This is why I want an Onvo with battery swap over a Tesla.. Everyone makes fun of me for it, but nobody realizes that if you swap the battery about once a year, then you're able to preserve the life of your vehicle.
In April, a group of people in a red Tesla driving through the Moroccan desert were glued to the odometer on the car’s giant touch screen. “Two million, Hans! Two million,” exclaimed the front-seat passenger to the owner and driver, Hansjörg von Gemmingen-Hornberg.
Ah, it's gonna be one of those fluffy wanker articles.
Yeah I've only ever had one LED bulb die, and I think that was because it was faulty in some way. I've had a much better experience with them compared to CFLs.
Usually it's a badly designed heat sink that's meant to cause an eventual short so that it has to be replaced. Or just shoddy low material builds. LEDs really can last an obscene amount of time and they don't die another part does.
Most LEDs run on DC, and the built-in transformer is the most likely component to fail. If the LED is failing and getting dimmer, it's most likely due to poor heat dissipation.
If we had little 12v adapters and separate LED modules, you could reduce waste by only replacing the part that fails, and manufacturers would have greater incentive to improve build quality. Instead, we get cheaply manufactured bulb-shaped disposable units that need to be thrown away when one part fails.
I was looking at rv lighting as some options over wise just doing custom jobs (LEDs in whatever fixtures I think look nice). It helps like domes, reccesed, and ambiant lighting I think.
Oh yeah electricians are allergic to DC lol (I used to be one, and yeah that was big knowledge gap in codes, breakers, etc).
Electricians don't want to touch DC circuits because it is illegal to mix low voltage DC and high voltage AC circuits. At least it's illegal in Europe. You need to rebuild your walls to ensure separate and independent wiring channels. And that's a very expensive nightmare.
Yeah, I definitely get it. It would be illegal to mix low and line voltage in the USA, too.
I ended up running the cabling myself, all class two circuits powering 12 24vdc spots. The nice bit is that they are all addressable RGBW spots, so I can control them all individually or as groups. And it's all automated. The downside is that I'll probably have to remove them if we ever sell this house, because nobody but me understands how it works.
The thing is that it is a lot easier and a lot safer to buy some ESP32 boards, flash them with WLED, plug into 5V/12V/24V box, hide all of that in a 3D printed enclosure and call it a day than to rebuild the bloody walls (: And you won't be breaking any regulations and every sparky will be fine with that.
Running all your house with two wiring systems is dumb AF that's why no one will ever do that for you. That's my point.
I used to work for a European home automation company. Thing is, their gear is most cost effective in new construction and was very popular in Germany, Austria, Czechia, and Poland, but convincing anyone to wire for low voltage devices in the UK or US was like asking for ketchup on pancakes. There are a lot of reasons to like their tech, but they don't really do retrofit, so it hasn'tanaged to make a dent in the market.
Yeah. Its about 50/50 for the ones who failed me. Gets too hot and burn out or the power supply fails. More prevalent in the compact formats like spots and g8 or g4.
LEDs themselves don't get dimmer and don't fail. Their drivers fail and run LEDs at higher voltages so then LEDs burn out. If the LED is driven correctly, it won't dim over time and will last pretty much forever in terms of human lifescales.
Last nearly forever? That needs to be broken down into details. Aren't batteries for EV limited to about 10 years of use? And they're a costly replacement?
A good solution would be to make EV batteries easily swappable instead of "charge stations"...
There's a couple thousand in China for Nio, but they haven't really taken off anywhere else.
By contrast there's over 1.8 million public EV chargers in China alone.
Batteries are heavy, which makes them hard to move and requires secure attachment to the vehicle. EV chargers have no moving parts and require much less maintenance.
I think we will stick with built-in batteries rather than any kind of swapping. I always thought the battery swapping idea was neat, but the real world cares about money more than anything.
To have ubiquitous battery swapping stations would be a huge amount of infrastructure. But to have ubiquitous vehicle charging you basically just have to run wires to existing parking spots.
That is combined with the fact that I think batteries, especially LFP batteries, have a lot more cycles in their lifetime than your 10 year estimate would suggest. I’ve read 4000 cycles for LFP in a few places. That’s more than a decade even if you fully charge and discharge the battery every single day. Drive a more realistic number of miles/kms per day and then the chronological age of the battery might be more important than how many cycles are on it.
My family bought an electric forklift for their factory in the early 90s. I think it is a Yale.
My sister has since taken over the forklift for her company and she has only replaced the batteries and the controller once.
These things are cheap to replace and not as much of a mystery as ICE engines.
I am seeing people replace old Prius hybrid batteries themselves with basic tools now.
I think the only thing I would be concern about is the crash safety for cars. Newer cars are safer. I think that would be the only draw to buy a newer vehicle.
I replaced the main battery in a Gen1 Prius. Fiddly. Had to get a strong buddy to help lift it in and out of the car, but we did it in a long weekend. A full set of 'used but tested' cells cost something like $750 but that was probably 8 years ago.
Actually the low cost part of this was that they weren't upgraded cells. Just tested-good cells from other battery packs. Most of the time it's just a couple cells in the bigger battery that have issues, and they take those out of the pool and make a good amount of $$$ because we were required to send back all of our cells. Assuming that of the 26 (iirc) cells that 3 or 4 were bad that's a big profit margin for sure. The car worked great after swapping them out.
Time to make a billion dollars on something else, then start up a car company designed to fail. No investors, design a car for a 60-70k buying price, few bells and whistles, but built to last indefinitely with basic maintenance. Start the company planning to practically close it down just after the last preorder customer has their car delivered and become a maintenance company with a few employees to make replacement parts and install them. If demand rises, redesign for the new times, ramp up and do it all again.
Who wants an infinite lifespan car anyway? Everything else would be getting safer and more fuel efficient. Might as well get around on horse and buggy.
For one most engines are pretty much at their peak efficiency, for two practical safety features reached peak between the mid 90s to the early 00s. Most modern safety features are ironically enough not all that safe, for example lane assist makes people pay less attention or it tries to assist in the lane and overcorrects. I see the latter rather frequently in my area since windy roads, usually the damned things are trying to avoid the white lines of the shoulder and overcorrect over the yellow.
I think modern safety standards alone would cost a few hundred million in research, or make it necessary to start from an existing donar car to make the type of thing I'm dreaming of.
I doubt a modern manufacturer would want to partner with a company designed to make basic but everlasting vehicles, so the imaginary billionaire would probably need to buy up whatever car the engineers want to start from in bulk.
Having worked on and had every major brand (and some obscure ones) in my family, there's a reason Japanese cars are considered the most durable.
We've driven numerous Toyotas and Hondas 300k+. Some we still have, 30 years old or more.
Working on Toyota and Honda is generally much easier and far less frequent than other brands.
You can see how American car companies enshittify things when there's a joint platform (Ford/Mazda, GM/Toyota, Chrysler/Mitsubishi). Invariably the American version is inferior, and even the Japanese company version often suffers with some of the same shitty design/engineering choices.
I refuse to ever again own an American vehicle, or even one of the joint platforms. I've had both - they suck to work on, require more frequent repairs, sometimes to things that just never fail on Japanese cars (especially electronics and control systems... Looking at *you" Jeep/Chrysler).
It would be wonder if they last forever and easly could be repaired. Making it better to keep the car then buy a new one. It just need to be upgradedable to the latest standards that might be more safe, efficient and agree with current law.
But I am pretty that would never exist - too hard.
There's not much room for improvement in terms of efficiency for EVs, except maybe lower rolling resistance tyres and better aero. You generally have to replace the whole car for better aero though unless you don't mind having some bolt on mods 😂
Ok, but it might be in other areas. Example lets see someone invent very high efficiently on solar panels with no weight at all. Or lets get rid of rubber wheels and do sifi so the car can hover over the road.
“Unlike gas-powered engines—which are made up of thousands of parts that shift against one other—a typical EV has only a few dozen moving parts. That means lessdamage and maintenance, making it easier and cheaper to keep a car on the road well past the approximately 200,000-mile average lifespan of a gas-powered vehicle. And EVs are only getting better. “There are certain technologies that are coming down the pipeline that will get us toward that million-mile EV,” Scott Moura, a civil and environmental engineer at UC Berkeley, told me. That many miles would cover the average American driver for 74 years. The first EV you buy could be the last car you ever need to purchase.“
No way a car would last me and my family 74 years. First year I owned my car I put on almost 35k. Was driving 100 miles back and forth to work at that time. We typically take a road trip from colorado to near Vermont every year for a vacation.
A lot of midwesterns will drive 14 hours to get some where
In the San Francisco Bay Area, it's not uncommon for people that work here but can't afford to live here to have commutes of over an hour with good traffic (2+ hours with heavy traffic) each way. That's the case in a few major metro areas in countries like the USA and Australia.
My commute in the Bay Area is 15-20 mins without traffic, but it can be 50 minutes if there's some incident on the 101 or if I accidentally try to commute during the highest peak period.
I'd love to take a train to work, and I used to take Caltrain every day, but it's just not feasible where I live now.
Round trip was 100 miles every day. This was rural Ohio driving to Columbus so it was not to bad 2 and 4 lane roads till you hit the city most of them time. If we got a lot of snowfall it could super suck but I was from NE Ohio so most of the time it was not that much white knuckle driving. You just listen to a lot of audiobooks and podcasts or call some friends on your hour or so drive home
Sure, there's always going to be outliers. Most people live and work in the same metropolitan area though - they're not driving 50,000km+ a year.
Besides, having a vehicle with 5 times the effective lifetime is going to be a big win regardless of how much you drive it.
Nope, he drove 80km/h with traction control, but lost consciousness somehow. No lines on the road (out in the German countryside) so no line assist. Car went straight when there was a very mild turn, so he drove off the road, into some uphill ridge whi h launched him, woke up when flying through the air after which he landed in a bunch of trees. This is where he landed. He luckily only had 4 broken ribs.
This is often the issue. Not in this case though. He had his license for 24 years, while driving from the south of Germany to the Netherlands back and forth twice a month. He never had an accident before.
There were no stripes on the road so the line assist didn't work. He was unconscious for just a sec, he remembered seeing the slight turn, then to wake up while flying into the trees.
They will if they are forced by regulation : 10y mandatory warrantee, right to repair, standardized swappable batteries, spare parts production for 20y...
Anyone know of any refrigerators today that are as durable as older ones and have today's efficiencies, but without the smart features and other junk?
Average refrigerator today still lasts 13 years though, and while they're made cheaply they also are cheaper (at least as a portion percentage of the average paycheck).
I've heard that in the US fridges are generally different, with stuff like active fans and nonsense like that. Is that true?
Because every fridge I've seen in Europe is mechanically extremely basic and I've literally never seen or even heard of one breaking. In my experience fridges are one of the only things that have remained phenomenally simple in design and extremely unlikely to break.
If someone told me their fridge broke, I'd genuinely assume they were lying. That's how reliable they are.
I mean there's so many different fridges you can buy but I've only heard of two dying. One was a compressor issue but that's all I know about it. The other one was a valve or something went bad but with the help of youtube my brother was able to diagnose it and replace the part. Apparently that's the most common failed part on at least that brand of fridges
Every LG and Samsung major appliance I've had has broken within 5 years.
Refrigerators, washing machines, and dryers.
Prior, I only ever had 80s era American tank energy hogs. Switched back to American brands in the last few years, so too soon to tell if they'll work out better...
Here's to hoping.
Oh, and having dealt with LG warranty for both electronics and major appliances, I'll never buy another LG product that isn't a monitor.
LG monitors are the only higher end LG product's I've owned that have survived well past the warranty date.
I can confirm Samsung appliances are complete trash. Every single one I've owned has either died or had a non-replaceable part fail within a couple years. We had a Samsung fridge at one point and one of the door switches failed. No big deal right, easy to replace? No, apparently Samsung used some kind of custom switch instead of the bog standard cherry contact switch that basically everything and everyone has used for decades, and it's no longer being manufactured.
My dad bought me a ridiculously expensive (like $400) Samsung vacuum that I loved. It was strong, it came apart in really cool ways to make it versatile, etc.
It failed in less than a year.
The $60 Walmart special Bissell that I went and bought to replace it lasted for 8.5 years before the motor burned out (I screwed up and it got too much pet hair in it). I bought the same one again and it's going on 5+ years with no issues.
Samsung certainly seem very aware of return window timing. 8.5 years is much better!
I wish some of this stuff was more standardized. In an ideal world one should be able to just replace a motor and keep on going. (Like without needing to learn any wiring and so on.)
I’m gonna offer some contrary evidence: I have a Samsung from 2013 that’s still working perfectly. It did have an issue with the icemaker seizing up, but they have a program where they send a tech out to repair it for free, which I took advantage of. The newer appliances can last a long time in some cases.
There’s also many old fridges that did die, including multiple of mine growing up in the 80s. You just see the ones that happened to survive.
Samsungs don't just fail; they are incredibly precisely engineered to fail on purpose not too long after the warranty ends.
I had a Samsung front-load washing machine that failed after maybe six years or so: the drum quit turning and it started making a terrible banging noise instead. I decided to take it apart to see what went wrong. Every single part in it was pristine and in perfect working order -- electronic parts, mechanical parts, rubber parts, plastic parts, even the stainless-steel parts exposed to the water and detergent all that time -- everything looked brand-new.
That is, except for the "spider arm," which is the large bracket that connects the axle to the drum. That one single part was made out of a completely different kind of metal and had corroded completely through. It was blatantly designed not to stand up to water and detergent. The excellent condition of the metal in the rest of the machine showed that they were perfectly capable of choosing the right material for the job, but deliberately chose not to. It was the most brazen, shameless instance of planned obsolescence I've ever heard of before or since.
(Not my pic, but it looked pretty much like this -- except mine was in three wholly separate pieces! And, as I mentioned, the axle and drum were shiny and brushed, respectively, with zero rust or residue of any kind at all.)
It's true. I fixed a Samsung LED TV that wouldn't turn on. They used a tiny resistor that I thought was a fuse.
That resistor was chosen so that it always ran hot and failed after about 3 years of normal use. I put in a bigger one with the same resistance that stays cold and now have the TV for 5 years.
Even those can have duds. My very first ultrawide was an LG, paid more money for it than any other monitor in my life because I've never had a montitor fail.
Died after 1.5 years and the warranty was only a year. I was so pissed.
First mistake was to not look at what repairman recommend because none of them will tell you to buy either brands, they'll tell you to buy from the Whirlpool family if you're going for "low cost" brands (vs brands like Bosch, Sub Zero, Miele...)
For washing machines, buy used Speed Queen commercial units.
They cost as much as new consumer high end units, but they're designed to be repaired, plenty of parts available, and they don't break in the first place.
The Speed Queen small washers at my local laundromat are about $2500 on the used market (in good running condition, with known hours on them). They're quiet, and don't shake for any reason.
I bought an expensive Samsung microwave thinking it would outlast the cheaper ones. The thing actually started to rust in the first few months something not even the cheapest microwaves have done on me.
Last Samsung appliance I'll ever buy luckily I'm in the UK and got my money back.
Well there are evaporator fans in modern refrigerators in the US. They serve an important role though helping with defrosting, improving cooling efficiency, and evenness of cooling throughout the fridge.
Usually only very small refrigerators are without them now.
It is another point of failure though, but should be pretty easily repairable. I mean it'll still be able to cool without the fan, but it'll be running much more to try and compensate and keep things cool though.
If you know the YouTube channel technology connections, here's a fun video of him messing around with a fanless style refrigerator:
The only durable ones are industrial refrigerators like they have at restaurants. Other than that, at least in the US, avoid Samsung and LG (have compressor issues) and buy American made (better build quality). But you're looking at 10-15 years regardless. Some other notes:
ice machines should be in the freezer, if you have one
Or buy a fancier chest freezer that can swap to a fridge with a button press
Got mine for Xmas 2 years ago, cost like 800 bucks? Bigger than a normal fridge, uses $2.78/month in electricity in freezer mode here in expensive electricity land
Downside: you have to dig for you shit. Upside: in the summer, good
Can confirm. Use a fridge from 1974. 2 years ago thermostat failed. Replaced with digital one for $15. Now have a nice digital readout of the temps. Thing uses 180W 100W when running, less than bigger newer ones.
It's even more ecological to keep it running since it still has the nasty ozone layer killing coolant that would partly evaporate when trashing it.
Luckily I'm pretty sure we are at least on an up trend when it comes to the ozone layer so even when eventually it kicks the can you don't need to worry too much about that anymore. Now we just gotta fix carbon emissions.
Good luck with that. Planned obsolescence is a key ingredient in capitalism. I mean what better way to make line go up than to turn a one-time purchase into a repeat purchase? This shareholders and executives will never be able to step on the working class if they can't gouge customers. Won't anyone think of the shareholders?
That said, we might be able to make industrial scale recycling an economically efficient activity if we build more durable goods with a longer lifecycle and limit the availability of new territory to strip mine and abandon.
So much of our "cheap" access to minerals and fossil fuels boils down to valuing unimproved real estate as at zero dollars and ignoring the enormous waste produced during the extraction process. Properly accounting for the destruction of undeveloped real estate and the emissions/waste created during industrial processing could dramatically improve how much waste we produce and - consequently - how long our durable goods last.
And few people want to work for free or want put aside too much of there personal wealth to help people for things that don't seem critical (like healthcare for example which has a lot of nonprofit activities).
I hope OpenSource keeps takening off in the field. Communalize the engineering results so we advance together, and lower the cost of manufacturing with diy/small scale manufacturing and maybe we can get better things at costs more can afford without enslaving people.
Back in the day you could buy whole (but small) parts, cut away the rusy one and solder in the new one (paint with anti rust paint). Did it on my cheap ass volvo 142 :-)
Maybe you can't do that any more because of complex crumple zones, but I bet we can do better. A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.
A car shouldn't just have a life span of 6-10 years.
They don't.
My current daily driver is 18 years old. I expect at least another 10 barring an accident, maybe 30 more years as a spare vehicle. It got a new transmission at 200,000 miles. Engine seems like it'll make it to at least 400k. A replacement is $1500, far less than a new car.
Most cars in my family (approximately 30 cars) are between ten and thirty years old.
I've had 3 cars since 1996, all bought used, and I traveled for work with one. One car I sold to a family member, and it's still being driven.
It's people that choose to not drive cars this long.
Same. We're at 17 and 18 years, and we're looking for replacements because we want something more efficient. We'll probably sell them instead of junking them. We bought one at ~8yo, and the other at ~15yo, each has had minimal issues and I've done most of the work on them myself. Neither have any rust, though we live in a desert, so that's not all that surprised.
Cars absolutely can last quite a while if they're well maintained and designed well.
You can still do that. They're called body repair panels. They are usually plain metal. You have to cut out the old, weld in the new, grind them flat, prime and paint them. This isn't cost efficient if your car is worth less than the paint you'd need. The parts usually are around $100-$300 bucks (if you don't need OEM parts) but the labor is expensive. And if you do it for cheap it will look like crap.
Like the new LED lightbulbs. Buy one now and they last a year or so. I bought one of them WAY back when they were brand new and horribly expensive and the damn thing still works just fine.
Companies can't stand new technologies that just work. They have to build in planned obsolescence. See also: smartphones, especially iTrash that make you buy a new one every year or two because updates slow them down.
The problem with LEDs isn't the bit that emits lights. It's the power supply, specifically the electrolytic capacitors. Good designs either use higher quality caps, or use designs that avoid electrolytic caps altogether. Either one takes a bit more money, but the market is always in a race to the bottom.
Long term, I think we should be avoiding traditional light fixtures entirely. It's better to have a lot of little lights spread over an area rather than a few point sources in the room. That gives us the opportunity to separate the power supply from the lights entirely, like LED strips do.
The LEDs will also fail from overheating. LED bulbs don't last long in fully enclosed fixtures that were designed for incandescent bulbs.
If the bulb starts flickering, that's usually a bond wire failure in an LED. When the LED heats up the bond wire loses connection and it will reconnect when it cools down again. The LEDs are in series, so if one fails, the entire bulb goes out. Flickering can also be caused by a capacitor failure in a switch mode supply, but most LED bulbs use linear regulators with a high voltage series string of LEDs now, which also increases the chance of a bond wire failure.
The early LED bulbs that cost a fortune had huge aluminum heat sinks to keep them cool. The few that I had all lasted until the LEDs got dim.
The newer designs that use very long, filament-attached LEDs in a large helium filled glass bulb also work quite well, even in a classical light fixture. The helium filling helps with cooling because helium has higher convective heat transfer than air.
100% true, the first CREE bulbs I had would die in these damned enclosed pimple-like ceiling fixtures. I got them replaced but I now run them without the frosted glass domes on them so they don't overheat and get killed again.
Good ones still last a long time. What fails is generally not the LED itself but the cheap-ass rectifier in a cheap-ass case that is optimised for production price instead of heat dissipation. The fixture can also be an issue as nobody designed for heat dissipation in the days of incandescent bulbs, you might be baking those poor capacitors.
And those kinds of bulbs will stay available because there's plenty of commercial users doing their due diligence on life-time costs. Washing machines, fridges? Yes, those too, though commercial ones aren't necessarily cheap. Want a solid pair of pants? Ask a construction crew what they're wearing.
It's more than just a rectifier. LEDs of any type, white or otherwise, require regulated current, not just any voltage, otherwise even an LED will burn out. Vis-a-vis: cheap white LED flashlights that take 3 AA or AAA batteries; there's no current regulation, they just call it 'close enough'. Over time some of those LEDs will fail and start flashing when they heat up.
So what usuall fails in white LED bulbs in your house is the electronics responsible for regulation. Sometimes the LEDs themselves (of which there is usually more than one LED, they're usually an array of several) will burn out, killing the whole bulb.
I have a 1080p TV that the backlight went out on it after a few years use, which I replaced myself. Inside it are three circuit board strips with white LEDs on them, all wired in series like christmas tree lights used to be wired. All it takes is one of them opening up and the whole backlight stops working.
Anything like this that is manufactured at massive scale is bound to have some failures, and white LEDs and white LED bulbs are no exception.
iPhones and iPads famously get slower, laggier, and less useful as time goes on. This is not just because of its use because even resetting one will make it just as slow as before. Sure, as we move forward we get more demanding applications and such, but it seriously doesn't seem like that scales properly with the ability of the hardware, almost like Apple intentionally builds in incremental slowdowns in each patch that isn't installed on current hardware. It's apocryphal, I know, but there have been so many people complaining about their perfectly good iDevices suddenly not performing like they used to even after a refresh that makes me feel like there's at least something to it.
And don't get me wrong, Android phones seem to do the same to a certain degree. iDevices are just more famous for doing it.
It's not even almost, in 2019 there was a settlement where they were found to literally be making older devices artificially slower once a newer model or two was out. Settlement sign ups ended in 2020, search Apple slowdown lawsuit.
Yeah you’re talking about batterygate. That was blown way out of proportion by the media. I know this because I worked for Apple from as far back as 2012 and most iPhone repairs were from old batteries shutting off around 30% charge remaining because the battery was so consumed, it couldn’t keep up with the voltage the hardware was pulling. This led to frequent shutoffs, data corruption and a whole lot of angry customers.
In an iOS 10 update they tweaked iOS to throttle to a speed the battery could handle. So yeah, your old phone might run a little slower, but it wouldn’t shut off in the middle of use and corrupt your shit.
The problem was they didn’t elaborate in the release notes and didn’t give customers heads up as to why they did that. Then their press release was written by engineers. Tech blogs spun the story as “OMG APPLE IS SLOWING YOUR PHONE SO YOU BUY A NEW ONE”.
No.
Apple is telling your phone to dumb itself down to what your old-ass battery can handle. As a result, they also dramatically lowered the price of battery swaps for several years after this whole experience to like $29, and just this last week they officially affirmed their unwritten commitment of supporting devices with software updates for at least 5 years.
Be mad at Apple for shit they deserve please. They’re not a great company and do a lot of shitty things that deserve this kind of hatred. But I lived this. You just have a surface level understanding of what happened.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
The only way to circumvent this problem is to invent a battery that doesn’t age. The person who does that is going to be a _very _ rich dude.
or how about easily replacable batteries. yes, they can be designed in a sleek, apple-y ergonomic way. but its much easier and more profitable to make battery replacements a phone killing endeavour. this applies to other manufacturers as well.
That’s a valid criticism too. But that’s also not exclusively an apple criticism, as you pointed out.
I’m not trying to defend Apple from people who hate them, I just want to make sure we’re not being solely reactionary here.
Again, they dropped the price of out of warranty battery replacements from $99+ to $29 for (don’t quote me on this) something like 2 years as a result of the bad PR they got from this change, which was inherently done to prolong the life of a phone with a consumed battery. That’s anything but a planned obsolescence move. They fucked up the messaging to users sure, but it wasn’t just done to slow your iPhone.
agreed on the batterygate thing. ars did a pretty decent writeup on the reasons behind the CPU throttling.
my issue with Apple has always been their... "its magic!" bullshit. that marketing leads to more and more e-waste as other manufacturers follow the sucessful Apple marketing trend, because, you know... its NOT actually magic and batteries are consumable items.
"Ford, how am I supposed to operate my [insanely expensive] digital watch now [that the battery is broken]?" guess i'll just get another one!
I mean, people don’t have to buy new phones every year. Especially recently YoY improvements have stagnated enough and prices have jumped enough that there’s never been less reason to.
I don’t really fault Apple for iterating their devices every year and advertising them any more than I fault literally every other manufacturer for doing the exact same thing. I just don’t understand why people like to pick out Apple specifically? It’s an industry problem, not just an Apple problem.
I appreciate the look behind the curtain but since apple was found in a court to have deceived customers and was proven of wrong doing it certainly is a bit more than just the media blowing it out of proportion or Apple actually doing people a favor that was misinterpreted. For example 3 days a week I use a phone from 2018 that was my daily driver for 3 years and needed to use it as a backup MFA device that I also sometimes stream and watch media on for a few hours a day. Updated it to the latest LineageOS and haven't had to worry about freezing or being slow or shutting off and corrupting my shit.
I already stated as much my guy, they screwed up letting users know what was going on. First in the release notes, second in the press release they put out about it. That’s why Apple was found to have deceived customers and rightfully so.
I’m not arguing that. I’m just stating the intentions behind it have been completely dominated by the media and reader’s reactionary responses to hearing “Apple slowed down your phone”. All I ever said here was that there was a very good reason for doing so, and it wasn’t planned obsolescence.
As for lineageos, it also slows down the CPU as needed when a consumed battery cannot output the necessary power or when the operating temperature exceeds safe limits. Most OSes do that. The ones that don’t cause data corruption.
You seem to misunderstand the issue still. It’s not an OS issue. It’s an issue with a consumable part becoming consumed. Until the update, iPhones just shut off when the OS tried to pull too much power. All Apple did was trade shutoffs (compromising user data) for dynamic CPU throttling (sometimes slower performance but your data is fine). Where they screwed up was in telling the users what they were doing and why.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about iOS, Android, a fork, or something else. An OS has battery management capabilities or it doesn’t.
That doesn’t change the fact that Apple should’ve been more transparent, but you’re not avoiding this very common method of resource management because of the type of device you have, unless lineageos can defy the laws of physics and consumable batteries.
Like I said, it's apocryphal and probably has other reasons (like the one you mention), but it's something you hear all the time about them to the point where it becomes major news and there has been some evidence presented, but as I said, it could just be newer versions of software requiring better hardware, which is still a bit iffy when you have an older phone and they want you to update to software that won't run as optimally on it. In some ways, Android actually benefits from this by just creating security patches for the life of the phone for the older version, and not updating to newer versions of Android like iOS does for old phones.
I think people just like to pick on Apple. They support old phones for at least 5 years with software and security updates, and sometimes even longer. They’ve even been known to push out the occasional security update for devices nearing a decade old.
That’s not to say they’re a perfectly innocent company. I just think there’s an Apple hate bandwagon people like to jump on. Rather than doing that, I’d like to see people focusing on the specific shitty things they do, and giving them credit for the things they get right.
Hey man, I'm an Android dude for phones. Won't even consider an iPhone as I dislike locked ecosystems for phones, but this is just not true.
Apple supports their devices way longer than any of the major Android producers do. I can't remember the last time my phone was supported more than 3-4 years, but my iPad was just rock solid and updated for 6 years. Replaced it because I wanted more RAM for scrolling endlessly on Reddit, but it was brilliant for everything else. My daughter still uses it with no issues today, two tears later.
The missus' Samsung tablet on the other hand...
What a piece of crap, and it was top of the line just three years ago.
Yep. Apple supports their stuff a lot longer, but it does seem like it slows down more and more every single update.
I'm really soured on the whole portable device thing completely because I don't like the interfaces, I don't like touchscreen (imprecise garbage), I don't like how locked down it is by default (Android over iOS here plus some Android devices are very hackable to the point of getting root, but still), and I hate the intense data collection and tracking these devices do to you. Even phones rooted with custom OSes still track you by its mobile radio triangulating your position.
The planned obsolescence is just another frustrating aspect to the damn things.
I mean yeah it’s not as optimized, but that’s not what the claim was. That’s also not exclusively an Apple behavior so I don’t get why we’re singling out one manufacturer here.
Apple doesn’t make anyone buy anything every year. They support older devices longer than most other manufacturers, so I still don’t understand your point.
Gonna downvote you here bröder and chip in with the people defending Apple’s products while recognizing that Apple did go through a lawsuit and that they did indeed participate in this shady-ass practice. Whether they still do - who knows, we live in a funny age.
From personal experience, not only is the build quality superior but they do last pretty long. I’ve got 3 devices personally and have had experience with many more.
My SE that’s old as hell now. I’m not gonna say it runs every app just fine, but the OS functions just fine. I use it as a music player now tho and iPhone 14 as my phone.
SE2 was shit, I’ll admit.
I bought M1 Air when they just came out - it has barely slowed down. Admittedly, it was after my 12 year old Acer plastic clunker decided to not wake up one day.
I also just recently used a friend’s pretty ancient iPad for Procreate and that worked just fine as well.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple? At least for smartphones there are none. If someone did put a really nice feeling (physically) smartphone in front of me and said: “hey, you can switch everything off with hardware switches and all the apps you’re used to are supported plus the UI and the camera is competent”, I might jump, maybe. Depending on how I could manage my workflow with Linux bc I’m not going to Windows and in this hypothetical scenario if I’m jumping Apple, I’m jumping everything not just the phone.
All that said, I have been giving a thought to all of this for some time and as soon as the time is right for me, I will switch, out of principle. I would love to be able to run some other OS on Apple phone hardware tho.
If someone’s looking for great UI/UX out of the box and great industrial design, what other alternatives are there besides Apple?
And this right here is where you went from cringeworthy Apple pandering to laughably, horribly wrong. crApple iTrash has the worst goddamn interface of any system. I'd rather use pure DOS from the fucking early 90s than have to poke around on iOS's ass-backwards interface.
