I’m not saying that you’re not making a valid point, but I would like to point out that you can still install the community-supported whited00r [1] on that 3G a

I’m not saying that you’re not making a valid point, but I would like to point out that you can still install the community-supported whited00r [1] on that 3G and still get some life out of it. Sure it’s probably breaking all sorts of copyright law to do so, and it’s not ideal, but the fact that almost no one on HN seems to know about it, and Apple has ignored it for years, underscores how little demand there is to keep 10 year old devices running. Meanwhile I have a 5 year old 5S that I use while traveling which runs iOS 12.1 swimmingly, and keeping older devices running longer was a major topic discussed by Lisa Jackson at the last Apple keynote. I fully expect that this old phone will run iOS 13 as well, and I expect that current iOS devices will have increasingly longer usable lifespans than 5-6 years. There isn’t anything close in terms of manufacturer support on the Android side of things. In terms of keeping phone hardware useful through an alternative OS, you may also want to keep an eye on PostmarketOS [2]. [1] http://www.whited00r.com/features?lang=en http://www.whited00r.com/features?lang=en [2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Main_Page https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Main_Page