandwidth requirement is actually pretty paltry (low-end for USB 2, but more than USB 1.1 could handle). USB doesn't have an isochronous transfer mode like Firewire or Thunderbolt.

          And USB 3.x bus controllers make this effect even worse by shoving USB 2 and USB 1.x devices both into the same "emulated mode", whereas USB 2 controllers only relegated USB 1.x devices to emulated mode. The emulated mode is essentially a workaround for the lack of isochronous transfer by taking a single, wider bus-time slice and allowing older devices to all take their own smaller time slice out of it, but stacking them up to use the bandwidth as much as possible. But then certain devices don't play nice with the clocking on this, and all hell breaks loose. That's what's causing the stutter/jitter issues in your undoubtedly USB 2 device connected to your very-likely USB 3 bus controller.

      • Re:Missed the main reason (Score:5, Insightful)

        by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:54PM (#51957269)
        For servers it's not just about processing power, but also about energy requirements. The newer Intel chips typically have better performance per watt even if the overall maximum performance hasn't changed that much. That means less cost because the servers aren't drawing as much power and also less spent on cooling as well.

        It's probably not worth replacing 5 year old servers if they suit your needs just fine, but eventually it will be more cost-effective over the long run to upgrade to more efficient processors simply because when the performance remains fixed, the Moore's law suggests the power consumption and or cost decreases.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mlts ( 1038732 )

          There are also additions to servers which make life easier. Improvements to iLO/iDRAC/etc. which make it easy to spin up a machine, or at least boot from recovery media. Next to that, M.2 and SSD technology is becoming commonplace, just because there are so many servers that just need a relatively small OS drive, but can use the rest of the SSD as a cache for operating systems like ESXi.

          I wouldn't be surprised to see servers start to have built in hypervisors, such as Hyper-V, KVM, Xen, and ESXi, and all

    • I'm not sure I agree that computer speed has flattened out over the last five years, the new computers I get at work are definitely significantly faster at each turn. I'll concede that it's hard to gauge because different components have different bottlenecks, what I do is very GPU heavy for example.

      The reason I've observed is that newer computers don't actually open any new doors. Back when I first got into PCs in the early 90's, we went from choppy side-scrollers, point and click adventures, and flat-sh

    • Yep, I've just upgraded recently and kept my 9-year old "Q6600" quad-core based computer for other tasks (it's even way overpowered for my little music studio).

      I easily expect my new I7-5820K 32 GB DDR4 ram to last me the next 10 years, it's already overpowered for what it does.

      • That's funny because I just upgraded my Q6600 machine to... a i5-2500 PC I got for cheap from work. Which is also a 5 year old machine now, yet it's within ~15% of performance of the latest Skylake processors of the corresponding market segment.

        Doing this back in the day, say upgrading from a 486 to a Pentium II when P4 was already out, would be unthinkable for most people. Yet I, a huge nerd who uses the PC all the time for coding, 3D, photo and video work as well as gaming, am perfectly satisfied. Sure, I

    • > The 5 year old computer is within an order of magnitude of power as todays computers.

      Oh it's not even that far. I'd say it's a matter of percentages. We recently did a hardware refresh at the office and when I went to spec out the replacements I realized the workstations I bought 4 years ago we'd only see a 20% boost on average replacing them with comparably positioned chips today (Sandy Bridge i5s and i7s vs Skylake i5s and i7s). So I felt the money would go way further buying SSDs and bigger moni

  • Been there, done that... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @11:56AM (#51956759)
    I used my first-gen iPod Touch for eight years before the battery stopped holding a charge. Probably five years after the last update. I got an iPhone 5C to replace it since it was $100 cheaper than the current iPod Touch and my cellphone was out of contract.

  • Phone-wise, I upgrade either when it smokes, breaks or just becomes so sluggish with later OS versions that I want to chuck it out the window.

    Fortunately, things like the 5S still run 9.3 very well, my desktop is nearly 10 years old, and my laptop is around 5. The laptop smokes the desktop, but for what I use these.. it don't matter. It just don't.

    So yeah.. when it smokes, I replace it.

  • Please stop using the DEC logo! (Score:4, Informative)

    by serviscope_minor ( 664417 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @11:57AM (#51956769) Journal

    Please stop using the DEC logo for random digital stuff. It's in the pile like the AMD and Intel logo because back when slashdot did such things, DEC was still a going concern and one of the coolest tech companies.

    Whiplash? Are you reading?

  • Why? (Score:3)

    by kamapuaa ( 555446 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:01PM (#51956799) Homepage

    This is a great idea with a car. But what's even the use with a cell phone? If you hold on to it for a normal length of time, a cool new cell phone will amortize to maybe a dollar a day. It's multi-purpose, acting as a phone + camera + MP3 player + computer + blah blah blah. I dunnow, why cheap out on something you use all the time that really isn't that expensive?

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:57PM (#51957295)

      This is a great idea with a car. But what's even the use with a cell phone? If you hold on to it for a normal length of time, a cool new cell phone will amortize to maybe a dollar a day. It's multi-purpose, acting as a phone + camera + MP3 player + computer + blah blah blah. I dunnow, why cheap out on something you use all the time that really isn't that expensive?

      Maybe I LIKE the device I'm currently using, and don't want to be bothered to learn, configure, root, or customize a newer one. Maybe I find the build quality of a lot of new stuff to be not so good. Maybe I realize that the 'dollar a day' bargain is a price that's being incredibly heavily subsidized by future generations, and I don't want to contribute, any more than I already do, to the plundering of Earth for the sake of more frivolous shiny toys. Maybe I don't want to enrich the already too-powerful corporations even further. Maybe I want to do my part to put the brakes on the giant Ponzi scheme that is 'the economy'. Maybe I'm getting a new device, but want the old one to be fully functional as a backup, or because I want to give it to someone who otherwise can't afford such a device.

      I could go on. There are lots of valid, even compelling, reasons for not replacing functional old tech with new tech. On the other hand, the reasons for dumping old devices in favour of new ones too often boil down to conformism and consumerism - which are mostly alternative names for 'selfishness', 'thoughtlessness', and 'emotional insecurity'.

      • Maybe I LIKE the device I'm currently using, and don't want to be bothered to learn, configure, root, or customize a newer one

        Most manufacturers of phone series offer migration from one device to the other without major headaches. If you're "learning" how to use the new device then the manufacturer has done something wrong. It should be intuitive to move to the upgraded device with additional features.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by enjar ( 249223 )

      I have a Samsung Galaxy S4. It's mine, I paid for it, it's unlocked on Ting. Bill runs about $30/month. I use it to check email, text, make phone calls, play music and be a GPS with Waze. I do use it every day.

      What does a S5, S6, S7 or latest iPhone offer that would make anything I do *that* much better? I went from a iPhone 3GS to the S4, which was a huge leap in screen size, processor power and other things. That 3GS is still used by my kids. But my wife has the S6, and yes indeed it's a little prettier a

      • Personally I *hated* my galaxy s5, it would hang and crashed all the time and looked crappy. When the s6 came out and T-Mobile had a deal where I could trade in my s5 with no big payment, yeah I jumped at the deal.

        And with iPhone, yeah the increase in screen size is a huge advantage.

        And I'm a huge fan of Google Cardboard, I'm willing to believe that future phones will be much better for such a purpose.

        But yeah, if in the theoretical future upgrades didn't really upgrade, then I guess there wouldn't be much

  • In Aldous Huxley 'Brave New World' they had a saying "Better to end than mend", meaning that rather than fix something, throw it away and get a new one. It was better for their 'economy'.

  • Good luck with that. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dmomo ( 256005 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:03PM (#51956817)

    The problem isn't often the hardware, but the software. Maintaining old gadgets should be OK if you're willing to stay away from walled-gardens or jail-break your device. This post is probably a testament that we should, in fact be doing one of those, or opt for open systems. In other words, you must also choose a device that CAN be maintained easily.

    I have a first-generation iPad and it technically works fine. The battery still lasts long enough for it to be useful, and the device is in near-new shape. However, because it's no longer supported, it's becoming more and more useless for the following reasons:

    1) New apps can no longer be installed because even the most trivial programs are written with libraries only supported by a recent OS version, which the device does not support.
    2) Most currently installed apps can no longer be upgraded for the same reason as above. Those that can be upgraded often have bugs, leaving the user with a broken app, as there's no easy way to revert.
    3) Existing apps that worked great yesterday start to require more memory, and begin to crash more and more often. If the app uses an external service, this can start happening even if the app was never upgraded.

    PCs are a little easier. My last PC was a decade old before I stopped using it as my main machine. My current one is six years old and going strong.

    • I'm actually considering building my next phone. Sure, it will be clunkier than regular phones but it will be faster and I will have TOTAL control over it. I'm currently currently eyeing a Braswell pico-ITX board from China.

      • Total control? so you have your own cel protocol? and you made your own chips from sand? You wrote all your own apps? your own OS? You programmed your on memory and disk controllers?

        Not to be too cute, but "total control" can never happen. You can slide up and down on the control scale, but you'll never get to 100%. Once you get past that, you can make better choices on your effort/control scale.

        • Even if you could do it all yourself, you'd have to "steal" bandwidth on some cell network, wouldn't you? Because obviously no cell provider would ever actually sell you service on some Frankenstein device you built yourself.

          And that's after you figure out the software stack and how to make it compatible with the network and other services like voicemail and stuff that is generally handled for you behind the scenes.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      Part of the obsolescence of the iPad 1 was that the RAM was inadequate the day it was new. I still have one around here someplace that gets dragged out as an in-flight movie screen for my son when we travel.

      I always wondered how much longer it would have been useful if it had shipped with 2 GB RAM. Probably horrible from a CPU perspective, but I suspect it would have at least been able to run a newer OS than where it got abandoned and probably a better selection of apps.

  • Upgrade iPod/iPhone (Score:5, Funny)

    by CauseBy ( 3029989 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:05PM (#51956839)

    Instead of choosing between an old iPhone OS and a slow iPhone, you could always just upgrade to a Palm Treo.

  • Avoid the dilemma - become an Android user! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:11PM (#51956903)
    >> upgrading to the latest available version of the operating system could substantially slow it up. Not upgrading, however, exposes your device to a range of security attacks. It's a tough choice.

    Hey, if you want to avoid the dilemma, just become an Android user, where the tradeoff has already been decided for you: you'll almost NEVER be able to upgrade!

  • planned obsolescence... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gosand ( 234100 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:16PM (#51956945)

    I am still quite happily running a quad core processor from several years ago. While I am able to upgrade some parts of it, if I need to do more than one... it would cost just as much to build a new system. It's sometimes just harder to find parts for older machines. I usually get to the point where when I do build a new system, I have to re-educate myself on all the new formats/standards for hardware.

    But to the topic of phones, I have upgraded my phone now for the third time in the same timespan. My first foray into smartphones was a few years ago with the HTC One, on T-Mobile. It was a great phone. When it became lethargic, I rooted it and it got new life. Then about a year and a half ago, they were updating their network and dropping 3G. My phone didn't support 4GLTE, and by law they had to provide me (and my wife) with a new phone for free. We got low-end phones that were barely above our 3 year old phones. Those became problematic as they filled up VERY quickly (2GB storage). I just bought a new BLU phone, which should have the specs to keep me going for a while... but there is no real way to "upgrade" things. Replace a battery... maybe get a bigger memory card. But a lot of things come down to your provider or if you are even able to do things like upgrade the OS. My parents have older iphones, and all my dad wants is a weather app. I couldn't find an older app in the app store, everything required a newer version of the OS. I don't belong to the Apple-verse, so I couldn't help him.

    Planned obsolescence is what keeps me out of "the cloud" [or whatever you want to call it] as much as possible, but it's getting harder and harder.

  • My smartphone is 7 years old (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MindPrison ( 864299 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:23PM (#51957003) Journal
    ...and it works just fine for what it does. It can STILL play high quality youtube videos like it always could, and essentially it's just my alarm clock and phone I use every day. I drool at the new Samsung Edge S7 etc...but the game is over when I see prices like 1000$ for a freaking phone, all of a sudden my old phone becomes super attractive (it's an old HTC Legend solid-alu chassis / Oled screen) and what I like about it is that I can still get 3 DAYS battery time out of it.

  • Hipsters are going to be all over this like flies on shit.

    • What about 3d printing? And drones? It just proves that upgrading is important!!! You can't get on the Cloud with last years 3d printed drone!

  • There are limits... (Score:3)

    by aaarrrgggh ( 9205 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:24PM (#51957009)

    Upgrading a phone every year is a fashion decision, not a technical one. Choosing to do so after two years is often more technically driven-- meaningful technical improvements (802.11ac, LTE, screen, etc.). Taking good care of a phone and having it last three years is a personal/economic decision. Keeping it much longer may have diminishing returns.

    A tablet I would like to keep for 3-4 years; with heavy use, mine have been closer to 2 years, although I am currently at 2.5 years. For the tablet, it really depends on your use case.

    A computer though, I have no idea how most people could last 5 years. My mom's computer did make it almost 13 years, but it was clearly at the bitter end of its life a year or two earlier. I am at 5 years and starting to die when I need to run a VM with Windows, but for most of the people in our office after 4 years it is just constant problems.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      My phone upgrades are usually driven by a shitty OS update that makes it unusable, not a hardware problem. My 2013 moto X got some update on the 5.1.x branch that doesn't release the 4g radio after it's been used, so cell standby is eating up between 40 and 70% of my phone. Well I need my phone to work and alarm to go off in the mornings so now it's on ebay and I've picked up a Nexus 5x which recently dropped below $280 if you shop around.

    • A computer though, I have no idea how most people could last 5 years.

      I'm typing this on a work issued 4.5 year old HP Probook 6455b. I've got an AMD Turion mobile processor and it wasn't fast when I got it. Two years ago, I tried to trade it in for a faster model. IT slapped some piece of crap slow SSD in it and refused me a new machine.

      It's not fast. I can do some engineering work on it (CAD, statistics), but most of the time it runs Firefox and Chrome to get to Google Apps where the corporate IT infrastr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by imac.usr ( 58845 )

      My phone updates have been driven in the past by getting whatever is the current model when my two-year contract runs out, but now that those are ending, I may just hang on to my current model (an iPhone 6 Plus) for a while longer, since it still works fine a year and a half after ordering it.

    • For PCs if one started out with better quality parts they tend to last. I have an i7 I got almost 4 years ago and it still rips along just fine on the windows side of things. When I got it I could max it out with ease and I still can. It replaced a 7 year old Athalon 64 X2 system and I will likely replace my current machine when I can build a machine with 1/4 to 1/2 TB RAM in the $1000 to $1200 range. I find once I can get about 8x the ram as my current machine at that price it makes sense to upgrade. Also

    • If my old tower hadn't given up the ghost last summer I'd've used it more than 8 years (I think it was the motherboard that was going). Heck, with 2 extra gigs of RAM that I never bothered to get I could still be using it for programming, one VM, and probably even Minecraft with the draw distance set on 'medium' (ha ha).

      Of course I don't run any serious gaming software more recent than Civ IV, though.

      Now I've got a new one with 8 gigs of RAM or more and a newer processor, and I hardly notice a difference. I

  • Is the end of carrier subsidies. Although the net cost to consumers may be about the same with and without the subsidy, the psychological effect of having to pay full price for a phone upfront (or in clearly-demarcated monthly payments) is a great disincentive to upgrading.

    • Verizon's trying to side step this with their payment plan scheme. You don't pay full price up front, just the sales tax. Then you pay monthly installments with the option to pay off the device at any time (after an initial grace period). The net result is the same as subsidies except the cost of the phone is more transparent.

      I haven't looked at the statistics to see if this is working, but given the number of people that lease automobiles and get a new one every few years or so, I can see people doing t

  • Samsung S5 - Verizon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dave562 ( 969951 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @12:29PM (#51957053) Journal

    I had my previous Motorola Droid Razr for years and toward the end of its life put Cynaogen on it. It was an entirely new phone at that point and the only reason I upgraded to the Samsung S5 was because I had a free upgrade.

    The S5 is starting to slow down and become unresponsive because of the amount of crapware that Verizon loads onto the phone. I am going to take the plunge and try to root it, though from what I am reading now that it is running Lollipop, it might be a bit tricky. Have any of you downgraded to Kitkat from the most recent version of Lollipop and successfully rooted a Verizon S5?

    Given the hardware specs of the current phone, along with wifi and LTE, I could see myself using this phone for years and years to come if I can get replacement batteries for it.

    If I ever do have to buy a new phone, I will not buy it from a carrier. There are too many strings attached. Wireless carriers should be like ISPs. We only need them to give us connectivity.

    • Yeah, Verizon screwed up my last two Android phones with software updates as well. They have a bad habit of polluting their phones with bloatware.

      If I got another Android phone, I'd make sure to get an unlocked Nexus phone as well and just put the carrier SIM card in it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dave562 ( 969951 )

        Careful with the Nexus. A friend of mine got a Nexus 5 and had major sim card issues. The phone would just lose connection with the sim and he would have to reboot. Apparently it is / was a known issue with that series of Nexus phones.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Part of the problem is that the S5 is running Android 5.x, which is notably more shit than Android 4.x on the whole.

      I have no idea why people like it, but it is slower and more of a resource hog on the whole, with a less useful interface. I've regretted having every single Android 5.x device I've had and wished I could roll back to 4.x - every single time.

      Being able to root and install Cyanogenmod (or something else) is the #1 qualifier for me when buying a phone since I got into smartphones.

  • Weird - same phone I use - bought a few on ebay for spares..

    Not interested in a droid, Iphone, or Winphone - I want a platform that belongs to me and doesn't spy. There is a concerted effort to prevent an opensource (the whole phone) platform by people in 3-letter places and the usual 'cartel socialism' companies.

    So still using a treo for now - probably more secure than the new crap - and less of a time waster..

  • Android user (Score:3)

    by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Thursday April 21, 2016 @01:01PM (#51957327)
    Android user here and I just want to say that I am totally fine with the OS being "insecure". For me it's not an inconvenience to wait to be on a PC to do my banking and I can easily avoid third party russian and chinese app stores.
  • Interesting timing on this story, considering the situation I find myself in and was considering options just this morning. I own a 3+ year old iPhone 5s that has a dying battery, meaning it will suddenly shut off with a dead battery even though it was reporting a 40% or greater charge just a few moments earlier. I obviously need to do something, so I decided to take stock of my options:
    • Replace the battery in my existing phone and continue to use it.
      • Apple quotes $80. The nearby Batteries+Bulbs quotes $6

    • I will impart a warning here. I have a friend who has repeatedly tried to use non-Apple batteries in his Apple mobile devices and its been a dismal failure for him. Spend the money to have Apple replace your battery, you will be happier in the end.

      Apple laptops... well, the ones with replaceable batteries are a different story. Going third-party there works fairly well. The ones that don't... again spend the money to have Apple do it for you, you will be happier in the end.

      Another recommendation... whe

  • As people have mentioned, this is a problem of software. The hardware exists and is plenty good for sustained use but we don't have the same cult community dedicated to supporting old hardware as say the PC. This may change as more and more of these SoCs go open source for their drivers and specifications but until we have a real solid infrastructure in place for maintaining these systems and a community that is enthused about the prospect of doing do, we're just going to look at the cost/value analysis and

  • Perhaps not one key event, but a combination of solid state storage removing the hard-drive-failure event that often drove people to upgrade, CPU performance topping out, and RAM well beyond anything most programs need have all conspired together to give us desktops, laptops, and mobile devices that basically no longer get 'old'. Not to mention that power consumption is low enough now that PSUs just aren't burning out like they used to :-).

    Something strange happened in the last year or two. I buy computer

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