I think most iPhone users buy the latest model every year, and that those who consistently use older or secondhand devices, wouldn't buy new often enough to affect Apple’s sales anyway.
Actually, continually providing upgrades to older iPhones is a wonderful way to push new hardware sales: the upgrades significantly degrade the user experience because the hardware isn't as capable.
I wouldn't worry too much. People keep buying iPhones because they love them, and developers use their platform because of the money and reach. The article is negative, but the two targets for these changes (developers, users) will benefit largely in the time to come.
LOL it would not.
People buy iPhones on average every three year. The yearly upgraders are just a vocal minority.
I’ve had moderately tech savvy people move from an iPhone X to an iPhone 14 and literally describe the jump as “mindblowing”.
All is relative, but HN users on average want absolutes, and repeatedly fail to understand how they’re part of a mostly irrelevant opinion bubble when it comes to being relevant as average consumers.
Should they persist in this, if I don't replace my current iPhone with an alternative, I will definitely not buy an iPhone for my next phone. It's a gross overreach and I'd be too worried about false positives.
I agree, I think this is what they meant. A feature for the people who have an iPhone 8 or 9 who say “why would I upgrade, my current phone is fine”.
If you can use this tech to make a feature that they really want you can trigger upgrades that otherwise may not happen for many more years. We’ve seen that before with things like when Apple first released a bigger phone. That triggered a LOT of “early” upgrades that wouldn’t have otherwise happened.
There’s a decent enough chance this will happen. The iPhone 13’s are actually thicker than the 12 and have a bigger better. Battery life is pretty bonkers good on the 13s (not that the 12’s were bad or anything).
Another cynicism that comes to mind - this won't only help staying ahead of competitors, but also perhaps persuading owners of older iphones to get a newer device, even though they were fully satisfied up to this point.
I recently made a 4 generation upgrade - from an iPhone 11 to an iPhone 15. It was remarkable how un-exciting it was. It used to be so much fun to get a new phone. Apple has a problem.
This is the first year I haven't upgraded my phone in at least 2 years since the early 2000s. My iPhone 13 Pro is good enough and there's nothing compelling me to upgrade. Apple will have to do a lot better than that to convince me to upgrade my phone, and they haven't come up with a good reason yet.
>I'd say the big plus is that you can safely target only the newer releases without a problem, because power users just rush out and buy the newest iPhone when it comes out.
Even more than that, the adoption rate for users on existing devices is just incredible.
So new devices with the newest version of the OS sell like hotcakes, existing users upgrade like crazy, and Apple pushes new version quite far backwards across those existing devices to boot.
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