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.
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.
I just got the newest iPhone and I am struggling to notice any difference in capabilities from my old one. I know they exist on paper but when actually using the device it’s hard to tell.
It feels like it’s been this way for a while. I have friends that have very old smartphones, like 3 or 5 years, but they don’t mind.
If this was 10 years ago their smartphones would be practically unusable from a lack of processing power and battery life.
When I had an iPhone it stopped being usable after 2 years and the last 2 non-Apple phones I had lasted 3 and 4 years and both got replaced on my terms, while still usable. You can't just handwave and declare that Apple doesn't do a worse job than others when the evidence is mounting that it does.
My mother has my old 2015 iPhone 6s. It runs latest iOS 15. Got a new battery at an apple store in under an hour mid last year. Looks like it just came out of the box.
Anecdata: my current iPhone is 4 years old, and the previous one is in my kid's hands (7 years old at this point, and going to be replaced by my current one because lack of future updates on that one).
The same would have been true if your first phones were Android and your most recent ones were iPhone.
In other words, your experience has nothing to do with Android vs iPhone, rather that earlier devices simply didn't have the same amount of resource headroom as more recent ones.
Ever since the iPhone 4S, they've been usable for at least 3 years before expectations catch up to them. And now I think since the 6S and SE—which have the same hardware generation—iPhones can claim to have 4+ year lifetimes.
(At 3.5 years old, the iPhone 6 is still a great device today, particularly with a cheap battery replacement.)
I see your 6 year young iPhone and raise my 14 year old Nokia 1100. I bought it new in 2003 80~ dolla. It still works flawlessly, the battery is fine as well (~31 days of normal use on a single charge or ~16 hours of screen time). If the battery were to fail I could just replace it, no tools required.
Oh, the thing is bulletproof (although it must be taken with a grain of salt, chuck norrys managed to break the glass on his after about three years).
In other words, it does not take an expensive iPhone to last longer than a contract period. Well-built phones can last a long time, much longer than the 10 years which most people seem to consider as normal.
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.
Source? I see lots of people using older iPhones, and even amongst the rich demographic I hang around, no one cares about new iPhones since at least a few years ago.
They simply do not change in a way that affects most people’s lives.
I've had great experiences with Apple products lasting far longer than they should. I won a first gen iPad when it first came out, and six years later I would use it as an umbrella to run down the block to the coffee shop, and it would still work when I got there. My phone is a five year old iPhone SE, I've replaced the battery once and the screen once, and it's running great.
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