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Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it's costing the economy (cnbc.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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The average American now holds onto their smartphone for 29 months, according to a recent survey by Reviews.org, and that cycle is getting longer. The average was around 22 months in 2016.

While squeezing as much life out of your device as possible may save money in the short run, especially amid widespread fears about the strength of the consumer and job market, it might cost the economy in the long run, especially when device hoarding occurs at the level of corporations.

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[–] 19 points 11 months ago (12 children)

What a load of bullshit. Maybe I misread it but it says that German companies would be 101% more productive if they bought newer laptops and phones (American ones no doubt). They also claim that businesses are trying to use old hardware for modern workloads. Apparently a six year old laptop can’t handle Outlook and Word.

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  • [–] 25 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    To be fair, current laptops don’t handle Outlook and Word very well.

    It’s probably not the hardware that is the issue.

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  • [–] 12 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    You can't polish a turd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children) 
    They used the dorodango technique to create dung spheres in order to bust the myth that one "can't polish a turd". Using a glossmeter, they measured gloss levels substantially higher than the value of 70 gloss units, which is considered "high gloss". Savage's 106-gloss unit dorodango used an ostrich's feces, while Hyneman's 183-gloss unit specimen used a lion's feces. They therefore deemed the myth "busted".
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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago

    Hell, Windows 11 is broken enough on my work laptop that it sometimes struggles with fucking explorer.exe, and this damn thing will run multithousand part CAD models without too much hassle while Windows isnt fucking up.

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  • [–] 13 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    It genuinely floors me that few medium and large-sized companies don’t use Linux for desktops. You can customize gnome or KDE to work very similarly to windows from a UI/UX perspective, especially with the number of web based apps companies rely on. Windows and Office might start sucking less if they had real competition.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    There is a lot of specialized shit that Excel does that calc isn’t up to par on.

    You also can’t easily cripple calc with group policy (no pesky macros or external connections, you little babies! Copy and paste or get dead)

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    The main reason is tech debt and proprietary software. Most companies have decades of software infrastructure all built on Microsoft based systems. Transitioning all that stuff to Linux is a massive investment, especially taking into account the downtime it'll cause combined with the temporary decrease in productivity when everyone has to get trained and build up experience with the new platform.

    And then you have to deal with proprietary software. A lot of niche corporate or industrial hardware only supports Windows. And you probably have to regularly interact with customers who use Windows and share files with you that can only be opened in Windows only proprietary software.

    Linux also frequently struggles with a lot of weird driver issues and other weird quirks, causing an increased burden on the IT department.

    Basically you're looking at a massive investment in the short term, for significantly reduced productivity in the long run. And all that mostly to save a bit of hardware costs, which are only a fraction of the operating costs for most companies. Just sticking with Windows ends up being the more economical choice for most companies.

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