What are you talking about? I can get a €20 Samsung in any place that still sells dumbphones. I got a €30 Nokia 5 years ago and it still works splendid.
This is what drives me insane about the state of modern electronic device quality. It seems the less you pay, the longer it lasts. This is completely the opposite of how it is with traditional goods like furniture, utensils, tools, and so on. Maybe it's over-engineering, maybe it's forced obsolescence, maybe it's something beyond my comprehension. But it stinks.
I think that's partly because by the time those components get to the cheap product they've been out in the wild for several years and improved substantially over time. The same thing happens with cars. Today, buying the top of the line BMW or Mercedes almost guarantees you more electrical/functional issues than a mid or entry level model where the technology is flowing down but been in the market for 3 - 7 + years and significantly improved.
Well, a more expensive phone has way more (hardware) features, and thus way more points of failure. Makes perfect sense to me, though I do understand your position.
Snow Leopard has been praised as the best OS X release for focusing almost solely on bug fixing. I wish releases such as this were more common both in soft- and in hardware.
> Well, a more expensive phone has way more (hardware) features, and thus way more points of failure.
That's an excellent point. Nokia of old was often associated with build quality, but the more advanced you got, the more stuff would break. Their cheaper Symbian phones tended to last forever, but the N-series, especially the N900, had more hardware issues than their cheaper brethren. Given that the N900 was basically a full fledged computer in a phone form factor there were a lot of potential points of failure, the biggest of which was the faulty USB port.
> Snow Leopard has been praised as the best OS X release for focusing almost solely on bug fixing.
That's the last version of OS X I have used on a daily basis, and from what I've heard I missed out on a ton of new bugs introduced in Lion and up. Of course my aging Mac mini CoreDuo, even with a Core2Duo upgrade, is no longer fast enough for daily use and won't take a newer OS anyway. I'm not buying another Mac for a long time (if ever) as I can't justify the expense, but given what I've heard about Yosemite's stability maybe that's a good thing. OpenBSD runs great on my current self-built system so I don't really have a need for OS X anymore.
I really enjoyed using Snow Leopard, skipped the Lion and Moutain Goat upgrades but did go with Mavericks, had no problems whatsoever, plus Yosemite has been fine for me, if not a teeny bit sluggish for me. But what widespread stability issues have you heard of? I haven't had any problems.
I am still on Mavericks at work, thank goodness for the fix for multiple screens as Mountain Lion would be useless!
Maybe cheap phones last longer because you use them less. In my experience is is usually the moving parts that break (switches and sockets). I want a device designed to work without any physical switches.
