Comment by sanswork
7 days ago
In the late 90s/early 2000s desktop computing was moving at such a pace that an 8 year old PC was near unusable. Overtime progress slowed and its not unusual to have a decade old desktop now. The problem is thinking that mobile has slowed that much too. Mobile is still progressing quite rapidly so yeah an almost decade old device is going to feel slow.
You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.
Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
> Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?
What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?
Games are dramatically bigger in scale and graphics quality.
I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.
Right, but you choose when to play the games right ?
You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.
if I want to play games, I will buy the latest iPhone. If I want to a smartphone with couple simple primitive apps that just send JSON and call REST APIs in the cloud, I don’t want to be forced to shell out $1500 every couple years
So trashing fine working hardware that was produced using valuable and rare resources sounds perfectly sane to you?
For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.
Yes, everything has a lifetime, 10 years is a very good run for a complex piece of technology you can carry in your pocket. Send it in for recycling.
So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.
The vast majority of things don't get recycled properly.
We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.
There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.
Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?
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I am totally fine if I stop getting software updates. In general I prefer not to update software either, because every new version brings only bloat
Windows 10 keeps telling me I need to buy a new Desktop in October. I don't remember when I bought it, but it runs fine for everything I do. I've been running Linux for ages on my laptops, I be upgrading my desktop to Linux too!
Windows 10 is EOL. As a fellow internet user I'm glad Microsoft is taking a harder line these days on people running EOL software. The internet has a history of being swamped by people running EOL versions of Windows full of security issues causing problems for everyone else.
No one is holding back software. You're not running local LLM or anything useful, you're adding performance cost for merely displaying icons on screen.
No one is holding back software because they aren't being allowed. If we were forced to support decade+ old devices though software would for sure be held back.
Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.
> Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world
Maybe there's also a cost to updating phones as frequently as people do, and inefficient software running across billions of devices.
I wouldn't blame people who make their hardware last longer and call them "laggards". And it's not their responsibility to write security patches for their device, that falls on the manufacturer.
For these people, me included, they don't need the latest hardware features to ray trace a game or run some local LLM. We're just taking some photos, making calls, getting map navigation, messaging, interacting with CRUD apps, and web browsing. None of that requires the latest hardware, and especially Apple hardware from 8 years ago is more than capable of handling it smoothly.
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