21 ms·

iPhone 6S getting iOS 14 is like the Galaxy S6 getting Android 11

325 points by finphil 6y ago

samename 6y ago
It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early. Now, they're still supporting the iPhone 6S, a phone from 5 years ago. Did Apple change their policy due to criticism, or have they honed their tech to improve support for older devices?
- Infinitesimus 6y ago
  Apple beats Android in the smartphone space but Windows has a much stronger desktop support record
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Apple wants to meet environmental aims and paint themselves green - something I fully support for that matter - and they have at least for consumers the expectation of quality and craftsmanship, not "crap that's obsolete in two years". Windows has a different reason why they're so focused on desktop BC: lock-in. Had Windows not taken care of BC over decades and a provable track record of that from the beginning of the DOS era, enterprises with tens of thousands of licenses would have fled the ship (and funded WINE with ludicrous amounts of money, probably). On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable.
    - muststopmyths 6y ago
      >On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable. Yep, a fatal mistake, made by leadership brought in from outside Windows. Pretty much wrote the epitaph for Windows with that move. signed: bitter Windows Phone user.
      - mschuster91 6y ago
        It was that way even at the Windows CE times. Truly a shame, MS and Blackberry essentially owned that market, and they let it slip away. Now both are fucked in that space.
  - Angostura 6y ago
    I think that's fair. Big Sur support is limited to 2014 iMacs and later, which is a shame because my late 2012 iMac is absolutely fine for home and business use still.
    - OldHand2018 6y ago
      Intel released Haswell in 2013. Big Sur probably requires features introduced with it, such as AVX2, new low power states, increased GPU execution units, etc.
- harpratap 6y ago
  > It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early When exactly did that happen? The first iPhone received 3 major updates, more than most Android phones even today.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  It's not that Apple is particularly good at supporting older devices, it's that Android vendors are catastrophically bad across the board. Apple tends to drop support when some hardware feature or limitation doesn't play well with the new OS. For instance, the iPhone 6 only has 1GB of RAM.
  - foepys 6y ago
    My Nokia 6 from 2017 is still receiving security updates. The update cycle switched from 1 month to every 3 months after the device reached the 3 year update guarantee but it's still acknowledgedby the manufacturer. Nokia phones are in my opinion way too underrepresented on the market for the support they give.
- coder1001 6y ago
  Apple makes money from services, more devices supporting the latest features == more potential money.
- s3r3nity 6y ago
  I think it's the latter, but it is also an under-reported aspect of Tim Cook's regime: a focus on sustainability. They have a whole page on their site about their efforts [1], including how they had to invent new materials and processes to achieve some environmentalist goals. [1]https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/
- selykg 6y ago
  This is just a theory, but I think a fair bit changed with this as their custom A series chips improved. It was easier to support devices further back because they started to have such a commanding lead in performance, which gives some extra room to keep improving the OS without it slowing down like it used to do.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    It's not likely to be a pure "performance" thing. The 6S, according to wikipedia [1], is the oldest phone containing an A9 chip, which has an image processing unit, a coprocessor that can handle Siri voice commands, and an NVMe storage controller. It is also the minimum requirement for ARKit. I doubt very much that Apple is being arbitrary in their support cutoff for phones. If it's capable of the features they build into the OS, it gets support. If I had to make a guess, the next cutoff point (iOS 15?) is going to be a chip having the Bionic Neural Engine, which would make the iPhone 8 the oldest supported phone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9
    - selykg 6y ago
      I mean that's fair, but I think in general, the advancements they've made to the A series chips over the years has been them a lot easier to continue to support for longer periods of time. Hopefully we'll see Mac's with longer lifecycles and macOS support as well. I think the Mac side is a tad short at the moment.
      - beagle3 6y ago
        My early 2013 MacBook Pro just got Catalina. Way more than I expected when I bought it.
        selykg 6y ago
        That's actually not that bad honestly. Nice!
- skywhopper 6y ago
  I don't think you have your history right on this one. At least not if it's about support for older iPhones. Apple has always exceeded typical industry practice in how long it supported old mobile hardware.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    Yeah, my experience across their device lines is that, for build quality reasons alone, their products outlive any competitors: I have a ‘08 MacBook Pro that still basically works, except it can’t connect to my WiFi network and 2GB of memory is basically useless today.
- basch 6y ago
  Or hardware improvements have become more incremental and less cataclysmic. From a software and developer side, it makes sense to drop 32 bit support early. It's less radically different architectures to target. It means they can guarantee the performance of the os and apps. But as processors got good enough to handle most things, the need to drop the slow ones, and the slow ones holding back the software evolution is minimized.
ComputerGuru 6y ago
It’s crazy to think supporting a five year old device is now considered ground-breaking. Windows did (does?) officially support devices fifteen years old. Desktop developers are only now starting to release apps that don’t support Windows XP, released twenty years ago. From a consumer perspective, it’s crazy how often we’re expected to replace mobile devices (even though the story now isn’t as crazy as it was five years ago) and how much we shell out for them (even putting aside the monthly bills associated with them). Not to mention a PC was shared by the family and now every kid needs their own phone. Great for the economy but oh so wasteful.
- nly 6y ago
  Visual Studio 2019 still comes with the option to install build tools and SDKs to target Windows XP.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I know you can still target iOS 9 with Xcode 12.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Also, the tasks we're accomplishing on our phones have not fundamentally changed over the past five years. (The five years before that, sure, but things have slowed down.) If my phone is performing the same actions as when I bought it, why should I have to buy a new one to get security updates? If nothing else, it's clearly bad for the planet. And, for that matter—and this is where iPhones do miss the mark—why does my phone not perform those actions as well as it did when new? That we have even faster chips nowadays shouldn't make the old ones slower.
  - core-questions 6y ago
    > why should I have to buy a new one to get security updates? Who is writing those security updates? How do they get paid?
    - 6y ago
the_rara_avis 6y ago
I'm unsure whether I'll ever forgive Google/Verizon for only offering 2 years of support for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. After all the promises of "this is our flagship phone and we'll absolutely support it!" and then... only 2 years? I've my issues with Apple like anyone else, but at least my phone is supported for a reasonable amount of time - 5 years or so?
DrBazza 6y ago
Companies don't backwardly support old phones so they can ship new ones. Planned obsolescence. However, Apple rightly foster "brand loyalty" (awful phrase), by doing exactly the opposite. And with the knowledge that people sell phones second hand, thus increasing Apple's market share, and future customers. It sounds like Samsung could learn a lesson or two. A phone does have a shelf life though (4g, 5g...), but it's not as short as these companies would like you to believe.
- rescbr 6y ago
  UMTS (3G) is still up and running in many locations, sometimes HSDPA (3.5G) is faster than congested/low signal LTE and it still is totally adequate even for video streaming. Those are early 2000's technologies which telcos are upgrading from to increase subscriber density, but on the customer optics, they are mostly equivalent to 4G.
dehrmann 6y ago
It's still not even close to the oldest PC Windows 10 supports. I've found Windows 10 to be happy on ~any PC with more than one core, 4+ GB of RAM, and, most important, an SSD.
- jokoon 6y ago
  I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense. RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer (after accessing remote systems over the network). It usually becomes the bottleneck after increasing RAM for most users, in my experience. The bus that transfers data from your hard drive to the CPU is much faster than what many spinning disks can actually manage. Address that, and many performance issues go away and you approach the essential limit of your system (bus speeds). Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.
    - jokoon 6y ago
      > Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer I guess the SSD is also slower than the RAM, so generally, storage is always slower. Ethernet/wifi is generally as fast as a HDD, in order of magnitude. There are many possible ways to avoid accessing the HDD, by buffering things and storing them on ram as often as possible. If HDD worked well on windows 7/xp/linux desktops, there are no credible arguments why it would not work properly on windows 10. Again I would say the problem is Wirth's law, which here easily benefits SSD. At one point, for an OS like windows is becoming so much complex that it becomes just impossible to optimize things appropriately for something else than a HDD. Backward compatibility and hardware compatibility might be one source of the problem, but I'm sure there are other things at play. I'm suspecting that in the end, the hardware people and people at microsoft decided to abandon the idea of having an OS that works well on a HDD, because the SSD industry would obviously benefit from this. Wirth's law has completely replaced Moore's law, in my view. I say this over and over, but when climate problems will cause economic problems, computing will return to an era of lightweight software and hardware.
JohnTHaller 6y ago
If you bought an iPhone 6S Plus 128GB at launch, it cost you $949. $189.80 per supported year so far. If you bought a Pixel 1 128GB at launch, it cost you $749. $249.67 per supported year over 3 years. (The iPhone 6S Plus has same 1080p resolution as the standard size Pixel phone, which is why I use them as the base, but for folks wondering...) If you bought a Pixel 1 XL 128GB at launch with the higher resolution screen, it cost you $849. $283 per supported year over 3 years.
- huzaif 6y ago
  I like that the updates are offered. I wonder how usable these older devices are after updates. I have an iPhone 8 which hasn't been usable since the last update. Most functions work but the performance has taken a nose dive. Some apps crash randomly. I would not use that device as my daily phone.
  - snazz 6y ago
    I'm guessing the iPhone 8 has some other issue (full storage?). Mine has had great performance and no app crashes since I bought it.
  - laken 6y ago
    I've still been using an iPhone 8 Plus as a daily driver since launch. Right after updates, or after not being used for a bit, there's some indexing that slows down the phone a little, but that recovers pretty quickly with some additional use. I'm even running the iOS 14 Developer beta on my 8 Plus right now and it still runs like a dream.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    My near-new iPhone 7 is snappy with latest iOS. Check battery health?
    - huzaif 6y ago
      Thanks for all the hints. So it seems it's the device itself and not the update.
compiler-guy 6y ago
The thing that holds most android manufacturers back is that their chipset vendors don't update their drivers for newer kernels. So the next version of android comes along and requires a newer kernel, and the phones built around these chipsets can't be updated. The chipset folks see no new revenue for forward-porting their hacked up kernels and drivers, and therefore aren't interested in updating. That is the problem the Android ecosystem needs to solve. Because Apple controls the full stack, they have no problem forward porting any custom changes that they need. It's all the same codebase.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  The postmarketOS project is trying to port these old Android devices to run on a mainline kernel, wherever feasible. It's non-trivial work, especially if you expect to submit patches upstream - I can see OEM SoC manufacturers running into issues with that. The whole Device Tree arrangement was intended to simplify this work, but a lot of hardware still comes with plenty of weird, one-off, entirely undocumented hacks. Sometimes it's a wonder how these devices can even boot at all!
- on_and_off 6y ago
  Another problem is that most users don't know what Android is and even less what version they are using. If anything, a new update changing anything in the UX might be met with negativity. So OEMs have even less reasons to care sadly.
- aequitas 6y ago
  Wasn't Project Treble created a few years back to solve this problem? I'm wondering what the current state of it is, because I haven't seen the effects of it yet.
  - robotnikman 6y ago
    It made it easier for manufacturers to create updates. Doesn't mean that they will release update for longer and take advantage of it though
- 6y ago
AdmiralAsshat 6y ago
I'd sure appreciate it if Android phones got five years of support. Right now my GS8+ is relegated to quarterly security updates only, and even that is a pretty big achievement in the Android world. It's probably time that I upgraded it, but nothing new even appeals to me anymore due to nearly all phones ditching the headphone jack, even the phablets. The "newest" phone I can find that ticks all the boxes I want (wireless charging, headphone jack, expandable memory slot) would have to be a regular S10, which is over a year old at this point.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
Sigh .... as an Android user this really hurts.
- evanlivingston 6y ago
  Does it though? Most android users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most Apple users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most people I know don't update their OS because then they have to update a bunch of other stuff too.
  - t-writescode 6y ago
    The defining reason for my original switch back to iOS from Android was lack of confirmation that a security update would be released to my phone. It absolutely impacts the reasoning for some iPhone and Android users. edit: added words to the last sentence
    - evanlivingston 6y ago
      I think it's a very tiny number of user though. Most users don't care about a security update and many actively avoid them. A phone updating all the time is seen by many to be a bug, not a feature. If my car was constantly nagging me to take it into the shop to be optimized, I'd be pretty annoyed. If it was taking itself to the shop and coming back telling me I now needed to update my seat belts in order to work with it's newest updates I'd be further annoyed. I switched from iPhone to Android because I end up breaking my phones after about two years and I can't be paying more per annum for a phone than for a car. I need an email client, web client, maps and sometimes a camera for taking a reference photo. It's astounding to me that the cost of meeting those needs seems to be increasing over time instead of decreasing. We've seen over time how Apple uses software updates to aggressively force new hardware purchases. The latest OS doesn't support version X of the software, and more often than not your device doesn't support OS version Z so open up thy wallet and get the latest hardware. This is precisely the reason people are terrified of updating their software. It goes from working to not working. This impacts my reasoning for NOT buying Apple hardware. EDIT: You know what, I change my mind. This gains some respect from me for Apple. I hate phones in general and I'm just grumpy.
philshem 6y ago
iPhone SE (1st gen) will get iOS 14, too. “Be still, my heart.”
- jeffbee 6y ago
  What's interesting is the iPadOS supports A8-based iPads like the Air 2 and the Mini 4, while the new iOS does not support any A8-generation devices like the 6/6+.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    I believe the iOS 13 cutoff was mostly a function of onboard RAM. (iPhone 6/6+ had a fairly anemic amount for what was being expected of them.)
- at_a_remove 6y ago
  This is lovely news. I am rather new to the smartphone world, I hardly use my iPhone SE, which was about discontinued when I first bought it. I like the smallness of it, primarily.
tibbydudeza 6y ago
The worst part of Android which Apple said screw you to was that each Samsung phone and others has to released with a firmware bundle specific to a carrier for each country (Orange/Vodacom etc ...).
jayd16 6y ago
Has anyone done a comparison to see when iOS 14 features were introduced into Android? I believe picture in picture works on the S7 (which was introduced 4 months after the 6S). Normally I'd feel a bit bummed about missing features and long term support is a problem but there wasn't much that was new to Android.
drewg123 6y ago
That, and supported battery replacement from the oem is why I recently switched from Google Nexus and Pixel phones to an iPhone 11.
- dddddaviddddd 6y ago
  I called Motorola support once to ask about a battery replacement for a Moto G (3rd gen). They told me it was impossible and effectively that I should buy a new phone.
  - evanlivingston 6y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer-SNN5965A-Replacement-Motorola/dp/B07QW1KLBW/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=moto+G3+battery&qid=1593028123&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer-SNN5965A-Replaceme...
acd 6y ago
You can still install Linux, FreeBSD and FreeDOS on an old PC.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  And if phones used UEFI (or openfirmware or whatever), you could do just as well there (subject to driver support, but that's varied on PC, too). The absurd lack of standards in phone bootloaders and device trees is killing us.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    You will probably be interested in Librem 5 or Pinephone.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Given that I own a Pinephone, you would guess correctly:D I'm having trouble finding out whether this truly helps though; do either of those have a bootloader/firmware that provides device tree info to the booted OS, or are they still relying on the booted system to have its own device tree to describe the hardware? EDIT: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage-model.html#history https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage-mode... implies that u-boot can probably feed a device tree file to Linux at boot time? EDIT2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree says, "As an example, Das U-Boot and kexec can pass a device tree when launching a new operating system.", so yeah it looks like that would work! Sweet:)
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
One of the central tenets of Apple's marketing since forever is that price != value, and this is the manifestation of that idea. You might be paying more for an iOS device, but unlike Android ones, it maintains its value for years on.
LaSombra 6y ago
That is the single reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't want to pay US$800 for a phone that will stop being supported after 2, 3 years.
ogre_codes 6y ago
When I first bought an iPhone (iPhone 5, I was a slow learner), Android's track record with updates was terrible but Google/ Samsung/ etc said it was going to get better and promises were made. I was skeptical and bought the iPhone. Every year since then, it seems like more promises and efforts get made by the Android crowd but it's never gotten more than marginally better and only for the top end phones. There are other reasons I don't use Android, but this was very distinctly the single reason I bought iOS initially and I've never regretted it.
maxwellito 6y ago
I'll be honest. It's true that it makes Android look a bit bad, at least the ecosystem. But this only matter in the iOS world, where the the whole park always move to the latest version, and you're required to get the latest version. Because on android, you can still download apps from the PlayStore for an Android KitKat. On iOS, if you're 2 versions behind, your device is getting pointless.
- guessbest 6y ago
  The App Store still supports older iOS builds.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    I have a first generation iPad and the App Store will still allow me to download compatible apps. The Kindle app still allows me to download purchased books.
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  I think the problem with those devices is more that security updates for the OS itself aren't released anymore, not that new apps don't work. My mom doesn't have a lot of apps installed on her phone, just something like maps, the local transit provider app and whatsapp. She sometimes browses the web. I actually installed LineageOS on her phone a while ago, but I think even that isn't updated anymore (for her particular model).
- scarface74 6y ago
  Apple has supported downloading the “last compatible version” for years. I wiped a first generation iPad and as of last year, I could reload Netflix, Hulu, Plex, Google Drive, and a few other apps still worked. It last saw an update in 2012.
ajkdhcb2 6y ago
The ability to install a custom OS like LineageOS again gives the advantage back to android
- zanny 6y ago
  Seriously, the Note 3 and S4 have los support for Android 10. 6 year old devices. Its not the exact same as vendors supporting it though since its los devs backporting Android 10 to 5 year obsolete kernels but it is the power of free software at work.
- aruggirello 6y ago
  Spot on! Coincidence: my Samsung S6 is on LineageOS 17.1 since May - that is, Android 10 - and despite being an unofficial build, I've got everything covered - save a few minor glitches. Before that, it was on the last official update (7.0).
- bserge 6y ago
  Yeah, but that's something most people will never try.
adrianvincent 6y ago
I much prefer Android over iOS, but this is the only reason I switched to an iPhone 11 last year.
supernova87a 6y ago
And yet, cue the armchair commentators about how Apple tries to hobble your hardware to make you buy a replacement.
- cooper12 6y ago
  I hear this conspiracy theory so often from non-technical people. I think what's going on is that obviously this isn't being done intentionally, but rather each new release is mainly written for and performance tested on the newest Apple devices (not to mention obvious hardware differences like CPU instructions/speed/cache size/memory). Apple might test that everything works, but they're not on these older devices 24/7 that they'll notice slight degradations. Also, devices are not uniform. On some devices the flash memory has been written to countless times and degraded. Other people are running tons of crapware or have the storage full to the brim. Finally there's always going to be some psychological suggestion going on: if I tell you to look for a certain thing, you'll be more likely to notice it, real or not.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
Even better iPad Air2 was released a year earlier than iPhone 6S and it's getting iPadOS 14; it's like Galaxy Tab 3 Lite which was released with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and never got even a single OS upgrade getting Android 11.
jdofaz 6y ago
Google updated the original Pixel to Android 10, which was nice because that was beyond stated major updates period. That was followed by a single security update before it was abandoned. I don't understand why they wouldn't keep issuing security updates when they already did the hard part of the major update.
Yetanfou 6y ago
The Android update model is very different from the iOS model since many Android vendors only support their devices for a short time, often no more than 2-3 years where Apple provides updates for a much longer period. This is offset by the fact that the core of Android is free software, on top of which you can - but do not have to - install Google-proprietary parts. I choose not to install those parts since I prefer to keep my data (mostly) to myself. When Apple says "that's all, folks" they mean it - the device will no longer get updates. When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device. I'm using a Galaxy SIII - using it right now in fact - with Android 9 more or less because I have not updated it to v10 (the current version of Android) yet. I might upgrade it, then again I might not, the thing works fine on v9. For reference, this phone was launched in 2012 (3 years before the iPhone 6s) with Android 4.0 and got official updates to 4.4. It then got updates through Cyanogenmod, later through LineageOS. It is still updated OTA (as in 'over the air', like when it was new). Once Android 11 comes around it'll probably be ported to the SIII, the limiting factor tends to be driver support. [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-android-10-samsung-galaxy-s-ii-galaxy-note-3/ https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-android-10-samsung...
- asutekku 6y ago
  Vast majority of the users are not going to get the update through an unofficial channel by downloading a custom rom. The problem are the manufacturers, not that you can’t get updates at all.
- mh8h 6y ago
  When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device. The problem is that a tiny percentage of users actually do that. It leaves the rest vulnerable to any security issues that are found after the last update.
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    That is a matter of user education comparable - but not equal - to what is keeping 'the year or Linux on the desktop' always somewhere in the future. The difference is that LineageOS (et al) is more or less identical to (the better) vendor-supplied distributions while Linux is a different operating system, not just a different distribution. Once installed something like LineageOS is just as easy to keep up to date as vendor-supplied distributions.
davemtl 6y ago
Wait.. Apple support a 5 year old phone? Why the heck am I still using an Android device? I have a Galaxy S8, while I'm still lucky enough to get the occasional security update, I won't be getting the latest Android release (at least officially), although the CPU in it is probably perfectly more than capable of running Android 11. I have been considering getting a new phone and I keep eyeing up the iPhone 11 Pro, mostly because of the longevity of available software updates. Secondly, with an Apple I'm not subject to waiting for the carrier to push out the update.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mixmastamyk 6y ago
Nice work Apple. My 6S is having problems†, but I don't want to let it go. Headphone jack and lack of biometric scanning. † Battery is shot and lightning connector bent from their impractical dock I fancied in years past. Very difficult now to get the perfect angle to allow charging.
- brunoluiz 6y ago
  I guess the jacks need a clean-up after sometime. My lightning jack was not holding the charging cable anymore and I was super desperate to lose access to the phone during Holidays. I went to an Apple Store and they just cleaned-up for me (walk-in). I bet the same applies to the headphone jack ;)
  - mixmastamyk 6y ago
    My phone's port is bent from use of these docks: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightning-dock-white https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightnin... It looks good but after a few years destroys the port due to lack of support.
- surfpel 6y ago
  Ifixit has guides to replace those parts (battery-yes, port-probably). Lots of performance issues can also be solved with a battery change, which is only $30 at an Apple store (although you might want to do the battery first for warranty reasons)
- Humdeee 6y ago
  Also still have my 6S and have been a heavy user with it for years. It's also my main testing HW for iOS apps I maintain. Other than a decreased battery life, it's still kicking great.
bad_user 6y ago
It's true, Apple products age very well. I don't like iOS much, I hate its restrictions, but this is the number one reason for why I like Apple's products. I'm a previous Android user, my iPhone 8 is almost 3 years old and I'm thinking of keeping it for another year or 2. I also have 2 Macbook Pro laptops at home from 2012 and 2015 respectively and I actually prefer them over the 2019 model from work. And a first generation iPad Pro (2015) that's better than what I see on the market for Android. Was just thinking of getting a Samsung tablet, but this is making me reconsider. All of my Apple products still work and are kept up to date.
agurk 6y ago
Almost five years ago I got a OnePlus Two when it was released and about the same time my then work gave me a new iPhone 6 (unrequested by me, and when they appeared they told me I had to take it). I still use that OP2 as my daily driver, now with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10, the current version) installed on it. It's not blazing fast but the battery is at 80% capacity and it otherwise works well (and has a 3.5mm jack). This obviously is the enthusiast option, but the first OnePlus had Cyanogenmod as the factory installed OS on there. If their relationship had continued and Cyanogen hadn't imploded it's quite possible that the OP2 would have the latest build on there officially as LineageOS is what Cyanogen became. Unfortunately there are no builds of 17 for the OP1. That iPhone of the same vintage? I gladly gave it back when it was stuck on the then just-outdated iOS 12 and there wasn't much of an obvious future for it.
RMPR 6y ago
Those updates have a price though [0], Android phones sure have their issues, but I never heard something about Google slowing down Pixel phones after updates. Moreover, if your Android device is not supported anymore, you can still opt for LineageOS, with iPhones you're pretty much fucked up. 0: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Since you keep posting that link, I don't think it's the smoking gun that you think it is. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
  - RMPR 6y ago
    I'm well aware of this, but I guess my point was: it's not just black and white like many people wanted to picture it in this thread, I use an iPhone 6S myself.
greatgib 6y ago
I think that no one in the comments recalled that the last times that older iPhones got the last updates, they became slower with reduced artificially reduced battery life. So somehow, despite getting updates, old iPhones were becoming less functional and users would get the feeling that they have to change it for a shiny new recent more powerful iPhone!
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  The battery life wasn't artificially reduced, it was naturally reduced by years of use and charge cycles. Apple should have done a better job of communicating why they slowed down the systems, and perhaps made it an option rather than just doing it, but having had devices that shutdown because of the battery (while it still had a charge, but was not capable of providing power to the CPU running at full-speed) I'd have preferred slow downs to random shutdowns. The latter makes the device unreliable and unusable, the former makes it reliable and maybe unusable for some applications. It's also rectifiable by replacing the battery (which I've done on several iPhones myself, and used stores for others just for the convenience). That last part is what Apple should have communicated to people. We did that with my dad's old iPhone 6 and it went from "slow but usable" to "like brand new and snappy". EDIT: A note, the device I had that did that to me was a laptop with a spinning disk hard drive. When the battery started failing the laptop was fine until I hit the GPU (which was often, I was in grad school and doing a lot of graphics programming). Plugged in there were no issue, but on battery it'd bring the system down when I ran anything that made the GPU and CPU run close to full-speed. Fortunately I was able to get the data off, unfortunately I'd pretty well fucked the system before I realized why it was happening (so it happened a few times) and ended up just replacing the whole laptop rather than just getting a new battery.
  - greatgib 6y ago
    Indeed, you are right, they did not reduce the battery level but reduced the performances after the update. So before the update, your phone was reasonably fast. A new phone/os version comes out, you have an automatic update, and then your phone will be slower to do the tasks that it was doing well before. So, as an user what will be you conclusion? If you are not even aware that performance slow down is due to the update, you will think "my phone become older, I need to buy a more recent one!". For memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate "Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone's Performance" https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iphone-kill-switch-ios-degrade-cripple-performance-battery/#7dfd1fd116a8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iph... And to be remembered, they were fined for that by the French regulator: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724
mataug 6y ago
This is one of the many reasons why I switched to the iPhone after 7yrs on Android, and I'm also getting my mother a iPhone as soon as possible. My mom is used to android phones, its complex but she's understood the basic design language and can navigate the phone easily. Whenever she needs help though, its a massive struggle for me to do tech support over phone / video call. Each android phone is different, and we've never had the same phone, and we both get frustrated because the menus and the steps needed to modify settings is different. With an iPhone though, regardless of the iPhone model, I can send her a screen recording that she can easily replicate on her phone. Consistency is extremely valuable for a non power-user, and only iPhones offer such consistency over multiple generations of iPhones, and iOS updates. Yes there are changes, such as the switch from TouchId to FaceId in iPhone X, but they are incremental, as compared to the confusing experience of switching from a Samsung device to a OnePlus or a Xiaomi device.
projektfu 6y ago
I found a big difference in application and app store support for older versions. You need to keep updating the iPhone to the newest version of iOS because if you don't, all the apps will be undownloadable. When they stop updating it, it's toast. I had an Android Gingerbread (2.3) phone for a while when KitKat was out, and I had lots of software to download. Then I updated to one on Marshmallow (6.0) and it had plenty of software and probably still does. I'm not sure how much software is still available that works on Nougat (7.0.1) on the S6 all the way through Android 10, but I was really disappointed that I couldn't even keep the iPhone 4S alive as a toy because all the old software was gone. However, it's lame that Google drops security updates so early.
- unix_fan 6y ago
  The minimum iOS version supported for most apps is iOS 11,sometimes even iOS 10.
  - projektfu 6y ago
    Yes but the old versions disappear more quickly. So if they decide to upgrade to requiring 13, they don’t leave an old version available.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      Yes you can. Apple will allow you to download the “last compatible version” going back to iOS 5.
intpx 6y ago
I can confirm, that even on beta 1, it runs really, really, really well on the 6s. I wonder if they rewrote all of the UI in swift or just really cleaned up the libraries because the perceived speed, that thing makes a end user device feel fast because it quickly moves you from on screen to the next when you command it to, is improved over 13.5. I can also confirm that it runs really well on an ipad (5 i think) with the same generation SoC, though I have seen more bugs with things like widgets. In my limited testing, all of the apps I run often work, i love that it tells me when an app is trying to use network discovery and allow me to block it. I might install it on my daily use phone by beta 2 its so good.
nicwolff 6y ago
This makes the old 4" SE still viable too! Apple was still selling them until late last year – it's a fantastic little phone (with an obsolete camera) – and you can get them refurbished for about $100. Highly recommended if you want to hold and use your phone with one hand comfortably, or forget if it's in your pocket!
- Tepix 6y ago
  Seconded. I made sure to get an iPhone SE as my work phone instead of the iPhone XR. Love the design and the form factor.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It's been running iOS 14 quite well. Such a great phone!
fsflover 6y ago
If you think that a smartphone should be supported for much longer than 5 years, consider Librem 5 [0] or Pinephone [1]. [0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ [1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/
- Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
  Knowing basically nothing about either of these, I'm super curious as to if either company will exist in 5 years. I've set myself a reminder and am looking forward to the result.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    You do not need those companies for the software support. You only need upstreamed drivers for Linux kernel for the hardware. This is what these companies are doing and Android doesn’t. Similarly, my laptop from 10+ years ago works flawlessly With Debian 10.
    - Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
      Sure, but it's nice to have an active company for repairs, replacement parts, support, etc. It'll certainly keep running without a company backing it, but there have been so many similar initiative, I'm personally curious how this one will turn out.
jordache 6y ago
I have a beater iphone 5s around to stream podcast and music while I'm doing yard work. Works great! pretty smooth OS UI.. Can't say the same about any Andorid phones from the same era. Looking forward to this new era of Apple ARM chips in desktops!
lostgame 6y ago
I often compose music on the go in GarageBand on my iPhone. I own several pairs of extremely high quality and highly accurate headphones, and; no - I don’t want to carry an adapter around for headphones that prevents charging while headphones are plugged in. That’s obviously logistically a no go for anyone performing live with an iPad. I’d never want to rely on battery power live. Even if I hadn’t invested in my audio gear and headphones specifically so much, the latency on Bluetooth has made it a non option forever - unless I buy one of the select few W1 certified Beats units, which then is just an additional expense. Apple does not currently offer, and it seems that they have no interest in offering, a phone that I will buy in the future. I couldn’t believe they pulled the headphone jack on the SE2, it seemed like the last ‘fuck you’ to the audio content creators they’ve claimed to support forever. iOS 14 support on iPhone 6S means Apple keeps me as an iPhone user for maybe another year. I will probably be downgrading to a dumbphone and an old, flash-drive modded iPod gen 3 or 4.
Tepix 6y ago
Little-known fact: As part of the "Android Enterprise Recommended" program, some Android devices (such as rugged devices) receive FIVE years of updates. Unfortunately they are all very expensive and most of these devices are not standard phones.
- neurostimulant 6y ago
  Hmm, according to this page[1], google pixel 1 has the android enterprise recommended seal, but it seem to be out of support after 3 years. Last guaranteed security update is October 2019 according to this page[2]. [1] https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/15 https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/1... [2] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en
  - Tepix 6y ago
    Pixel 1 is not a rugged device
    - neurostimulant 6y ago
      Yeah, but which one of those rugged devices that has five years of support? The page doesn't provide that information, and if we use the "android enterprise recommended" filter, it listed pixel phones that obviously don't have 5 years of support. Or are all those devices marked as "rugged" actually got 5 years of support? I tried going to some of the listed rugged device manufacturers website and they don't seem to indicate how long they'll going to support their device (unless the information is hidden somewhere).
      - Tepix 6y ago
        It was mentioned here: https://9to5google.com/2018/09/05/google-android-enterprise-recommended-rugged/ https://9to5google.com/2018/09/05/google-android-enterprise-...
nullsmack 6y ago
The fact that Samsung won't even provide Android 10 for my Note8 should be criminal, even by their policy of only updating their devices for two "major" revisions. They shipped it with Android 7 when Android 8 was already out.
brailsafe 6y ago
> Even with a phone that old, Apple is still sending it the latest iOS 14 features, which will allow people still holding onto that device to use it for at least another year. I'm running an iPad 3 with iOS9 and a OnePlus 3 running Android 9 that I bought off Craigslist for $200. I know it's like driving a 20 year old Corolla, but does lack of the latest OS make a device unusable? If my current car worked I wouldn't buy a new one to get auto distance cruise control. I haven't found features on smartphones very compelling probably since 2015. Fingerprint sensor is nice, more speed is nice, but the complexity of what I use it for isn't that significant.
makecheck 6y ago
It’s been surprisingly easy to support various Apple devices. I think the notch and home-screen-bar layouts were a bit tricky but they did have APIs in place and it was OK. The biggest issue really was the 32-bit to 64-bit hardware transition; I remember seeing weird graphical issues because floating-point results were slightly different with float vs. double.
e40 6y ago
One of the reasons I left Android for iOS was just this issue. 2 years of updates, then you're expected to purchase a new device. My iPhone 11 I expect to have for many years. Hopefully 5+.
JoshuaRLi 6y ago
Love how my old Galaxy S6 is stuck on ancient Android 7. And it's the verizon version too, so I can't unlock the bootloader. Perfectly capable device, what a shame. Switched to iPhone SE a while ago because of this.
metta2uall 6y ago
Given the harm caused by cybercrime, plus the increased police work, governments really ought to make a minimum duration of security updates mandatory.. Phones are already required to meet a raft of various regulations.
jp0d 6y ago
I used Android phones for several years before switching to an iPhone 8 two years ago. I think the major reason why manufacturers don't care to provide updates is because they don't expect those phones to last more than 2 years. It's not a joke. I've had some mid-range to expensive Android phones (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) and none of them lasted more 2 years. Whereas my wife's 6 year old iPhone 5s is still working! How do you explain that? Every Apple devices I've owned so far has been incredibly reliable and held their value really well. My wife's 6 year old Macbook air with 4 gigs of RAM still works fine and runs the latest Mac OS! I don't think I can get that level of support from any other vendor.
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Size is important and that is something Apple should have deal with from day one. It miss the big phone time and now it miss the small phone time. Really want to have a small one.

325 points by finphil 6y ago

It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early. Now, they're still supporting the iPhone 6S, a phone from 5 years ago. Did Apple change their policy due to criticism, or have they honed their tech to improve support for older devices?

Infinitesimus 6y ago
Apple beats Android in the smartphone space but Windows has a much stronger desktop support record
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Apple wants to meet environmental aims and paint themselves green - something I fully support for that matter - and they have at least for consumers the expectation of quality and craftsmanship, not "crap that's obsolete in two years". Windows has a different reason why they're so focused on desktop BC: lock-in. Had Windows not taken care of BC over decades and a provable track record of that from the beginning of the DOS era, enterprises with tens of thousands of licenses would have fled the ship (and funded WINE with ludicrous amounts of money, probably). On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable.
  - muststopmyths 6y ago
    >On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable. Yep, a fatal mistake, made by leadership brought in from outside Windows. Pretty much wrote the epitaph for Windows with that move. signed: bitter Windows Phone user.
    - mschuster91 6y ago
      It was that way even at the Windows CE times. Truly a shame, MS and Blackberry essentially owned that market, and they let it slip away. Now both are fucked in that space.
- Angostura 6y ago
  I think that's fair. Big Sur support is limited to 2014 iMacs and later, which is a shame because my late 2012 iMac is absolutely fine for home and business use still.
  - OldHand2018 6y ago
    Intel released Haswell in 2013. Big Sur probably requires features introduced with it, such as AVX2, new low power states, increased GPU execution units, etc.
harpratap 6y ago
> It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early When exactly did that happen? The first iPhone received 3 major updates, more than most Android phones even today.
gridlockd 6y ago
It's not that Apple is particularly good at supporting older devices, it's that Android vendors are catastrophically bad across the board. Apple tends to drop support when some hardware feature or limitation doesn't play well with the new OS. For instance, the iPhone 6 only has 1GB of RAM.
- foepys 6y ago
  My Nokia 6 from 2017 is still receiving security updates. The update cycle switched from 1 month to every 3 months after the device reached the 3 year update guarantee but it's still acknowledgedby the manufacturer. Nokia phones are in my opinion way too underrepresented on the market for the support they give.
coder1001 6y ago
Apple makes money from services, more devices supporting the latest features == more potential money.
s3r3nity 6y ago
I think it's the latter, but it is also an under-reported aspect of Tim Cook's regime: a focus on sustainability. They have a whole page on their site about their efforts [1], including how they had to invent new materials and processes to achieve some environmentalist goals. [1]https://www.apple.com/environment/ https://www.apple.com/environment/
selykg 6y ago
This is just a theory, but I think a fair bit changed with this as their custom A series chips improved. It was easier to support devices further back because they started to have such a commanding lead in performance, which gives some extra room to keep improving the OS without it slowing down like it used to do.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  It's not likely to be a pure "performance" thing. The 6S, according to wikipedia [1], is the oldest phone containing an A9 chip, which has an image processing unit, a coprocessor that can handle Siri voice commands, and an NVMe storage controller. It is also the minimum requirement for ARKit. I doubt very much that Apple is being arbitrary in their support cutoff for phones. If it's capable of the features they build into the OS, it gets support. If I had to make a guess, the next cutoff point (iOS 15?) is going to be a chip having the Bionic Neural Engine, which would make the iPhone 8 the oldest supported phone. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9
  - selykg 6y ago
    I mean that's fair, but I think in general, the advancements they've made to the A series chips over the years has been them a lot easier to continue to support for longer periods of time. Hopefully we'll see Mac's with longer lifecycles and macOS support as well. I think the Mac side is a tad short at the moment.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      My early 2013 MacBook Pro just got Catalina. Way more than I expected when I bought it.
      - selykg 6y ago
        That's actually not that bad honestly. Nice!
skywhopper 6y ago
I don't think you have your history right on this one. At least not if it's about support for older iPhones. Apple has always exceeded typical industry practice in how long it supported old mobile hardware.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, my experience across their device lines is that, for build quality reasons alone, their products outlive any competitors: I have a ‘08 MacBook Pro that still basically works, except it can’t connect to my WiFi network and 2GB of memory is basically useless today.
basch 6y ago
Or hardware improvements have become more incremental and less cataclysmic. From a software and developer side, it makes sense to drop 32 bit support early. It's less radically different architectures to target. It means they can guarantee the performance of the os and apps. But as processors got good enough to handle most things, the need to drop the slow ones, and the slow ones holding back the software evolution is minimized.

ComputerGuru 6y ago

It’s crazy to think supporting a five year old device is now considered ground-breaking. Windows did (does?) officially support devices fifteen years old. Desktop developers are only now starting to release apps that don’t support Windows XP, released twenty years ago. From a consumer perspective, it’s crazy how often we’re expected to replace mobile devices (even though the story now isn’t as crazy as it was five years ago) and how much we shell out for them (even putting aside the monthly bills associated with them). Not to mention a PC was shared by the family and now every kid needs their own phone. Great for the economy but oh so wasteful.

nly 6y ago
Visual Studio 2019 still comes with the option to install build tools and SDKs to target Windows XP.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I know you can still target iOS 9 with Xcode 12.
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Also, the tasks we're accomplishing on our phones have not fundamentally changed over the past five years. (The five years before that, sure, but things have slowed down.) If my phone is performing the same actions as when I bought it, why should I have to buy a new one to get security updates? If nothing else, it's clearly bad for the planet. And, for that matter—and this is where iPhones do miss the mark—why does my phone not perform those actions as well as it did when new? That we have even faster chips nowadays shouldn't make the old ones slower.
- core-questions 6y ago
  > why should I have to buy a new one to get security updates? Who is writing those security updates? How do they get paid?
  - 6y ago

the_rara_avis 6y ago

I'm unsure whether I'll ever forgive Google/Verizon for only offering 2 years of support for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. After all the promises of "this is our flagship phone and we'll absolutely support it!" and then... only 2 years? I've my issues with Apple like anyone else, but at least my phone is supported for a reasonable amount of time - 5 years or so?

DrBazza 6y ago

Companies don't backwardly support old phones so they can ship new ones. Planned obsolescence. However, Apple rightly foster "brand loyalty" (awful phrase), by doing exactly the opposite. And with the knowledge that people sell phones second hand, thus increasing Apple's market share, and future customers. It sounds like Samsung could learn a lesson or two. A phone does have a shelf life though (4g, 5g...), but it's not as short as these companies would like you to believe.

rescbr 6y ago
UMTS (3G) is still up and running in many locations, sometimes HSDPA (3.5G) is faster than congested/low signal LTE and it still is totally adequate even for video streaming. Those are early 2000's technologies which telcos are upgrading from to increase subscriber density, but on the customer optics, they are mostly equivalent to 4G.

dehrmann 6y ago

It's still not even close to the oldest PC Windows 10 supports. I've found Windows 10 to be happy on ~any PC with more than one core, 4+ GB of RAM, and, most important, an SSD.

jokoon 6y ago
I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense. RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer (after accessing remote systems over the network). It usually becomes the bottleneck after increasing RAM for most users, in my experience. The bus that transfers data from your hard drive to the CPU is much faster than what many spinning disks can actually manage. Address that, and many performance issues go away and you approach the essential limit of your system (bus speeds). Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.
  - jokoon 6y ago
    > Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer I guess the SSD is also slower than the RAM, so generally, storage is always slower. Ethernet/wifi is generally as fast as a HDD, in order of magnitude. There are many possible ways to avoid accessing the HDD, by buffering things and storing them on ram as often as possible. If HDD worked well on windows 7/xp/linux desktops, there are no credible arguments why it would not work properly on windows 10. Again I would say the problem is Wirth's law, which here easily benefits SSD. At one point, for an OS like windows is becoming so much complex that it becomes just impossible to optimize things appropriately for something else than a HDD. Backward compatibility and hardware compatibility might be one source of the problem, but I'm sure there are other things at play. I'm suspecting that in the end, the hardware people and people at microsoft decided to abandon the idea of having an OS that works well on a HDD, because the SSD industry would obviously benefit from this. Wirth's law has completely replaced Moore's law, in my view. I say this over and over, but when climate problems will cause economic problems, computing will return to an era of lightweight software and hardware.

JohnTHaller 6y ago

If you bought an iPhone 6S Plus 128GB at launch, it cost you $949. $189.80 per supported year so far. If you bought a Pixel 1 128GB at launch, it cost you $749. $249.67 per supported year over 3 years. (The iPhone 6S Plus has same 1080p resolution as the standard size Pixel phone, which is why I use them as the base, but for folks wondering...) If you bought a Pixel 1 XL 128GB at launch with the higher resolution screen, it cost you $849. $283 per supported year over 3 years.

huzaif 6y ago
I like that the updates are offered. I wonder how usable these older devices are after updates. I have an iPhone 8 which hasn't been usable since the last update. Most functions work but the performance has taken a nose dive. Some apps crash randomly. I would not use that device as my daily phone.
- snazz 6y ago
  I'm guessing the iPhone 8 has some other issue (full storage?). Mine has had great performance and no app crashes since I bought it.
- laken 6y ago
  I've still been using an iPhone 8 Plus as a daily driver since launch. Right after updates, or after not being used for a bit, there's some indexing that slows down the phone a little, but that recovers pretty quickly with some additional use. I'm even running the iOS 14 Developer beta on my 8 Plus right now and it still runs like a dream.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  My near-new iPhone 7 is snappy with latest iOS. Check battery health?
  - huzaif 6y ago
    Thanks for all the hints. So it seems it's the device itself and not the update.

compiler-guy 6y ago

The thing that holds most android manufacturers back is that their chipset vendors don't update their drivers for newer kernels. So the next version of android comes along and requires a newer kernel, and the phones built around these chipsets can't be updated. The chipset folks see no new revenue for forward-porting their hacked up kernels and drivers, and therefore aren't interested in updating. That is the problem the Android ecosystem needs to solve. Because Apple controls the full stack, they have no problem forward porting any custom changes that they need. It's all the same codebase.

zozbot234 6y ago
The postmarketOS project is trying to port these old Android devices to run on a mainline kernel, wherever feasible. It's non-trivial work, especially if you expect to submit patches upstream - I can see OEM SoC manufacturers running into issues with that. The whole Device Tree arrangement was intended to simplify this work, but a lot of hardware still comes with plenty of weird, one-off, entirely undocumented hacks. Sometimes it's a wonder how these devices can even boot at all!
on_and_off 6y ago
Another problem is that most users don't know what Android is and even less what version they are using. If anything, a new update changing anything in the UX might be met with negativity. So OEMs have even less reasons to care sadly.
aequitas 6y ago
Wasn't Project Treble created a few years back to solve this problem? I'm wondering what the current state of it is, because I haven't seen the effects of it yet.
- robotnikman 6y ago
  It made it easier for manufacturers to create updates. Doesn't mean that they will release update for longer and take advantage of it though
6y ago

AdmiralAsshat 6y ago

I'd sure appreciate it if Android phones got five years of support. Right now my GS8+ is relegated to quarterly security updates only, and even that is a pretty big achievement in the Android world. It's probably time that I upgraded it, but nothing new even appeals to me anymore due to nearly all phones ditching the headphone jack, even the phablets. The "newest" phone I can find that ticks all the boxes I want (wireless charging, headphone jack, expandable memory slot) would have to be a regular S10, which is over a year old at this point.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

Sigh .... as an Android user this really hurts.

evanlivingston 6y ago
Does it though? Most android users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most Apple users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most people I know don't update their OS because then they have to update a bunch of other stuff too.
- t-writescode 6y ago
  The defining reason for my original switch back to iOS from Android was lack of confirmation that a security update would be released to my phone. It absolutely impacts the reasoning for some iPhone and Android users. edit: added words to the last sentence
  - evanlivingston 6y ago
    I think it's a very tiny number of user though. Most users don't care about a security update and many actively avoid them. A phone updating all the time is seen by many to be a bug, not a feature. If my car was constantly nagging me to take it into the shop to be optimized, I'd be pretty annoyed. If it was taking itself to the shop and coming back telling me I now needed to update my seat belts in order to work with it's newest updates I'd be further annoyed. I switched from iPhone to Android because I end up breaking my phones after about two years and I can't be paying more per annum for a phone than for a car. I need an email client, web client, maps and sometimes a camera for taking a reference photo. It's astounding to me that the cost of meeting those needs seems to be increasing over time instead of decreasing. We've seen over time how Apple uses software updates to aggressively force new hardware purchases. The latest OS doesn't support version X of the software, and more often than not your device doesn't support OS version Z so open up thy wallet and get the latest hardware. This is precisely the reason people are terrified of updating their software. It goes from working to not working. This impacts my reasoning for NOT buying Apple hardware. EDIT: You know what, I change my mind. This gains some respect from me for Apple. I hate phones in general and I'm just grumpy.

philshem 6y ago

iPhone SE (1st gen) will get iOS 14, too. “Be still, my heart.”

jeffbee 6y ago
What's interesting is the iPadOS supports A8-based iPads like the Air 2 and the Mini 4, while the new iOS does not support any A8-generation devices like the 6/6+.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I believe the iOS 13 cutoff was mostly a function of onboard RAM. (iPhone 6/6+ had a fairly anemic amount for what was being expected of them.)
at_a_remove 6y ago
This is lovely news. I am rather new to the smartphone world, I hardly use my iPhone SE, which was about discontinued when I first bought it. I like the smallness of it, primarily.

tibbydudeza 6y ago

The worst part of Android which Apple said screw you to was that each Samsung phone and others has to released with a firmware bundle specific to a carrier for each country (Orange/Vodacom etc ...).

jayd16 6y ago

Has anyone done a comparison to see when iOS 14 features were introduced into Android? I believe picture in picture works on the S7 (which was introduced 4 months after the 6S). Normally I'd feel a bit bummed about missing features and long term support is a problem but there wasn't much that was new to Android.

drewg123 6y ago

That, and supported battery replacement from the oem is why I recently switched from Google Nexus and Pixel phones to an iPhone 11.

dddddaviddddd 6y ago
I called Motorola support once to ask about a battery replacement for a Moto G (3rd gen). They told me it was impossible and effectively that I should buy a new phone.
- evanlivingston 6y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer-SNN5965A-Replacement-Motorola/dp/B07QW1KLBW/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=moto+G3+battery&qid=1593028123&sr=8-3 https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer-SNN5965A-Replaceme...

acd 6y ago

You can still install Linux, FreeBSD and FreeDOS on an old PC.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
And if phones used UEFI (or openfirmware or whatever), you could do just as well there (subject to driver support, but that's varied on PC, too). The absurd lack of standards in phone bootloaders and device trees is killing us.
- fsflover 6y ago
  You will probably be interested in Librem 5 or Pinephone.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Given that I own a Pinephone, you would guess correctly:D I'm having trouble finding out whether this truly helps though; do either of those have a bootloader/firmware that provides device tree info to the booted OS, or are they still relying on the booted system to have its own device tree to describe the hardware? EDIT: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage-model.html#history https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage-mode... implies that u-boot can probably feed a device tree file to Linux at boot time? EDIT2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree says, "As an example, Das U-Boot and kexec can pass a device tree when launching a new operating system.", so yeah it looks like that would work! Sweet:)

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

One of the central tenets of Apple's marketing since forever is that price != value, and this is the manifestation of that idea. You might be paying more for an iOS device, but unlike Android ones, it maintains its value for years on.

LaSombra 6y ago

That is the single reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't want to pay US$800 for a phone that will stop being supported after 2, 3 years.

ogre_codes 6y ago

When I first bought an iPhone (iPhone 5, I was a slow learner), Android's track record with updates was terrible but Google/ Samsung/ etc said it was going to get better and promises were made. I was skeptical and bought the iPhone. Every year since then, it seems like more promises and efforts get made by the Android crowd but it's never gotten more than marginally better and only for the top end phones. There are other reasons I don't use Android, but this was very distinctly the single reason I bought iOS initially and I've never regretted it.

maxwellito 6y ago

I'll be honest. It's true that it makes Android look a bit bad, at least the ecosystem. But this only matter in the iOS world, where the the whole park always move to the latest version, and you're required to get the latest version. Because on android, you can still download apps from the PlayStore for an Android KitKat. On iOS, if you're 2 versions behind, your device is getting pointless.

guessbest 6y ago
The App Store still supports older iOS builds.
- OldHand2018 6y ago
  I have a first generation iPad and the App Store will still allow me to download compatible apps. The Kindle app still allows me to download purchased books.
vladvasiliu 6y ago
I think the problem with those devices is more that security updates for the OS itself aren't released anymore, not that new apps don't work. My mom doesn't have a lot of apps installed on her phone, just something like maps, the local transit provider app and whatsapp. She sometimes browses the web. I actually installed LineageOS on her phone a while ago, but I think even that isn't updated anymore (for her particular model).
scarface74 6y ago
Apple has supported downloading the “last compatible version” for years. I wiped a first generation iPad and as of last year, I could reload Netflix, Hulu, Plex, Google Drive, and a few other apps still worked. It last saw an update in 2012.

ajkdhcb2 6y ago

The ability to install a custom OS like LineageOS again gives the advantage back to android

zanny 6y ago
Seriously, the Note 3 and S4 have los support for Android 10. 6 year old devices. Its not the exact same as vendors supporting it though since its los devs backporting Android 10 to 5 year obsolete kernels but it is the power of free software at work.
aruggirello 6y ago
Spot on! Coincidence: my Samsung S6 is on LineageOS 17.1 since May - that is, Android 10 - and despite being an unofficial build, I've got everything covered - save a few minor glitches. Before that, it was on the last official update (7.0).
bserge 6y ago
Yeah, but that's something most people will never try.

adrianvincent 6y ago

I much prefer Android over iOS, but this is the only reason I switched to an iPhone 11 last year.

supernova87a 6y ago

And yet, cue the armchair commentators about how Apple tries to hobble your hardware to make you buy a replacement.

cooper12 6y ago
I hear this conspiracy theory so often from non-technical people. I think what's going on is that obviously this isn't being done intentionally, but rather each new release is mainly written for and performance tested on the newest Apple devices (not to mention obvious hardware differences like CPU instructions/speed/cache size/memory). Apple might test that everything works, but they're not on these older devices 24/7 that they'll notice slight degradations. Also, devices are not uniform. On some devices the flash memory has been written to countless times and degraded. Other people are running tons of crapware or have the storage full to the brim. Finally there's always going to be some psychological suggestion going on: if I tell you to look for a certain thing, you'll be more likely to notice it, real or not.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

Even better iPad Air2 was released a year earlier than iPhone 6S and it's getting iPadOS 14; it's like Galaxy Tab 3 Lite which was released with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and never got even a single OS upgrade getting Android 11.

jdofaz 6y ago

Google updated the original Pixel to Android 10, which was nice because that was beyond stated major updates period. That was followed by a single security update before it was abandoned. I don't understand why they wouldn't keep issuing security updates when they already did the hard part of the major update.

Yetanfou 6y ago

The Android update model is very different from the iOS model since many Android vendors only support their devices for a short time, often no more than 2-3 years where Apple provides updates for a much longer period. This is offset by the fact that the core of Android is free software, on top of which you can - but do not have to - install Google-proprietary parts. I choose not to install those parts since I prefer to keep my data (mostly) to myself. When Apple says "that's all, folks" they mean it - the device will no longer get updates. When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device. I'm using a Galaxy SIII - using it right now in fact - with Android 9 more or less because I have not updated it to v10 (the current version of Android) yet. I might upgrade it, then again I might not, the thing works fine on v9. For reference, this phone was launched in 2012 (3 years before the iPhone 6s) with Android 4.0 and got official updates to 4.4. It then got updates through Cyanogenmod, later through LineageOS. It is still updated OTA (as in 'over the air', like when it was new). Once Android 11 comes around it'll probably be ported to the SIII, the limiting factor tends to be driver support. [1] https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-android-10-samsung-galaxy-s-ii-galaxy-note-3/ https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-android-10-samsung...

asutekku 6y ago
Vast majority of the users are not going to get the update through an unofficial channel by downloading a custom rom. The problem are the manufacturers, not that you can’t get updates at all.
mh8h 6y ago
When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device. The problem is that a tiny percentage of users actually do that. It leaves the rest vulnerable to any security issues that are found after the last update.
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  That is a matter of user education comparable - but not equal - to what is keeping 'the year or Linux on the desktop' always somewhere in the future. The difference is that LineageOS (et al) is more or less identical to (the better) vendor-supplied distributions while Linux is a different operating system, not just a different distribution. Once installed something like LineageOS is just as easy to keep up to date as vendor-supplied distributions.

davemtl 6y ago

Wait.. Apple support a 5 year old phone? Why the heck am I still using an Android device? I have a Galaxy S8, while I'm still lucky enough to get the occasional security update, I won't be getting the latest Android release (at least officially), although the CPU in it is probably perfectly more than capable of running Android 11. I have been considering getting a new phone and I keep eyeing up the iPhone 11 Pro, mostly because of the longevity of available software updates. Secondly, with an Apple I'm not subject to waiting for the carrier to push out the update.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

mixmastamyk 6y ago

Nice work Apple. My 6S is having problems†, but I don't want to let it go. Headphone jack and lack of biometric scanning. † Battery is shot and lightning connector bent from their impractical dock I fancied in years past. Very difficult now to get the perfect angle to allow charging.

brunoluiz 6y ago
I guess the jacks need a clean-up after sometime. My lightning jack was not holding the charging cable anymore and I was super desperate to lose access to the phone during Holidays. I went to an Apple Store and they just cleaned-up for me (walk-in). I bet the same applies to the headphone jack ;)
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  My phone's port is bent from use of these docks: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightning-dock-white https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightnin... It looks good but after a few years destroys the port due to lack of support.
surfpel 6y ago
Ifixit has guides to replace those parts (battery-yes, port-probably). Lots of performance issues can also be solved with a battery change, which is only $30 at an Apple store (although you might want to do the battery first for warranty reasons)
Humdeee 6y ago
Also still have my 6S and have been a heavy user with it for years. It's also my main testing HW for iOS apps I maintain. Other than a decreased battery life, it's still kicking great.

bad_user 6y ago

It's true, Apple products age very well. I don't like iOS much, I hate its restrictions, but this is the number one reason for why I like Apple's products. I'm a previous Android user, my iPhone 8 is almost 3 years old and I'm thinking of keeping it for another year or 2. I also have 2 Macbook Pro laptops at home from 2012 and 2015 respectively and I actually prefer them over the 2019 model from work. And a first generation iPad Pro (2015) that's better than what I see on the market for Android. Was just thinking of getting a Samsung tablet, but this is making me reconsider. All of my Apple products still work and are kept up to date.

agurk 6y ago

Almost five years ago I got a OnePlus Two when it was released and about the same time my then work gave me a new iPhone 6 (unrequested by me, and when they appeared they told me I had to take it). I still use that OP2 as my daily driver, now with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10, the current version) installed on it. It's not blazing fast but the battery is at 80% capacity and it otherwise works well (and has a 3.5mm jack). This obviously is the enthusiast option, but the first OnePlus had Cyanogenmod as the factory installed OS on there. If their relationship had continued and Cyanogen hadn't imploded it's quite possible that the OP2 would have the latest build on there officially as LineageOS is what Cyanogen became. Unfortunately there are no builds of 17 for the OP1. That iPhone of the same vintage? I gladly gave it back when it was stuck on the then just-outdated iOS 12 and there wasn't much of an obvious future for it.

RMPR 6y ago

Those updates have a price though [0], Android phones sure have their issues, but I never heard something about Google slowing down Pixel phones after updates. Moreover, if your Android device is not supported anymore, you can still opt for LineageOS, with iPhones you're pretty much fucked up. 0: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Since you keep posting that link, I don't think it's the smoking gun that you think it is. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387
- RMPR 6y ago
  I'm well aware of this, but I guess my point was: it's not just black and white like many people wanted to picture it in this thread, I use an iPhone 6S myself.

greatgib 6y ago

I think that no one in the comments recalled that the last times that older iPhones got the last updates, they became slower with reduced artificially reduced battery life. So somehow, despite getting updates, old iPhones were becoming less functional and users would get the feeling that they have to change it for a shiny new recent more powerful iPhone!

Jtsummers 6y ago
The battery life wasn't artificially reduced, it was naturally reduced by years of use and charge cycles. Apple should have done a better job of communicating why they slowed down the systems, and perhaps made it an option rather than just doing it, but having had devices that shutdown because of the battery (while it still had a charge, but was not capable of providing power to the CPU running at full-speed) I'd have preferred slow downs to random shutdowns. The latter makes the device unreliable and unusable, the former makes it reliable and maybe unusable for some applications. It's also rectifiable by replacing the battery (which I've done on several iPhones myself, and used stores for others just for the convenience). That last part is what Apple should have communicated to people. We did that with my dad's old iPhone 6 and it went from "slow but usable" to "like brand new and snappy". EDIT: A note, the device I had that did that to me was a laptop with a spinning disk hard drive. When the battery started failing the laptop was fine until I hit the GPU (which was often, I was in grad school and doing a lot of graphics programming). Plugged in there were no issue, but on battery it'd bring the system down when I ran anything that made the GPU and CPU run close to full-speed. Fortunately I was able to get the data off, unfortunately I'd pretty well fucked the system before I realized why it was happening (so it happened a few times) and ended up just replacing the whole laptop rather than just getting a new battery.
- greatgib 6y ago
  Indeed, you are right, they did not reduce the battery level but reduced the performances after the update. So before the update, your phone was reasonably fast. A new phone/os version comes out, you have an automatic update, and then your phone will be slower to do the tasks that it was doing well before. So, as an user what will be you conclusion? If you are not even aware that performance slow down is due to the update, you will think "my phone become older, I need to buy a more recent one!". For memory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate "Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone's Performance" https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iphone-kill-switch-ios-degrade-cripple-performance-battery/#7dfd1fd116a8 https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iph... And to be remembered, they were fined for that by the French regulator: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

mataug 6y ago

This is one of the many reasons why I switched to the iPhone after 7yrs on Android, and I'm also getting my mother a iPhone as soon as possible. My mom is used to android phones, its complex but she's understood the basic design language and can navigate the phone easily. Whenever she needs help though, its a massive struggle for me to do tech support over phone / video call. Each android phone is different, and we've never had the same phone, and we both get frustrated because the menus and the steps needed to modify settings is different. With an iPhone though, regardless of the iPhone model, I can send her a screen recording that she can easily replicate on her phone. Consistency is extremely valuable for a non power-user, and only iPhones offer such consistency over multiple generations of iPhones, and iOS updates. Yes there are changes, such as the switch from TouchId to FaceId in iPhone X, but they are incremental, as compared to the confusing experience of switching from a Samsung device to a OnePlus or a Xiaomi device.

projektfu 6y ago

I found a big difference in application and app store support for older versions. You need to keep updating the iPhone to the newest version of iOS because if you don't, all the apps will be undownloadable. When they stop updating it, it's toast. I had an Android Gingerbread (2.3) phone for a while when KitKat was out, and I had lots of software to download. Then I updated to one on Marshmallow (6.0) and it had plenty of software and probably still does. I'm not sure how much software is still available that works on Nougat (7.0.1) on the S6 all the way through Android 10, but I was really disappointed that I couldn't even keep the iPhone 4S alive as a toy because all the old software was gone. However, it's lame that Google drops security updates so early.

unix_fan 6y ago
The minimum iOS version supported for most apps is iOS 11,sometimes even iOS 10.
- projektfu 6y ago
  Yes but the old versions disappear more quickly. So if they decide to upgrade to requiring 13, they don’t leave an old version available.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    Yes you can. Apple will allow you to download the “last compatible version” going back to iOS 5.

intpx 6y ago

I can confirm, that even on beta 1, it runs really, really, really well on the 6s. I wonder if they rewrote all of the UI in swift or just really cleaned up the libraries because the perceived speed, that thing makes a end user device feel fast because it quickly moves you from on screen to the next when you command it to, is improved over 13.5. I can also confirm that it runs really well on an ipad (5 i think) with the same generation SoC, though I have seen more bugs with things like widgets. In my limited testing, all of the apps I run often work, i love that it tells me when an app is trying to use network discovery and allow me to block it. I might install it on my daily use phone by beta 2 its so good.

nicwolff 6y ago

This makes the old 4" SE still viable too! Apple was still selling them until late last year – it's a fantastic little phone (with an obsolete camera) – and you can get them refurbished for about $100. Highly recommended if you want to hold and use your phone with one hand comfortably, or forget if it's in your pocket!

Tepix 6y ago
Seconded. I made sure to get an iPhone SE as my work phone instead of the iPhone XR. Love the design and the form factor.
saagarjha 6y ago
It's been running iOS 14 quite well. Such a great phone!

fsflover 6y ago

If you think that a smartphone should be supported for much longer than 5 years, consider Librem 5 [0] or Pinephone [1]. [0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ [1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/ https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
Knowing basically nothing about either of these, I'm super curious as to if either company will exist in 5 years. I've set myself a reminder and am looking forward to the result.
- fsflover 6y ago
  You do not need those companies for the software support. You only need upstreamed drivers for Linux kernel for the hardware. This is what these companies are doing and Android doesn’t. Similarly, my laptop from 10+ years ago works flawlessly With Debian 10.
  - Xavdidtheshadow 6y ago
    Sure, but it's nice to have an active company for repairs, replacement parts, support, etc. It'll certainly keep running without a company backing it, but there have been so many similar initiative, I'm personally curious how this one will turn out.

jordache 6y ago

I have a beater iphone 5s around to stream podcast and music while I'm doing yard work. Works great! pretty smooth OS UI.. Can't say the same about any Andorid phones from the same era. Looking forward to this new era of Apple ARM chips in desktops!

lostgame 6y ago

I often compose music on the go in GarageBand on my iPhone. I own several pairs of extremely high quality and highly accurate headphones, and; no - I don’t want to carry an adapter around for headphones that prevents charging while headphones are plugged in. That’s obviously logistically a no go for anyone performing live with an iPad. I’d never want to rely on battery power live. Even if I hadn’t invested in my audio gear and headphones specifically so much, the latency on Bluetooth has made it a non option forever - unless I buy one of the select few W1 certified Beats units, which then is just an additional expense. Apple does not currently offer, and it seems that they have no interest in offering, a phone that I will buy in the future. I couldn’t believe they pulled the headphone jack on the SE2, it seemed like the last ‘fuck you’ to the audio content creators they’ve claimed to support forever. iOS 14 support on iPhone 6S means Apple keeps me as an iPhone user for maybe another year. I will probably be downgrading to a dumbphone and an old, flash-drive modded iPod gen 3 or 4.

Tepix 6y ago

Little-known fact: As part of the "Android Enterprise Recommended" program, some Android devices (such as rugged devices) receive FIVE years of updates. Unfortunately they are all very expensive and most of these devices are not standard phones.

neurostimulant 6y ago
Hmm, according to this page[1], google pixel 1 has the android enterprise recommended seal, but it seem to be out of support after 3 years. Last guaranteed security update is October 2019 according to this page[2]. [1] https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/15 https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/1... [2] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en
- Tepix 6y ago
  Pixel 1 is not a rugged device
  - neurostimulant 6y ago
    Yeah, but which one of those rugged devices that has five years of support? The page doesn't provide that information, and if we use the "android enterprise recommended" filter, it listed pixel phones that obviously don't have 5 years of support. Or are all those devices marked as "rugged" actually got 5 years of support? I tried going to some of the listed rugged device manufacturers website and they don't seem to indicate how long they'll going to support their device (unless the information is hidden somewhere).
    - Tepix 6y ago
      It was mentioned here: https://9to5google.com/2018/09/05/google-android-enterprise-recommended-rugged/ https://9to5google.com/2018/09/05/google-android-enterprise-...

nullsmack 6y ago

The fact that Samsung won't even provide Android 10 for my Note8 should be criminal, even by their policy of only updating their devices for two "major" revisions. They shipped it with Android 7 when Android 8 was already out.

brailsafe 6y ago

> Even with a phone that old, Apple is still sending it the latest iOS 14 features, which will allow people still holding onto that device to use it for at least another year. I'm running an iPad 3 with iOS9 and a OnePlus 3 running Android 9 that I bought off Craigslist for $200. I know it's like driving a 20 year old Corolla, but does lack of the latest OS make a device unusable? If my current car worked I wouldn't buy a new one to get auto distance cruise control. I haven't found features on smartphones very compelling probably since 2015. Fingerprint sensor is nice, more speed is nice, but the complexity of what I use it for isn't that significant.

makecheck 6y ago

It’s been surprisingly easy to support various Apple devices. I think the notch and home-screen-bar layouts were a bit tricky but they did have APIs in place and it was OK. The biggest issue really was the 32-bit to 64-bit hardware transition; I remember seeing weird graphical issues because floating-point results were slightly different with float vs. double.

e40 6y ago

One of the reasons I left Android for iOS was just this issue. 2 years of updates, then you're expected to purchase a new device. My iPhone 11 I expect to have for many years. Hopefully 5+.

JoshuaRLi 6y ago

Love how my old Galaxy S6 is stuck on ancient Android 7. And it's the verizon version too, so I can't unlock the bootloader. Perfectly capable device, what a shame. Switched to iPhone SE a while ago because of this.

metta2uall 6y ago

Given the harm caused by cybercrime, plus the increased police work, governments really ought to make a minimum duration of security updates mandatory.. Phones are already required to meet a raft of various regulations.

jp0d 6y ago

I used Android phones for several years before switching to an iPhone 8 two years ago. I think the major reason why manufacturers don't care to provide updates is because they don't expect those phones to last more than 2 years. It's not a joke. I've had some mid-range to expensive Android phones (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) and none of them lasted more 2 years. Whereas my wife's 6 year old iPhone 5s is still working! How do you explain that? Every Apple devices I've owned so far has been incredibly reliable and held their value really well. My wife's 6 year old Macbook air with 4 gigs of RAM still works fine and runs the latest Mac OS! I don't think I can get that level of support from any other vendor.

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Size is important and that is something Apple should have deal with from day one. It miss the big phone time and now it miss the small phone time. Really want to have a small one.