The lack of updates beyond 2-3 years on Android is pitiful. If the manufacturer will not certify new updates after a period of time, they should support moving to another version of the OS that supports updates.
Repair costs are ludicrous. My 4 year old phone has a crack on the corner of the front glass. Repair shops are quoting me $250 to repair it. I can find old new stock of the same phone for less.
Lack of updates of the OS in one side of it, but everything else in the phone updating and becoming more and more resource hungry is another issue.
I am the kind of person that never drops a phone and can replace a dying battery by myself. As long as parts are available, the most decisive factor for me to change a phone is the available RAM for apps, seconded by the lack of security updates.
I wish proper software optimization and testing on older hardware was given more attention, It is sad to replace perfectly good hardware due to bloated software. That and society requiring me to use 5 different chat apps that could but refuse to talk to each other.
Hate updates with a passion. If they don't break something rightaway (most of the times they do), are guaranteed to turn a snappy phone into a sluggish, barely-usable sort of a brick.
Afterall you never install Windows 11 on your Windows 95 machine and if you did, it would be unusable. Yet the Win95 software is perfectly usable if you decide to stick to it.
If I want new software I'll buy a new device that can run it.
Old phones can last A LONG TIME. I only replaced my mother's Samsung Galaxy S4 last month and only because WhatsApp refused to work with it anymore (not that it couldn't but so are corporate decisions). In all it lasted 10 years, not bad for a phone with no updates.
Like "the market will always go up long term", software updates are the cancer we were brainwashed to accept as some unquestionable axiom.
I also avoid updates. They usually give me something I don't want, and take away some thing I do. On top of that with Apple devices, updates seem to slow the device down. I try to wait as long as possible before any updates.
This could work, in the past. Nowadays software is released under the assumption that it will be fixed with updates, so you rarely get anything working out of the box.
Welcome to "hiring a human to do a few hours technical labor involving low-volume parts." I don't think it's crazy, I think we just can't fathom how inexpensive per-unit manufacturing costs are and how efficient modern logistics is.
Outside of the really unique designs (folding, etc.), most phone screens tend to fall into a few basic size classes, but we still end up with wildly varying designs within those classes. The connectors are different, it's 2mm larger or smaller, etc.
I suspect when a manufacturer orders 100,000 the engineering costs to make it a little custom are insignificant on a per-screen basis.
If we had more top-down economic planning, there would likely be a single Display Monopoly, and they would say "here's the one six-inch display model for 2023". Whether it went into a Samsung or a Umidigi, there would just be one replacement SKU, and it would be far more feasible for repair vendors to stock it.
I busted my Lumia 1020 back in the day, and ended up retiring it because local repair shops were all 'weeks, if we can get the parts". If you had an iPhone or certain Galaxy S models, you at least had some chance spares were available from parts phones.
This would mean that even if you had something other than an iPhone or a recent Galaxy S, you'd have a chance of an affordable replacement part.
It's been a long while since I've had a laptop open to muck with the displays, but I remember similar things there... Even if the screen had the same connector, it might not work if the motherboard bios didn't support it. eDP looked like it might help, but it stopped being something I invested time in.
I noticed that with toasters, at Target. I wanted to buy a toaster with better heat distribution, rather than burnt on one edge, under-toasted on the other. All the toasters at Target have exactly the same heating element.
Android updates: yep. It's even worse when it's cell phone carrier-branded system updates such as a Verizon Samsung Tab.
Phone repair costs: also yep. My friend owns a cell phone repair chain. They cannot get front glass for iPhone 1[345] Pro (or Pro Max) because the screens just aren't available for any price. The consequence is the third-party cell phone repair business is presently dying.
Yes and we know that Google always follows through with its products.
With Google’s “ooh shiny”, ship new features to get a promotion culture, no team is going to want to support a 7 year old product that isn’t generating new sales.
Google has moved a lot of capability from the core operating system to updatable libraries. For example, the system browser isn't linked to the OS. So if your Android version is a few versions behind you're generally not missing too many capabilities, nor do you run into too much app incompatibility. So if the vendor only updates the core OS for 3 years, it's still generally quite usable for a few years more. Sure, it'd be better if the core OS updated too, but IMO it's not a major annoyance.
Repair costs are ludicrous. My 4 year old phone has a crack on the corner of the front glass. Repair shops are quoting me $250 to repair it. I can find old new stock of the same phone for less.