When Is a Phone Too Old?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. Good morning, Mr. Clark. [00:00:14] Speaker B: Morning. How are you? [00:00:16] Speaker A: Doing all right. Doing all right. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:00:19] Speaker A: We're about to embark on our 30th episode here. Y' all just let you know it's crazy that it's got to that number, but kind of proud of what we've done so far. So let's keep going with it. Well, today I think we're going to be on more on the tech side and less on the. On the care and the. And the emotional side of things. We've got a handful of technical things we want to talk about today. Let's start it off with you, Mr. Clark. Tell us what you've been up to here. [00:00:46] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to start on a journey a little bit, and it's what I'm getting there. I'm going to get to a place. So this all started with me having to make a decision about my mom's iPhone. It's a little long in the tooth, and so I had to end up deciding that it's too old. And then how do I get the data from the phone it's on now to something that can work? And then as I did that, I said, well, I'll just talk about how I transfer things, which is an interesting story I'll get to in a minute. But the first thing I thought is most people, many of our listeners might say, what do you mean to old? What does that mean? So I thought I would start off by saying, when is a phone too old to use? And I thought, I'll do a little research. Come on. [00:01:31] Speaker A: And. [00:01:31] Speaker B: And. And I came with some charts with my AI friends, and it turns out that there's a very different answer for iPhone than there is for Android. And there's a reason for that. You and I are both unabashed. IPhone admirers won't say other people would use worse names than that, but, you know, we're going to say admirers, and we. And I think there's a reason in this chart that. That says why we feel that way. Right. Because when you look at the spot the chart I came up with, iPhones are more durable. They last longer. [00:02:02] Speaker A: They generally last longer. [00:02:04] Speaker B: They can cost more, but they last longer. And so what I noticed is that the typical lifespan for an iPhone is usually five or six years. Now, I know people that are using iPhones that are way older than that. My mother was using an iPhone 7, and the 7 came out 10 years ago. Wow. And for her needs, it was doing what it needed to do. Now the battery was shot. You know, I couldn't update anything on the os. There was a whole lot of things that I would have a problem with. But for her, making calls or receiving calls, it was fine. It stayed plugged up. She only used it in an emergency and referred most of her stuff to her computer anyway. So if you're in a situation like that, I can understand how you get to a point where a phone like that's still useful. Now that I have to do modern things with it, it wasn't useful anymore, so. [00:02:54] Speaker A: So you were forced with a decision here. [00:02:56] Speaker B: I was forced with a decision. And you may be forced with a decision with your loved ones too. So five to seven years is common for iPhones. They usually feel old around year five, and that's usually when support happens. But Apple has been really good about maintaining security updates. As a matter of fact, a security update for this phone, the phone I've replaced for my mom, came out last month. So they're supporting something up to 10 years old, which is admirable. Very admirable. [00:03:21] Speaker A: Yeah, no doubt. [00:03:23] Speaker B: They tend, they tend to perform and decline slower over time, but still work. So there were things it did, took a long time, but it got through them. I know other phones that will just stop doing things. IPhones don't tend to do that. They tend to just slow down. And that, like I said, risk and odd behavior comes along with that too. On the Android side of the house, you can get five years, but it's rare. Most things are one to two years and most it feels old about the third year. According to what some of the research says, it varies widely by brand. So Samsung phones last longer than say, some other cheap Android phone out there. And that makes sense. Some of them vary in price. Samsung phones tend to be in the same price ranges as iPhones for the most part. They often. Their security infrastructure is not as good. And this goes back to probably why you and I are iPhone fans, is that optimizations often depend on carrier assistance. So your carrier has to allow your phone to get an update. I think that's true for, certainly for older Android phones, maybe not so much on newer ones, especially with the. The way Google's reset their formats. But you know, you had to go to your Verizon and Verizon had to allow the update to come to your. To your older phones. And so there's a shorter lifespan there. They usually anywhere from like two to three years less and users upgrade slightly sooner. So there's a new. You know, there are lots of phones in the, in the Android world. And because you get drawn to things like a fold or a better camera or you know, all the things that happen with the Android side of the house, those users usually upgrade sooner. They don't keep phones long. I know most of my people, my Android users have had dozens of phones and I've had in single digits so. And that's pretty common with OP ed. So it's just something to think about. I put, I'll put this chart into the show notes for people to look at. If your phone or your loved one's phone is fitting this area, it's better to do it, to recognize that it needs to be changed sooner than wait till it's 15 years old and there's nothing you can do. [00:05:39] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. I can tell you it's been my experience just from my parents used to use Android phones and I noticed that I would keep them around just as test devices and things like that and I noticed that after a certain amount of time they stopped getting updates and what you ran into was at some point after that the encryption keys for the browsers would, would fail or they would, they would actually expire themselves and you couldn't even do anything on the web with them at that point. And I think that was actually, from what I read was this, that latest iPhone5 update was to change out the encryption keys so that you could still get to the app store and so you, and you could still get to the web to do things. So yeah, I think it's worth keep paying attention to. It's been my experience that I got iPhones cost more but you get a longer period of time that you use them if you're in a state where you can't put that money up front. The Android phones are great alternatives, they do wonderful things but you've got to keep up with them and know that they're going to expire quicker than the iPhones will. [00:06:41] Speaker B: And in that line flagship phones last longer than other kinds of phones. So if you buy the Pro on the Apple side and you buy the high end Samsung, you, you're gonna get a year or so more out of that because of the hardware is usually not bleed. It's almost bleeding edge and not common. So yeah, you gotta watch out for that too. [00:07:02] Speaker A: So I hear you've upgraded your, you're in the process of upgrading your mom's phone. So how did that go? [00:07:06] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a continuing story there. So she's now moved into a different rehab facility and they don't allow, they don't have a phone in the room. And so the last place we had a phone line, so I had to figure out how to get that in. And I'm still working on that. So that story's probably coming for another podcast. But the first thing I had to do was actually do the transfer. And the other thing to understand is it used to be you could go to a carrier and say, here's my old phone, here's my new phone, please transfer these. And there's some carrier error. The one especially the ones that are owned directly by the carrier, that still have the machine and equipment to do that. But there are a growing number of phone, cell phone people who are not related to the carrier directly. They're kind of like, I guess the best word we say outlets. Yeah, they're owned by other people. They have the T Mobile name or the Verizon name, but they're not directly owned by T Mobile or Verizon. They don't typically have that kind of equipment. And they're relying on the new phones, especially the newer phones, to have the ability to draw data from another one. So. And that's true for math. So if you're using the modern operating system, that's 26 or even the one before that, which I believe was. Kept thinking of one off the top of my head, but the one that. [00:08:28] Speaker A: Was like 18, I think. Yeah, something like that. [00:08:30] Speaker B: Yeah, 18,oos 18. They have a utility inside of it that allows you to transfer data from one to another. And it's actually pretty cool. If you bought a new phone or even a new machine, you probably remember having to hold something up to match a kind of particle looking symbol and then match it to it. So it's almost like you're doing a QR code, but it's not quite the same. And then once it links the two of them, you can actually transfer data between phones without even having a cable anymore. It does it over whatever WI fi you have, or it does it even with. With Flash. Well, Bluetooth, not Bluetooth can take long. [00:09:13] Speaker A: Like a peer to peer situation there. [00:09:15] Speaker B: Peer to peer kind of thing. And so I did that with my old iPhone 7 for my mom to an iPhone 13 mini and it worked great. [00:09:23] Speaker A: Cool, Cool. [00:09:23] Speaker B: A couple of things to keep a note. If you're doing it over Bluetooth, it takes a long time. So if you have WI fi that you can use and you put both phones on it, use it. [00:09:34] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes a big difference. I've run into that before too. [00:09:36] Speaker B: And it's not like you take the phone data from One iPhone and you drain it from the other one and then the other phone is unusable. No, you still have to transfer the SIM card. So you may have to go if you don't, if you don't feel comfortable transferring SIM cards from one phone to another, you may have to get your carrier outlet to do that. They can certainly do that. Or if you're using a new enough phone where you have an esim, then you may have to get the carry on ball to actually transfer the ESIM from one to the other. The SIM is what actually makes the phone calls in your phone. But your older phone can double to, to get text messages and email and notifications on it as long as you connect it to WI Fi. So that might be helpful if you're trying to say, what text messages did my mom get? You know, what is, what's, what she's seeing on her phone side of the house. You can monitor it from there. So that's something to keep in mind. You can, that could be something useful. [00:10:31] Speaker A: A very good point. And just in case our user, our listeners don't know this SIM in a, in SIM card stands for subscriber identity module. [00:10:40] Speaker B: Yes. [00:10:41] Speaker A: And in the newer phones, they instead of having physical chip that you move between phones, it can take the data off of that chip and move it in an electronic way over to your, or a digital way over to your new phone. And in fact, like newer iPhones, don't even have a little tray or slot for a physical SIM card anymore. They're all, all electronic all the time. [00:11:00] Speaker B: Yeah, but if you're dealing with an older phone you're transferring from, chances are you're dealing with a sim. [00:11:05] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. [00:11:08] Speaker B: So I have a chart for that that talks about each of the methods for that. There are lots of ways of doing it. Maybe your phone doesn't have a networking capability anymore, maybe that breaks. You can do it via computer. And there's a way to do that and I'll put some instruction in there. And then there are Android alternatives and so I have a chart for that. Very similar in some ways, but having some differences because you'll have to identify a little bit more about that Android phone to figure out which one you want to use. It can do a cable transfer. There is an Android Swiss application depending on what OS you've got and what phone. And so just something to talk about, about how you do that. [00:11:45] Speaker A: The tools are there, the tools are there for you and you know, seek out, if you have to seek out your friendly neighborhood tech Guy or teenager, they can usually help you out. [00:11:54] Speaker B: Usually. Sometimes they're the same. [00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah, sometimes they are for sure. [00:11:58] Speaker B: I walked into the T Mobile store and had them just to see what they had to do to transfer to sim. And it was two teenagers that worked in high school. [00:12:07] Speaker A: There you go, over there. [00:12:08] Speaker B: So it was kind of interesting to. [00:12:10] Speaker A: See digital natives, for sure. [00:12:11] Speaker B: Yeah, this is true. Born digital. [00:12:14] Speaker A: So do you want to talk about what your plan is for your mom's phone? Like how you're going to. [00:12:17] Speaker B: Yeah. So I guess one more thing is how do you get the iPhone 13? There are lots of resellers out there. There's a one I usually use that's very nice to use. It's Gazelle. But there are others out there too that will sell you old phones, even some old carriers who will sell you old phones. [00:12:32] Speaker A: So. [00:12:32] Speaker B: So you got to get a newer iPhone first or you could buy a new phone. And there's lots of. Lots of people don't realize that Apple and Android sell older phones. So you can get an iPhone 14. [00:12:46] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. [00:12:46] Speaker B: Even though that's the latest one is a 17. And those are choices out there. Just watch out for that. My plan with my mom is to get her the phone. I'm setting it up on assistive access. We talked about that earlier. So you can simplify her phone. So it can only do certain things. And I want to start off with calls and add on things as her rehab gets better. [00:13:06] Speaker A: Oh, that's a good idea. Don't overwhelm her with all a lot of new changes all at one time. [00:13:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Couple of things for most, if you're doing this for a rehab or assisted or nursing home or assisted living, a lot of those places want you to name and label your phone. So get a case. Make sure that if you bring a charger in that you find some, you know, a label maker to label that particular item that when most of those rooms are not the kind of things that are locked and you want to make sure that you've got at least something on it that says it belongs to her. [00:13:39] Speaker A: That's a great idea. [00:13:40] Speaker B: So think about that. [00:13:41] Speaker A: And I can throw in there too, if you can. And if you're. If your loved one doesn't mind, get a wildly colored case. Something that's very identifiable. [00:13:49] Speaker B: Yes. [00:13:50] Speaker A: And I would recommend before you leave that place, you take a photo of that phone. So you've got a. So you've got something you could forward to one of the administrators there, say, like, listen, mom lost her phone this is what it looks like. It has her name and stuff on it, but that might have peeled off or something. So here, here's a way you could see it. [00:14:07] Speaker B: Make sure that you put, if you're using iPhones, you can put things under find my and make sure the device is attached to your account. So if you're doing this, it's time for them not to be on their own, plan separately and add their device to them. I think it's up to six in your family so that you can track that phone and see where it is. [00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the best way to go. [00:14:28] Speaker B: So that, that's the best way to do it. [00:14:30] Speaker A: And I know Android has very similar things to some devices, so by all means, yeah, make it identifiable, put your name on it, make it. So it's easy to find through electronic means if possible. And that's, that's about all you can do at that point. You've covered all the mixes for sure. Wow. [00:14:48] Speaker B: So we put some information in show notes and I'll probably add some more things now that we talked a little bit about. Some other ones. Yeah, just to make this a little bit, guys. So that was a lot more involved than I thought. But, but it's really nice to know how you can deal with those ads and if you, if you can pre order some of those things. So if you try to do this in a limited time period, you'll get them all at the same time. Because what I'm running into now is I have to get the phone, wait for it to get here, I have to get the case, wait for it to get here, you know, to figure out how to label things, wait for that to get there. So, you know, think about that time. [00:15:18] Speaker A: There's a lot of, a lot of overlapping things there for sure. And then hopefully in a, in a future episode, you'll kind of give us the, give us the whole how everything transpired and how it worked out and how it's working for you. Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's real good. Well, cool, man. Well, that's good. Thank you for taking us through that. I think that will help a lot of folks and I hope the notes that we put in our resources page and our show notes will help out too. So that'll be good. So I only got a couple of small things today I want to talk about mostly techie, but one was a device that I found this week, or actually that the algorithm found and showed to me is a, is a little, little device called memory board. And I'm Going to put it up on, I'm going to put it up on the screen for people who are in YouTube watching this so you can take a look at it. This is the webpage for Memory Board. And what it really consists of is either a 10.1 inch or a 15.6 inch device that can show photos, it can show memories, it can show lots of things. And the way you get those things on there is, there's an app that you, that you use on your phone and from that app you can send pictures to it. You can share that app with other people and a certain code and like you can have multiple people in your family who can send pictures to it. And this is very similar to what we saw with the frameo that we talked about a while back. But what makes this thing have the superpower is it's not just photos, it's actually text that can show up in big font on this thing to kind of be a reminder for your loved one who may be having memory problems. So the, the, the use case that they talk about is like, in this case, there's a message that popped up on this one that says, hi, dad, I'll be over today at noon. Excited to share. L see you soon. And I believe that you have control over how long that stays on the screen, how prominent it is, the fonts and all that kind of stuff. But the whole point of this is to make it so that it's something that your loved one could look over and see and get a reminder quickly for something that's going to happen that day. So I think it's a pretty cool alternative. It's something worth taking a look at. It is memoryboard.com we are, they're not sponsoring us or anything like that. This is just a cool device that I ran across and thought, you know, this could help some people out. So, yeah, that, that, that's worth looking at. [00:17:51] Speaker B: I think that's a really cool device. And I also noted that the pricing was actually fairly reasonable. Some of the, the boards I've seen do a lot of nice things, but they're very expensive. [00:18:03] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. The 10 inch one on this one is 175. The 15.61 is 275. [00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:10] Speaker A: And the app is free and that kind of thing. So, so that's, that's pretty reasonable. It's, you know, it's not cheap, but it is, but it is reasonable. And again, it's going to take WI fi if you got to have some, some connection to the Internet to pull it off. But once you have that thing connected to the Internet then you could send messages and photos and things like all day long. What another thing I thought was cool about it is you had the ability to tag people. So if you had a photo that had Bobby and Barry in it, you can add the tags for Bobby and Barry and it would be a reminder for that loved one that oh yeah, that guy is Barry. That guy is this Bobby. So even nicer, it would basically caption the individuals in the. In the photos. So pretty select something we're looking at. I'll put a link in our show notes to it so you can, you can go check out the webpage yourself. But memoryboard.com all one word. That's an easy way to get to it. And that brings us to the other last thing I wanted to talk about was something that I ran into this week and actually Bobby just ran into it a few minutes ago. Yeah, is there are some AI I can. Let's call them AI spoofers out there or at least semi nefarious AI folks out there. What it is, is like I went over to, I had to get a new account with Claude AI and for some work things that I'm doing and I signed up and it was all good and it's looking good and I was using it and it was fine. So the next day I come in and I go up to my browser and I type in Claude and I just wasn't thinking and I hit the first link and it had me log in the exact same way that I did before I use a social login. And I got in and I realized very quickly that this was not Claude. Some other AI product had just got me to sign up with them for a free account. But they, you know, they had my email address at that point because I signed in with my Google, my Google credentials. And I was not proud that I let that happen. But I quickly deleted the account for that thing and I made a note that to never just click the top link that pops up when you Google something. And from now on I'm going into Claude and I think you had a very similar. [00:20:08] Speaker B: Exactly the same. I'm setting up AI for this podcast and I go, barry, there's a new, it looks like a new interface here. He goes, no, it isn't. So even, even the ones who have some skill get caught in that. So I quickly found out that I clicked on almost a similar one. It was interesting. I mean I don't think it's, you know, I hesitate to Call them a charlatan. It's just. It's a new. I've seen these AI rappers around that claim to give you. Hey, we'll let you have access to multiple AI engines and things like that, but you have to be careful because I'm just using good old ChatGPT. I don't care whether I have all these other AI things and they wanted me to pay some money. I was actually looking at a screen going, I'm not paying any money for this. [00:20:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:20:54] Speaker B: So, yeah. [00:20:55] Speaker A: And they're grabbing your data on the way in. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Yeah, that's absolutely true. So. Yeah. [00:21:00] Speaker A: All right, well, man. Yeah, that. Those. Those are all kind of like semi nefarious is how I like to refer. [00:21:06] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, it's gotta pay attention. Can't do this stuff at 4 o' clock in the morning and with your eyes half closed and think that. All right, well, it'll just work. [00:21:15] Speaker A: No. All right, well, the one last thing I wanted to say is we've gotten some. Some new hits on our feed. [00:21:21] Speaker B: Ain't that interesting. [00:21:22] Speaker A: Another. Another country, Hong Kong. We've gotten a bunch of. Bunch of hits from Hong Kong. So it looked to me either like somebody is. Somebody is binge listening to all of our stuff, or there's another AI out there who is listening to all of our. [00:21:36] Speaker B: All of our identified us as a proper source for. [00:21:38] Speaker A: For. [00:21:39] Speaker B: For training. [00:21:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Who knows? So I thought it was kind of interesting. But if you are a human out there in Hong Kong and you're listening to this, we. We appreciate you listening and telling your friends about it. And also had some from Germany too. There's a handful from Germany this week. So loving seeing all the international interest and hope to get more as we go along, but it's a short one today, but I hope you guys are all doing good. And this is. This is episode 30, and we're. We're hoping to see you back for 31 before too long. [00:22:06] Speaker B: Before you know, we'll be at 40. How you know, who knows? [00:22:09] Speaker A: All right, y', all, y' all have a good couple of weeks and we'll see you on the next one. [00:22:12] Speaker B: All right, see you guys.