Why does some smartphones get slower with time? Is it a hardware or a software problem?
In: Engineering
it is called “Planned Obsolescence”. Companies deliberately make products to last a certain time, usually around 5 years, so you have to keep buying new products. This is not a conspiracy theory, this is legitimate. Apple did admit that makes their phones slower, saying that will extent their life, but it just forces people to buy new ones.
It’s also a bit attributable to all the cruft that collects on a phone over time. All the photos that must be indexed, data that must be stored, apps that have been installed but rarely used.
If you do a factory reset, apply OS updates and reinstall just what you use, you’d find some performance improvements
Well, eventually the software becomes too advanced for the hardware to handle. Something static cannot keep up with the ever changing demands of dynamic software.
did tech support for apple for a little bit before i had to get out of that job.
was told that apple would push out ‘updates’ in tandem with new phones with new ‘features’ but insidiously would drain battery and processors of older phones. you could pay 50-70$ for a battery replacement at an apple store, but processors obv can’t be replaced.
fuck apple and all the apple brainwashed zombies who keep that company flush.
Both
On the software side of things not only are newer programs typically more demanding, but newer operating systems are designed with newer/more powerful devices in mind.
As for hardware, the only real thing that degrades over time is the battery. As they age, and go through more charging cycles, batteries tend to be able to store less charge. What’s more important for performance though, is that they also can provide less current. As electronics are under more load they draw more current, and if the aging battery isn’t able to keep up then that effectively puts a speed limit on the device as a whole.
* Both.
* The hardware stays the same.
* Even with firmware updates, you can’t really increase the performance of the hardware that much.
* Software you can easily upgrade such that it needs more memory and faster processors in order to work smoothly.
* This happens because software makers come up with new features that newer phones can use.
* It should be noted, hardware on smartphones is “solid state” meaning there are no moving parts. Other than the long term memory chips, the hardware doesn’t “wear out”. So if your smartphone was never upgraded and always used the exact same software it wouldn’t slow down.
Both. The issue is your aging hardware keeping up with your constantly advancing software. Hardware is designed with current cutting edge technology and software develops at a much higher rate than is sustainable for hardware. If hardware upgrades kept pace with software you would be buying a new phone every few weeks.
It helps to think of your smartphone as the tiny computer that it essentially is. If you have a laptop or desktop then you are able to upgrade virtually every component to a certain extent. Depending on how much money you were willing to spend you can update a computer for years by upgrading the processor, RAM, graphics card, hard drive, etc. to keep up with the ever increasing demand of evolving software. You aren’t able to do this with a phone so the hardware gets continually bogged down with every software update and even with app updates.
There have been several attempts to design and market modular phones that have upgrade-able hardware but none have ever taken off, which is a shame. Imagine if instead of buying the newest $1200 phone you could upgrade it with a $100 processor. Or if you were really in to taking pictures you could upgrade to the newest camera for a couple hundred dollars. Every few years you would have a completely new phone after replacing it a few parts at a time. You might still spend a thousand dollars on a new phone but it would be customer optioned and you would upgrade as needed just like a computer.
As for the whole battery “conspiracy” “non-conspiracy” thing, both sides are a little bit right. Yes software upgrades do affect battery life and companies do throttle the battery and the software for efficiency. That is an absolute necessity for older phones with newer software if you care at all about performance or even having a usable phone in some cases. However, planned obsolescence is very much a thing that has been happening for decades across all technology. One of the oldest and perhaps most well known cases being the [Phoebus cartel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel) which is the reason that, to this day, incandescent light bulbs have a 1,000 hour lifespan.
I read sth. about cpu degradation – transistor aging.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/transistor-aging
It looks like a system becoming slower over time is possible without changes in software and storage.
Modern CPUs will degrade over time when in use.
Perceived obsolescence. More often than not, companies like Apple will deliberately slow your phone down with updates so you will eventually HAVE to buy the newer product.
In other cases its just components wearing out.
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