Honest question, wouldnt putting things to good use mean that old hardware would be kept running? I think your first and last paragraphs seem to be contradictory.
That's true, but the only old hardware that actually seems to be kept running is old analog stuff, or things that probably shouldn't still be running, like kerosene lamps as actual everyday lighting and gas leafblowers at 6AM.
Everyone's priorities are so skewed towards tech being disposable and analog being valuable, nobody really seems to mind all that much if they have to upgrade hardware. Especially when until recently there really was a benefit because pre-2018ish Android phones and the like were kind of laggy.
A more depression-like "Use it up, wear it out" kind of mindset might make us be more up in arms when our phones stop getting updates, but if it also makes developers constantly want to push the capabilities of those machines it probably won't run that well.
The deprecated hardware thing might a separate issue though, devs and companies like to sell stuff, and don't really understand that a new phone is a major purchase for the rest of us.
It's partly solved now by purely brute force, hardware is now good enough that you can't make badly performing app unless you very aggressively refuse to care about performance whatsoever, just basic laziness isn't enough when all the frameworks are pretty optimized.
But it's still an issue on servers and definitely still an issue in the open source world, where everyone now tacks a coin onto everything and uses tons of electricity.
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Honest question, wouldnt putting things to good use mean that old hardware would be kept running? I think your first and last paragraphs seem to be contradictory.
That's true, but the only old hardware that actually seems to be kept running is old analog stuff, or things that probably shouldn't still be running, like kerosene lamps as actual everyday lighting and gas leafblowers at 6AM.
Everyone's priorities are so skewed towards tech being disposable and analog being valuable, nobody really seems to mind all that much if they have to upgrade hardware. Especially when until recently there really was a benefit because pre-2018ish Android phones and the like were kind of laggy.
A more depression-like "Use it up, wear it out" kind of mindset might make us be more up in arms when our phones stop getting updates, but if it also makes developers constantly want to push the capabilities of those machines it probably won't run that well.
The deprecated hardware thing might a separate issue though, devs and companies like to sell stuff, and don't really understand that a new phone is a major purchase for the rest of us.
It's partly solved now by purely brute force, hardware is now good enough that you can't make badly performing app unless you very aggressively refuse to care about performance whatsoever, just basic laziness isn't enough when all the frameworks are pretty optimized.
But it's still an issue on servers and definitely still an issue in the open source world, where everyone now tacks a coin onto everything and uses tons of electricity.