My phone is older than that, and it's working perfectly fine. It's still getting updates, too. No idea what you're talking about or where you're getting your information from, but it's clearly wrong and biased. Makes sense I suppose, when you've spent so much money to buy into the apple ecosystem you just can't help but defend it.
Yet my iPhone is 7 years old, I use it for hours a day, and works as well as the day I bought it. I feel like this whole ordeal is misrepresented or just exaggerated.
Also irrelevant. Most people don't use phones that old.
There is a vibrant official second hand market for iPhones where people sell their phones and the hand me down market. It really helps when you can still use an older device with the newest operating system. Anecdotally, my son is still using my circa 2015 iPhone 6s with the latest OS. According to many benchmarks, it was faster than high end Android phones up until 2018 and is still faster than mid tier Android phones.
Even better, their system apps will also get updated at an even higher frequency during that time transparently, while iOS users have to wait for an OS update and reboot their devices. This is an issue with highly vulnerable apps like iMessage and Safari.
Well fortunately we have statistics about how many iOS users are running the latest OS compared to Android users from the prospective companies. We know that your conjecture is probably false.
True, but I don't mind. I'm happy getting a new phone with better cameras/battery/etc after two or three years. But kudos to Apple for their longevity - my daughter still has a 1st gen iPhone SE (nearly 6 years old) which is still running the latest iOS version, and performs perfectly for her needs.
That's still an 6 year old phone, do you consider this long or short? Generally Apple are extremely good at keeping their devices usable.
I used an iPhone 4 up until late last year, my dad is still using it. Now I upgraded to an iPhone 5s.
The annoying part is generally apps that require a higher OS, which is the app developers fault. But even then you don't always necessarily /need/ the absolute newest version of an app.
What a disingenuous argument. It doesn’t matter when the phone was first introduced, that’s not what makes it “old.” Apple sold (as a first party) the 6S through at least 2018. If you bought it then, it would certainly not be a thing worth celebrating that last year (less than two years later) the phone was still supported.
> Now as far as the iphone 6s being usable - that's my point. It is usable, on the old OS it was designed for.
That phone was running the latest OS when I gave it to my friend last year. I think it might have been running faster thanks to ios 13 (or whichever version improved performance). I believe you when you say your brother's iphone 5s became unusable with subsequent updates. But my 6s kept chugging along just fine, updates and all.
I'm delighted there's solutions for android phones like what you're talking about. This sort of thing is really important - I mean, they're fully fledged computers capable of way more than we're able to use today. Its crazy that people throw them out after a few years. My iphone 12 is faster than my 2016 macbook pro. And I still occasionally code on that laptop. If I could run OSX on my phone and use my laptop as a terminal for it, that would be really sweet. But I can't because Apple doesn't care, and I'm locked out of making changes like that on my own hardware. Using old phones as web / file servers would be fantastic.
Companies like Apple are actively incentivized by the market to make their old products feel worse over time. And for that reason I'm always impressed when occasionally they release an OS update that improves performance across the board.
I guess my take is, Android phones have an awful history of dropping official support for recent devices. I'm delighted the hacker community can and has stepped in to clean up android's mess. Its a shame they have to, but such is life.
I'm sad you can't do that on Apple devices, but one saving grace is that, the 5s aside, apple seems to do a much better job of official software longevity than android. I'm expecting my iphone 12 to last 5-10 years. I do wish the battery lasted all week though - that sounds phenomenal.
haha is this a joke? Apple basically forces you to upgrade your phone every two years, by releasing a mandatory OS update that makes older phones slow as dirt.
I'm talking about my mom's 1957 Ford pickup that still runs great today. I'm talking about the Ostrisizer can opener from the 1970s that my family still uses in their kitchen. 5 years lifetime for a $800 product is not "built to last".
This would be a bigger issue if Apple cut off support for older phones like Android vendors do. The iPhone 6 got OS updates for 5 and a half years. I think that’s enough. It’s actually impressive that Apple created a phone that still works well enough after 7 years that some people continue to use it.
The iPhone 8 was released in autumn 2017, 4.5 years ago. It still gets regular software updates for security and new features and the hardware performs well compared to newer smartphones (Apple chips have been loads better than other mobile chips for a long time so an Apple chip from a year or two ago is often bested only by the newer apple chips in metrics like single-threaded performance or power efficiency).
I think it is mostly silly to accuse apple of planned obsolescence when their hardware functions well (and retains its value) for much longer than the hardware produced by their competitors. It feels to me that paying for one phone 4.5 years ago, and $50 for a battery replacement (all lithium ion batteries degrade over time) that will extend its useful life is a pretty efficient use of money.
In their defense, iPhones haven’t changed much, and IMO that’s a good thing. I still use an iPhone SE and haven’t experienced any issues. I have a much older iPhone which i stopped using a couple years ago but it was the same, and I suspect it might still even support the latest OS and apps
This is one of the things that keeps me with Apple. They're far from perfect in the reliability front, but they will keep supporting the software for much longer than I expect my phone to last. Looks like the oldest phone they still support is the 6s, and typically they support phones for a bit under 7 years after launch, and 5 after discontinuation.
Obviously they get slower and fewer features, but that's better than "Good luck LOL".
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