> 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.
In my experience with iPhones, this was true for older generations where they simply didn't have the processing power for newer OS features. My switch from my iPhone 4 to a 5 was strictly for performance reasons, but I went from my 5 to a 6S just to have something newer with mostly a better camera and touch-id. Performance-wise the phone was still perfectly usable (my brother still uses it). Sure it was a lot faster, and there still are massive leaps in performance with every generation, but these days that performance is mostly used to race to idle for improved battery life.
For the current applications, an iPhone 5S level of performance - a phone which is 4 years old - is still very usable today. That's also why Android flagship phones aren't really in trouble while still struggling to match the performance of a year-old iPhone 6S, and can't even dream of getting near the iPhone 7's performance. They mostly try to compete with stuff people do notice these days: the camera - where they have a lot more success.
I'm on my 3rd iPhone now (3G -> 4S -> 6S) in 12 years. Some people like to upgrade their phone every couple of years, and that's fine - but some don't -- and no Android is useful for these people.
My >5 year old 6S runs the latest-and-greatest OS 13 revision, it is still smooth and useful and does essentially everything I need. It's slower than a new model, has a much lesser camera, and the NFC is useful exclusively for Apple pay. But it's still perfectly useful for me for now.
Usability is subjective, and you may like iOS more, or not - but longevity is objective. If you want to stay secure and able to run latest apps (some of which are becoming essential for some of us - e.g. taxi hailing apps in various jurisdictions), you have to upgrade your Android every 2 years, or your iPhone every 5.
I feel like there was an inflection point a few years ago where smartphones were fast enough that even half a decade of OS updates couldn't cripple it. I distinctively remember all the iphone 3GS/4/4S out there that were unusable after 3-4 years of updates. Whereas iPhone 6s/SE (they use the same chipset) after 5 years of updates is very usable. The difference is day and night.
I don't agree with your comment. The updates Apple has released have made iPhone 6 and 6S unusable. Everyone is complaining about them, they transformed a perfect phone into something that makes you want to upgrade to a new phone.
That's a kind of a… difficult comparison. The 6S was right when Apple shifted from chips that were highly competitive to chips that were ridiculously overpowered.
If you're making a point about 5-year-old hardware being still useful today, I think you need to reference typical 5-year-old hardware. The 6S was weird (albeit in a good way).
I love the openness of android, and the explicit permission to root your phone.
But iphones have amazing longevity. The iphone 5s you mentioned came out in 2013 - which is 8 years ago now. Back then Obama was still in his first term. Maybe it is way too slow to handle the most recent version of iOS, but I'd rather a phone vendor that releases operating system updates for 8 years than a vendor who releases updates for only 2 years (like you get with certain android vendors.)
Last year I replaced my iphone 6s with an iphone 12. The thing that astonishes me is that I didn't need to. After a battery replacement, my 5 year old iphone was still running fine. It still runs the latest OS, and it ran every app I threw at it with aplomb. I really only upgraded it as a personal indulgence. Its still in use by a friend.
I'm absolutely on board with complaints about apple's lock in. I'm disgusted by some of the documents that came out in the epic court case, and I wish you could easily root iphones. But it feels like a stretch to complain about their longevity.
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.
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.
Yea, that's one thing that I envy Apple for. I legitimately still use the iPhone 4S as my daily driver. It had software updates for around 5 years and has iOS 9. Still works as an alarm clock, a music player, and for everything else I use it for.
But it's also important to consider that lack of Android upgrades are also slightly disregardable, as API and app level updates will exist for years, and the majority of older phones support custom ROMs. I understand how that's not the ideal use case for people, just providing my own take on things.
As opposed to tossing an Android device into the landfill because it doesn't get any software support at all after a limited time?
> Six years is an awfully long life span for a mobile device, and certainly puts the 6S in the running for the longest supported phone to date. The iPhone 5S was five years old when it got its last OS update with iOS 12 but wasn’t eligible for iOS 13. On the Android side, Samsung has made recent moves to improve its device longevity by offering four years of security support for some of its phones. But six years of OS updates and security support puts the 6S in an entirely different league.
You know what... I hated the iPhone since the 3G when an update made it so slow to be unusable. Android all the way since. But then I got tired of having to install third party ROMs that vary a lot in quality, crash often, aren't updated anymore... So I bought a used 6S for 150$. Absolutely no regrets. It just works. It's not slow even on the latest iOS. It'll be hard to make me switch back to Android again. Maybe worth considering?
With Apple supporting iPhones with IOS upgrades for years and security updates even longer, you don’t throw away an old iPhone, you either hand it down to someone else or you sell it.
Even an iPhone 6s from 2015 with a new battery is faster than most low end Android phones and it is still fully supported.
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.
I wonder, how many years iPhone 6S will be able to stay relevant. For example iPhone 4S started lagging on iOS 7. While it's certainly usable on iOS 9, it feels as an old and underpowered device.
The iPhone 4s used the A5, an 800 mhz 32-bit processor with 512MB of RAM.
From the review, the iPhone 6s is a 64-bit processor with access to 2GB of RAM. And with the advancements announced at WWDC like App Thinning and LLVM and Swift optimizations, we may be close to the end of seeing any noticeable slowdown in the foreseeable future of these devices.
Responding to this from an iPhone 6 (non-S) purchased in either late 2014 or early 2015. This phone doesn't have the latest and greatest software/hardware (version locked at iOS 12), but it does its job and does it well enough that I haven't had to pay for a phone in 4 years.
It's definitely slowed down and the battery is rated at 76% capacity now, but it can still browse the web, play a handful of games I occasionally open, and handle the few social apps I use.
When it comes to browsing, JS and animation heavy sites can tank performance though, e.g. Apple's product pages and https://blloc.com
I'm only just starting to consider getting a new phone, but am willing to wait till the fall if I can to see if Apple brings back TouchID with the iPhone 12s/13 or whatever they choose to name the upcoming models.
> 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.
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