[adimitrov]

As they say, those who seek to combat traffic jams by building more roads, would also attempt to lose weight by undoing their belts.

It's not different with phones. Your 2 year old flagship phone does not have a laggy UI because it's slow. It's because people code for today's phone. And as long as enough people keep buying new phones, the software market will not optimize apps, since it's cheaper not to. And as long as software needs ever more resources, people will continue to buy new phones.

It's recursive. But it's not pure: the side effects are resource depletion, electronic waste, labour exploitation, increasing energy demand.

We won't escape this vicious cycle by perpetuating that very behaviour. And so maybe we can all do something about it, however little. Maybe by accepting a tiny bit of UI lag here and there.

[noisy_boy]

I don't disagree with the principal of the argument. I also think by continuing to use my phone until it basically dies/breaks, I'm already doing my part. I am also a person who likes fast performance and doesn't want to invest time in changing the world by accepting a thousand cuts of lag daily. Maybe that's a flaw I have but I'm willing to live with that.

[pbhjpbhj]

Or, given this is a site for devs and entrepeneurs, do all of that except for accepting unoptimised stuff - do our best to create and highlight greater utility in older stuff.

The WordPerfect for Dos story fits in here: an awful lot of software seems to increase cycles (processing power used) without a proportional increase in utility.

Mind, this is a symptom really of how "we" have made a consumer society where companies can't exist without fitting into an ever tightening upgrade cycle -- that's incompatible with reducing energy use, reducing carbon footprint, reducing resource wastage and pollution.

We've made a sort of Skinner Box for society. It's not going well, but we've got enough distractions ...

[lukeschlather]

My 2 year old flagship phone (Blackberry Key2) does not have a laggy UI. My Pinephone does. And yes, I'm sensitive to lag but I'm not talking about minor lag. I'm talking about I push a button and then 15 seconds later after I thought that the keypress hadn't registered, suddenly I get popped into a different screen.

[freedomben]

You're not wrong, but what you say is also not helpful. You're suggesting a microeconomic solution to fix a macroeconomic problem. It's a form of the Tragedy of the Commons. Doing what you say will simply hurt the person who does it, while making no difference in the large scheme of things.

[adimitrov]

But I'm not proposing a solution. What I'm saying is that a vicious cycle isn't broken by shrugging and conceding defeat to whatever you feel "macroeconomics" is.

It's easy pointing fingers and blaming circumstances. But I'm asking you: what would hurt exactly? Would your life be worse without the iPhone 12? Would you me less productive, would you be less happy?