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.

  • twinnie@feddit.uk
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    8 hours ago

    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.

    • 4am@lemmy.zip
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      8 hours ago

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

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

        • Korthrun@lemmy.sdf.org
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          5 hours ago
          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".
          
    • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
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      8 hours ago

      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.

      • ByteSorcerer@beehaw.org
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        6 hours 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.

      • 4am@lemmy.zip
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        8 hours ago

        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)