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Apple issues security update for the almost 10-year-old iPhone 5S
- steponlego 4y ago[flagged]
- imwillofficial 4y agoGreat to see commitment to older devices. I hope this becomes the norm in this space.
- mdasen 4y agoIt might become the norm, but probably only via EU legislation. The EU is proposing 3 years of updates and 5 years of security updates. We'll see if it happens. Without legislation, it probably won't become the norm. With Apple, they know they will capture the value of future device purchases since if you want an iOS device, they're the only seller. Margins can be better since they're the only seller which leaves more money to support the product long term. Long-term support positions them as a premium product. One of the big issues is that Google can't patch an issue and then push it out to everyone. They need buy-in from phone manufacturers and even carriers who have customized Android. Apple doesn't need any coordination. They can update iOS when they want to and they control all the hardware it's running on. Yes, you'd think that competition might lead people to become loyal to one Android manufacturer if they provided longer-term support, but I think the ecosystem encourages shopping around for the best deal/promo rather than brand loyalty and money spent on long-term support makes products more expensive. I think part of it is even a different market segment between iOS and Android. I think a lot of iOS users are people that want something that just works that they don't have to worry about and are willing to pay for a premium product that does that. I think Android users are split between power users who want to upgrade frequently (negating the utility of long-term support) and low-end users who don't care or need to prioritize purchase price over updates/security. Again, needing 2-3 parties involved for updates makes them more expensive, more difficult, and less likely to happen. Part of it is simply the Apple experience. Apple Stores aren't cheap. Apple could use cheap materials and try to build stores that look and feel like most retail. That's not their game. They're looking to sell a premium experience and part of that includes long-term support. Of course, that comes with a price. It's easy to find $100 Android phones, but not $100 iPhones.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- torstenvl 4y agoThe OP is about a security update for a 10-year-old phone. Mandating security updates for 5-year-old phones would have absolutely no effect.
- Gigachad 4y agoAnd Apple already does feature updates for about 6 years on the iPhone. The new laws really only affect android which gets on average 2 years updates.
- HWR_14 4y agoAnd it seems like those feature updates don't die for no reason. They phase out models with insufficient RAM or 32-bit CPUs.
- scarface74 4y agoBy “no reason” you mean that the newer chips literally don’t support 32 bit processors? And insufficient RAM is not a good reason not to support older phones?
- Gigachad 4y agoThey support them for security updates like the OP link shows, but obviously at some point insufficient compute power is a good reason to not load new features on.
- HWR_14 4y agoYes, that's what I said. They don't do it for planned obsolescence reasons or arbitrarily at N years old. They do it when specs require it.
- acdha 4y ago
- willis936 4y agoI have an apple watch series 3 bought within the past two years. Using it prevents me from using E2EE icloud backups: a feature I badly want. No technical explanation is given as to why this is the case and I fail to think of one. What does come to mind is: new feature is a carrot to buy new devices.
- westhom 4y agoI have the same watch, same issue. Just discovered it tonight while trying to enable E2EE. Presumably it’s because the 3 doesn’t receive watchOS updates anymore as a discontinued product, so it can’t participate in the new E2EE “pipeline”
- scarface74 4y agoThe Series 3 is 5 years old and was already struggling with upgrades. E2EE requires all devices to be updated to the latest version of the OS
- saagarjha 4y agoI don’t want to blame you for a situation that Apple intentionally made confusing, but there is no reason you should have bought that device in the last four or so years. It was pretty clearly on the road to being obsolete sooner than later, and unsurprisingly it lost support pretty much the day Apple stopped selling it.
- metadat 4y agoCan these still be connected to the AT&T or Verizon networks? When I tried attaching one in 2020 they immediately disabled my sim card (irreversibly) and when I called support told me it was much too old and I must get a newer phone (thanks a lot, ATT). To be fair, this is often the claimed solution with AT&T and at least sometimes I'm certain it's BS (e.g. for a Samsung S10e, Verizon told my elderly friend the same thing last year). Hence my question.
- Quasimarion 4y agoExactly the reason I left ATT and moved to T-Mobile. My old device still works, no need to throw it away.
- technothrasher 4y agoBack around when AT&T was first making noises about killing 3G and telling me I needed a new phone, I bought a T-Mobile prepaid SIM just to try it out. When I put the SIM in, the phone lit up like a Christmas tree with features that AT&T wouldn't allow (because it was a non-carrier phone). I since switched over and haven't looked back. Course it also helps that I've now got a T-Mobile tower on the same hill as my house, 1/4 mile away, and I live in a pretty rural area. So it's as if I have my own private tower. I regularly get 700-800mbps down on my phone at my house.
- metadat 4y agoWhat new features specifically were unlocked with T-Mobile?
- jackofallballs 4y ago[dead]
- technothrasher 4y agoWifi calling and VoLTE were the two biggest ones.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoIf the security bug is bad enough... vendors do, sometimes, give into providing an update for an obsolete platform. See also Microsoft, which patched the security bug used by WannaCry over 4 years after Windows XP end of life.
- DanAtC 4y agoNot Cisco! https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/13/cisco_smb_critical_router_flaw_no_fix/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/13/cisco_smb_critical_ro...
- judge2020 4y agoTangentially related: iOS is a licensed trademark of Cisco https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/copyright-apd19e3e6994/ios#:~:text=IOS%20is%20a%20trademark%20or%20registered%20trademark%20of%20Cisco%20in%20the%20U.S.%20and%20other%20countries%20and%20is%20used%20under%20license https://support.apple.com/guide/shortcuts/copyright-apd19e3e...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Ndymium 4y agoNot iOS but IOS.
- withzombies 4y agoiPhone is licensed from Cisco though. Cisco bought Linksys which held it for its ip phones.
- prvc 4y agoSo good of them to protect the users from being able to jailbreak their own devices easily.
- charcircuit 4y agoWhy frame it like that? They are protecting their userbase against malicious drive by attacks.
- asddubs 4y agoi think the 5s has a bootloader exploit so it's still jailbreakable
- olliej 4y ago... what? Are you saying that the correct course of action is to leave users vulnerable to known - and clearly fixable - security bugs?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- fortran77 4y agoHow does Apple's security model allow for any malformed web page to execute arbitrary code?
- henriquez 4y agoThe malformed [anything] to run unsigned code is an age old bug archetype. This is the obvious result of web browsers providing OS-level API access to JavaScript web pages.
- Gigachad 4y agoBecause WebKit is written in C so malformed anything has the ability to run arbitrary code. As far as I know there is no current work being done to fix this. Google has been making significant efforts to replace insecure C components in Android with Rust though.
- asddubs 4y agoIt's written in C++
- astrange 4y agoWebKit is largely a JIT and a JIT is itself unsafe, so writing one in Rust won't help. ARM has been adding security features that do help with any language like PAC/BTI.
- nneonneo 4y agoA JIT is not, by itself, unsafe. The problem is that maintaining the complex set of constraints and invariants necessary to generate both safe and performant code is extremely difficult, and one slip-up can mean generating code that breaks some invariant and escapes a safety boundary. You can have simple JITs that are completely safe: they generate code to bounds- and type-check unconditionally and avoid fragile optimizations. But, if you want to go faster, you have to start dropping checks and performing aggressive optimizations (peephole, inlining, object layout tricks, …) and every new optimization is an opportunity to make a mistake. PAC and friends are an effort to make the hardware support certain checks more efficiently. But again, as they are an extra check, there’s always the chance that they’ll be slower than the unchecked alternative; if so, you can bet that one day an engineer looking to get a 0.5% perf gain will try removing those checks (“safely”) and we’ll be back to square one.
- dghughes 4y agoHa! I just retired my Mom's 5S and got her an S22 for Christmas. And a pre-paid plan too the phone company was consonantly sending texts suggesting she change to monthly. That thing was a tank it was OK until about a year ago then the battery got noticeably worse. Not bad for someone who always let it die all the time always charge only when 0%. She almost always used it just for voice calls a few texts no web (no data plan). No OS updates for a while too. So it was risky I thought to keep it going. Android is much easier to deal with. Although the ringtones and notifications are all different she has to now learn after almost 10 years of iPhone to new sounds by Samsung.
- loeg 4y agoAre you looking forward to Android’s lack of security updates in, say, 18 months?
- jeroenhd 4y agoSamsung promises updates to the S22 for five years after introduction (which means until February 2027 assuming we're talking about the standard version introduced in the beginning of 2022 and not a later model).
- katbyte 4y agoThat’s still half of what the iPhone 5s got…
- selcuka 4y agoThat's Samsung's "promise". Similarly Apple promises to provide 6 years of security updates. This update is an exception.
- loeg 4y agoThe relevant question isn't what Samsung has promised, but what they will actually deliver. I think we should be pretty skeptical of that promise based on Android's track record.
- geodel 4y agoI think one main reason 5s get supported because it had first 64-bit chip on iPhone.
- olliej 4y agoThey length of time an update is supported isn’t the time from first release, it’s the time from last sale. If a phone is sold for two years, and I buy that phone at the end up the two years, then “two years of updates” means a day one purchaser will get four years of updates. So while it’s nice that we can say “almost ten years old”, the reality is probably not more than seven years. It’s why when you look at android manufacturers making update promises you need to make sure that they’re being honest, and similarly any legislation needs to specifically say that the mandatory update support period starts after the last sale of the device.
- chrismorgan 4y agoI dunno how things are now, but a few years back duration of updates were certainly linked to first release, not last sale, for at least most major manufacturers. As an example of this: In April 2019, I needed to rapidly obtain a device, and purchased a Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) from a major retailer in Australia. I later discovered that this model had already been EOL for over a year when I purchased it. (It was released with 5.1.1, got its last security patch in November 2017, and was actively unsupported no later than March 2018. The handset should very obviously have been updated to Android 6, if not released with it—Android 6 was announced and in beta 7½ months before, and was the stable release 3½ months before, the handset’s January 2016 release.)
- olliej 4y agoThat's the choice of the manufacturer. If a company is selling something and says "X years of support", that means X years of support, not "until date Y" where Y is date of release + X. If android manufacturers are saying "X years of support" when they mean "supported until [some date]" then they are quite plainly false advertising. I can find many sites that say that apple commits to 5 years of software support from the date of last sale, but I can't find anything on apple.com that matches that. I've found that they guarantee 5 years of hardware support (repairs, etc) from date of last sale, and then a further 2 years subject to hardware availability (presumably they stop purchasing/manufacturing parts). Note that I'm not talking about warrantee coverage (which varies but seems 1 year is standard?) just the actual ability to do repairs. Based on this article and various others over the years, and the vast array of spammy infographic laden sites making up the first page of google search results, it seems like claims of ~5 years of major updates and a few more for security only is consistent, but again I can't find anything on apple's site to confirm that explicitly.
- rubicon33 4y ago5s still the best
- taylodl 4y agoFrom a reduce, reuse, recycle standpoint - iPhones just make sense.
- judge2020 4y agoWhat you can use it on does deteriorate though, since tons of new apps require iOS 14 or 15 to even run, and if there is an app with an iOS 12 version, it might just be out-of-date with the remote UI. I suppose that, if your use case for a phone is running the apps and websites of "today", then you must upgrade at least somewhat regularly.
- layer8 4y agoThe iPhone 6S (and the OG iPhone SE) still run iOS 15, so should be usable for maybe 2 more years. It was released in 2015, so could come close to 10 years of practical use. Note all iPhones fare equally well, but you should probably be able get 6+ years out of any model.
- timcederman 4y agoI'm still using an iPhone 6S as a secondary phone. Amazed at how well it still works, including the battery.
- jackofallballs 4y ago[dead]
- scarface74 4y agoNew apps require the latest version for the newest releases. You can download the “last compatible version” for older devices.
- eviks 4y agoNo you can't unless you've already "purchased" the app before
- gambiting 4y agoMy iPad mini 2 is also getting regular security updates, and that was launched 10 years ago . The problem isn't the OS, it's all the apps - even though it is compatible with, and runs Netflix and Disney Plus, both apps crash after about 15 minutes of use, which defeats the point of this iPad for me(cartoons playback device for my kid). It's a shame.
- bratwurst3000 4y agoEven worse. I got an old ipad to share the screen of my iphone. End of story is it doesnt work because apple isnt updating the protocol. Even worse I cant share the internet of my phone because they have different hotspot protocols . Fuck you apple. Even in the apple universe compability sucks
- kitsunesoba 4y agoIf you’re looking to project your phone screen onto the iPad, I don’t think that’s ever worked. I have a newer iPhone and iPad running the same OS and they can’t do that either. Only Apple TV boxes and macs can act as screen mirroring targets without third party assistance. As for the hotspot, I don’t see why the old iPad shouldn’t be able to connect to your phone’s wifi as long as you have “Maximize compatibility” enabled. I think I’ve had circa 2008 devices connect to my phone that way but I’ll have to test to see if I’m misremembering or not.
- bratwurst3000 4y agoHey thanks i will test this when I will be back home. The core problem was that ipad and iphone have the same user account and because of that apple wants to share the network some other way then classic wifi. And this protocol aint updated in my ipad And screen mirroring is working when I use a new ipad :/
- neuronic 4y agoIt frustrates me because it seems like the opposite of mindful engineering. I feel like that's the "we don't give a shit about resources" development mantra for you, banking on the ever increasing hardware limits that everyone will purchase in never-ending ~2 year cycles. "Ah, it's a nice morning with so many free gigabytes of RAM, calm CPU cycles and sunshine. Let's slap a few questionable libraries and a bunch of chatty analytics modules into the build." It doesn't help that a lot of major businesses work with contractors and consultants in relatively short-term gigs where feature development is king even if your application is reasonably feature complete. It's hard to improve a complex application if your domain knowledge and technical knowledge isn't quite there due to short time spent at the company (and likely no real personal invest in the product). Also, in mid to large sized companies, constant unwarranted changes to please a fat layer of middle management which needs to pretend to have some sort of impact may lead to crappy development. Let's just change the UI and UX for the sake of it with 5 additional libraries, 2 more processes so that manager XYZ has something to show for his PowerPoint presentation. Don't you dare work on technical debt and refactoring, we need new features to make management happy! Excluding possible external dependencies that might have broken or standards that might have changed, what did Netflix REALLY add to their app from a user perspective since it ran perfectly well on the iPad mini 2 in 2014?
- kasabali 4y ago> It closes a nasty-sounding security loophole in which “processing maliciously crafted web content may lead to arbitrary code execution.” only if they're was a way to update the web engine from app store.
- tempodox 4y agoInstalled. I had to get my phone out of the attic but it's worth it. And Xcode-14.2 still installs my apps on the 5S.
- antomeie 4y agoI still use my iPhone 5S as a webcam for my Mac Mini, and occasionally as an alarm clock / timer.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]