My Samsung Galaxy S3 died after 8 years. EMMC failure. Just started boot looping while I was asleep. Everything gone. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies.
Having beautiful dead phones that have never had a broken screen or a hard drop is pretty depressing.
It can also depend on the hardware it's connected to. If the endless gigabytes of Samsung's value-add software are scribbling to eMMC nonstop then it's not surprising the flash is wearing out. A lot of this stuff is masked by the fact that most people swap out their phone for a new one that's exactly the same every 12 months so they never notice this, but if you hold onto a phone or similar device for longer the unnecessary wear starts to add up.
Google Android should get more praise for doing quality control by analyzing and killing apps and processes that attacked the hardware - at least back in the day.
The great filter for incompetence by the big G was real and necessary.
Yeah, the Flash has a wear lifetime. Battery has a finite lifespan too. Anything over five years is pretty good going. My wife managed that with a Nokia 1020, the last and best of the Windows phones.
Like everything else, phones need to be backed up.
I just replaced my OnePlus 5 a couple of months ago at over 8.5 years old. No repairs needed, battery was a bit crippled in active use, especially making calls, but fine for a mostly idling phone. In idle it still lasts longer than a 1.5 year old iPhone 15. I still use it for by backup phone number SIM, as it slowly gets to ~9 years old.
The bigger issue was no more OS updates since 2020, and no Play updates since 2023. The battery can be replaced but getting a fully updated OS is more involved.
OnePlus 5 runs great with custom ROMs, including potentially ones based on mainline Linux as opposed to AOSP. (The Linux support is not as good as OP 6/6T but getting there pretty nicely.)
Too bad they have these long lists of "this doesn't work so well" and I'm too time constrained to troubleshoot for too long or dig for solutions. And I'd also need to replace the battery. It's an option for when I actually have some time.
The device integrity is a bigger deal, this is also a backup for some banking apps so if they don't work it kind of defeats the purpose. I removed all other apps to minimize the attacks surface.
If you're using it as backup for banking apps and the like I totally get not running a custom ROM on it! But you could also set that backup on something even cheaper, any one of the random not-bootloader-unlockable brands, and be left with the OP5 as a Linux phone. You're also right that the Linux support on OP5 is not up to standard yet, this is more of a question for the future if that support improves.
What's cheaper than an already existing phone that would otherwise stay unused or end up in the landfill (recycling center)? It could also be a great experimentation platform, play with Linux on the phone, but the time I have available now leaves little room for this kind of play.
The goal is not "experimentation" but having it eventually as an always up-to-date daily driver once the support for it matures. You're quite right that we're still a bit far from that, though.
Do you hate the "Ribbon" UI that got forced into everything in Win8+?
That's what telemetry was used for. Every advanced user turned that off when they gave us the option, and now we have every UI on the computer designed for Grandma.
After being told to not integrate Internet Explorer into the OS, they changed the name to EDGE and did it anyway? With the added excuse that it now compromises most of the file explorer functionality, too?
No one in our Auto shop is using AI. One of the new diagnostic tools was demo'd with AI, and none of us were having it. It's about as accurate as Googling your symptoms.
My mother had an AI powered lung scan that came back with Stage 4 Cancer. The Oncologist got called in (for a fee!) to tell us it was just early stage COPD.
I much prefer having my thoughts distilled down into easily digestable and agreeable idioms that I can push around with absolute faith that they weren't just lies written by some PERSON on the internet.
And fake meat is highly edible. But do many people eat fake meat? No. Do many people recycle lithium ion batteries? Also, no. Less than 5% is the current estimate for what percent of lithium ion batteries is recycled.
>Compare to e.g. Hyundai with a 10-year/100k-mile powertrain and 5-year/60k-mile general in the USA.
Most cars are sold by the first owner between 30,000 and 60,000 miles. Hyundai's warranty is cut in half for the second owner, 5/50k powertrain and 2.5/30k general. There's nothing to cover, so it's basically free to put 10/100k in all of the commercials.
I'm curious where you got those numbers from. I did a quick search and find wildly different numbers (depending on method and source, from ~60% to >98%).
However I don't find anywhere claiming anywhere near <5%. Can you back that up?
Example source of manufacturers claiming >95% [0].
This is probably because it's not economical to recycle lithium ion batteries, certainly not for the lithium itself. Lithium is an extremely abundant element. If this ever stopped being the case, or if there are other battery components that were scarce enough to make batteries economical to recycle, we'd start doing that.
There's no virtue in recycling equipment for recycling's sake alone, we do it in exactly the situations where some raw material in the equipment is expensive enough to justify the cost of the recycling process.
Anything at all is recyclable if you're willing to spend enough money on the recycling process. If the raw materials of that thing are cheaper to get from nature than they are to get by recycling old versions of the item, then this is a good sign that it's not worth recycling the item and therefore we shouldn't do it.
My Samsung Galaxy S8 died at 7 years. Some kind of thermal failure, I was able to recover my data by keeping the phone in the freezer while I copied. Known issue.
My Samsung Galaxy S21? I figure I've got another year or two in it before it, too, dies.
Having beautiful dead phones that have never had a broken screen or a hard drop is pretty depressing.
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