4 ms·

Yes, upgrades are always free, and new iOS versions are typically supported on several generations of older devices.

• winteriscoming 9y ago
  Thank you.
  • laingc 9y ago
    As a concrete example, iOS10 runs reasonably well on my spare iPhone 5, which is coming up on 6 years old.
    • rimliu 9y ago
      However iOS11 won't be supported on iPhone 5 and earlier, i.e. on 32bit devices. Only iPhone 5s and up.
      • jclardy 9y ago
        To put it into context - the iPhone 5 was in competition with the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Nexus at launch.
        • lazerpants 9y ago
          And my Galaxy Nexus stopped receiving updates 2-3 years ago despite it being a Google device (mine was also straight from the Google store, so it wasn't the carrier's fault).
          • foepys 9y ago
            Cyanogenmod supported the Galaxy Nexus until 13.0 which is Android 6.0.1. So Google just dropped support after 4.3 (coincidentally the last unsupported version) even though it was absolutely possible to update to newer versions of Android. As a result the Galaxy Nexus doesn't receive security updates from Google and is thus not usable as an online device.
          • Tsiklon 9y ago
            if i recall the galaxy nexus was dropped just after 4.3, if i recall correctly this was due to Texas Instruments dropping out of the modem game no? that was the last android phone I owned.
• 0x0 9y ago
  While iOS upgrades are usually free these days, it hasn't always been like this. According to wikipedia, iOS 1.1.3 was a paid upgrade on iPod Touches (while being a free upgrade for iPhones).
  • k-mcgrady 9y ago
    The first few upgrades were paid for tax reasons as far as I remember. And then after a few versions they were able to change that.
    • kalleboo 9y ago
      And only on the iPod touch, not on the iPhone. They also had to charge for a WiFi update on MacBooks for "accounting reasons".
      • k-mcgrady 9y ago
        Yeah I think the iPhone got around it because people were already paying monthly for it.
  • ahakki 9y ago
    Yes, I remember that. I had to explain this to my parents so that they would let me use their Creditcard for this purpose.
  • JimDabell 9y ago
    iOS updates have always been free. There's no such thing as iOS 1.1.3, only iPhoneOS 1.1.3.
    • MBCook 9y ago
      No they are right. Due to some sort of accounting thing once upon a time on some of the first iPod touches there would be a small fee to upgrade the OS.
      • 9y ago
• mstade 9y ago
  It's worth mentioning though that there's often not a 100% feature parity between iOS versions on different devices, typically because of hardware changes. These even applies to devices of the same generation, e.g. iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus have different camera features since the latter has two cameras and the former just has one. The differences between feature sets on different generations is less and less it seems though. If I recall correctly, the differences between the iPhone 3G and iPhone 4 was bigger than for instance iPhone 6 and iPhone 7. If I weren't such a sucker for new and shiny things, I'd probably buy an iPhone SE today.