5 ms·

> Apple iPhone as the gold standard only provide security updates up to 6-7 years Laughs in Microsoft How about 20 years?! I have a laptop built in 2006, it

> Apple iPhone as the gold standard only provide security updates up to 6-7 years Laughs in Microsoft How about 20 years?! I have a laptop built in 2006, it runs Windows 10 and will be supported untill 2025. It can also run software compiled in 1999! What platform can beat it, an IBM mainframe? Microsoft is the gold standard! Its a shame they never get credit for the one thing they do well.

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
They needlessly broke the start-menu and taskbar in Windows 8 and Windows 11 for no good reason. And there still isn’t a coherent native desktop-app dev story for Windows. Even MS is using Electron for their own software. One step forward, two steps back.
jen20 4y ago
You missed the implied “for phones” in there.
Dylan16807 4y ago
Well a lot of people are looking at Windows 11, which launched in 2021 and required a ~2018 CPU. Especially when Intel's 8th generation chips were barely different from the ones going back years. Chips close to that cutoff are going to have awful support lifetimes from microsoft if you can't get updates past 2025.
- doubled112 4y ago
  I laughed out loud when the Ryzen 7 1700X (8c/16t @ 3.4GHz) in my main desktop didn't meet the minimum system requirements. It's just 5 years old now, and I have a funny feeling it'll be more than powerful enough for a while yet.
  - vxNsr 4y ago
    They’re ways to get around the restrictions though I don’t know why you’d want to. Windows 11 is a virus
    - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
      Windows is too much of a resource hog to be a virus.
  - Pxtl 4y ago
    I have a similarly new PC and found there were BIOS settings needed to allow it to get windows 11 -- some security stuff that wasn't turned on by default. Of course, then I looked into what windows 11 provided and decided I'd wait a bit either way.
    - cptskippy 4y ago
      I initially upgraded a Ryzen 7 1700 system with the hold TPM module, then got an incredible deal on a 5700X. I was surprised how much I had to fiddle in the BIOS with a year old motherboard to get things like Secure Boot and memory isolation working. It was something like 5 or 6 BIOS expeditions before I had all the right features enabled. Windows 11 is meh... They fixed some of my issues with 10 and created new ones. I wouldn't rush anyone to adopt it, it's a Vista/XP/ME style release. I'm expecting Windows 12 to be the keeper.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    I was in the same boat with the base 1700. It likely just needs a TPM module. My ASRock Fatality (sp) motherboard had a port for a module. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/where-to-buy-tpm-2.0-for-windows-11 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/where-to-buy-tpm-2.0-for-w... Win11's line in the sand requirements aren't nearly as "bad" as Vista/XP/ME in terms of disruption. Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      > Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support. That's a non-starter because Intel upsell ECC as an "enterprise"/"prosumer" feature and regular, non-high-end/workstation/server processors don't support ECC. Sadly Intel is still the CPU market leader, so that would have meant Win11 not being able to run on most existing hardware at launch.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - cptskippy 4y ago
        Yes, how different are Intel's consumer CPUs from their Enterprise? Is ECC disabled physically in their CPUs or is it simply a software limitation? AMD's CPUs have ECC support but the motherboard manufacturers don't support it. Intel has been shipping TPMs in CPUs for a while. That begs the question, is Intel dictating requirements to Microsoft or is Microsoft dictating them to Intel?
    - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      > was in the same boat with the base 1700. It likely just needs a TPM module. Oh dear, why is Microsoft upgrade assistant and documentation so misleading? I just got a new CPU!
      - doubled112 4y ago
        I'm not sure they are. I can go into the UEFI settings and enable fTPM on the system. It still doesn't make it see the system as supported. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-amd-processors https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi... It is only 2nd gen Ryzen and up. P.S. By reverse logic, I have disabled (f)TPM to block the upgrade on some machines.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  This is looking at it from the wrong side though. It isn't the hardware vendor ending support there, it's the software vendor. PC hardware can be supported indefinitely because it's documented, more or less. Windows uses a hardware abstraction layer so the old drivers can be used with the new Windows. Hardware only stops being supported by Windows when Microsoft decides it, not Intel or NVIDIA or Broadcom. The Linux community writes open source drivers, or the hardware makers do themselves, so they can be updated by the kernel developers when they make changes to the kernel and continue to work. You can put run the latest Linux kernel on a PC from 1995. But for phones the hardware support comes as an opaque binary blob tied to a specific kernel version, so when that kernel falls out of support, the hardware is slag unless someone has the resources to reverse engineer it. Which they might if it was just the wireless or just the storage controller, but it's not.
ryandrake 4y ago
You are absolutely right and it is shameful what consumers simply accept for software support periods! I try to buy things that I hope/expect to work for 10, maybe 20 years. Appliances, cars, tvs, and electronics including phones. Yet software support for all these things lasts a mere 3-5 years if that. I have an iPad1 original that still works great! But software support ended a year after I bought it—over a decade ago. Totally unacceptable. I hate how the hardware industry forces obsolescence by cutting off software support for devices in the field. Nobody should be grateful for a mere 3 years of software support.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes Apple should support a 2G iPhone that no cellular network supports
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Why shouldn't you be able to keep using it on Wi-Fi only?
    - imwillofficial 4y ago
      You can if your router supports it
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        Yes, but if you can't get security updates for it, then you can't do so safely.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      So Apple should try to support a phone with 256MB RAM and a 400Mhz processor in 2007 that doesn’t even work on any cellular network? What do you expect to do with it? The 2010 first generation iPad that came out 4 years later could barely handle modern web pages by 2011.
  - foepys 4y ago
atleta 4y ago
Yeah, and Linux will probably have an even longer support period. But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market. The mobile phone business is very different. (But you may argue that that's the problem.) The HW manufacturers sell the SW bundled with the HW. As soon as they have sold the HW, the software is just a liability (while for MS it's a recurrent revenue!). Not only that, but the longer and the better the SW works, the less likely you are to buy new HW from them. (And since that's the only thing they are selling, it means the less likely they will see a revenue from you.) Now this may imply that the business model is flawed and maybe it will change as the market matures and people will stop buying newer and newer phones every year. Just like it happened to desktops and then laptops. (I'm typing this on a 7+ year old Thinkpad and the only thing I miss is +16GB RAM.)
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Linux is a bit different because you are responsible for supporting yourself really.
  - asddubs 4y ago
    not like microsoft is going to help you if you run into problems either. The software supports it in either case
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  > But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market. It's really the opposite problem. Essentially all of the relevant phones run Android; the monopoly doesn't help. And PC/workstation hardware was supported for just as long back in the days of Novell Netware and proprietary Unix. Some of the hardware from those days is still supported now. The problem isn't the lack of a monopoly, it's the presence of one. The majority of the SoCs in phones are from Qualcomm, and they provide neither documentation nor source code, even though the market is clamoring for the longer support lifetimes that would allow, because with limited competition they don't have to. There was some hope that Samsung would do better, and they might increase their market share quite a bit if they did, but a duopoly still isn't much competition. Samsung is already a big enough player that they have to be weighing the increase in market share against the longer repurchasing cycle. The have to decide if they want to be the heroes and capture that much goodwill from the people paying attention and making recommendations to others, or not. So far so fail. We need more competition.
josephg 4y ago
I started programming in the 90s. The other day I found some of the first programs I ever wrote (in qbasic), and ran them in qbasic 4.5 on dosbox on my Mac laptop. I was running an arm laptop, emulating a modern x86_64 chip, emulating an old i386 chip, interpreting a qbasic program unmodified from 30 years ago. Sound, graphics modes, input events - all of it worked perfectly. I didn’t try running it on windows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just worked there too without even needing dosbox. Backwards compatibility on phones is a joke. Decades of phone software is totally lost to history, impossible to download or run anywhere. The web isn’t much better because old websites go down. But at least modern browsers will still happily render webpages from the 90s just fine.
- hattmall 4y ago
  Phone software is basically a joke anyway. Is it not possible to emulate phones in the same manner?
  - t43562 4y ago
    The point of fixing security holes is sometimes to make it not possible to do certain things which applications may have been written to "expect". There's a bit of not being able to have your cake and eat it.
    - josephg 4y ago
      Tosh. The fact you can’t download old iOS apps from the App Store, nor can you run them on modern 64 bit iOS devices has nothing to do with apps using undocumented APIs.
      - t43562 4y ago
        What about documented APIs that are flawed? I'm not an iOS programmer but let's imagine an API that requires an SHA-1 signature ... so those become insecure and the API is dropped - or an API that offers an SSLv1 connection and that's insecure so it gets dropped. The only way to emulate that would be to re-introduce the problem. Perhaps these are bad examples and the real reasons for Apple to not support something is not so neat - I don't know about them - but FWIW my experience from working at Nokia was that compatibility was a big drag to being able to implement improvements and it's a huge effort to maintain it that doesn't come for free.
graderjs 4y ago
Yeah that is pretty good. You're right about MS being the gold standard for backwards compatibility and forward support. Amazon talks about being the best at customer service, I guess that's how MS excelled in customer service, a key differentiator, super-wide compatibility, long lifetimes.
shepherdjerred 4y ago
The original iPhone had 128MB of memory. The iPhone 6s (releasing in 2015, which is the oldest model currently receiving security updates) has 2GB of memory. The latest iPhone, the iPhone 14, has 6GB. It doesn't make sense for Apple to support devices that aren't even going to be able to run the apps that users want. Not many users are going to want to be using a 6-7 year old device when hardware is advancing and therefore the software is becoming more resource hungry.
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  There are tons of people who use their phones to make phone calls and send texts and read the occasional Wikipedia article. They don't need newer hardware. People who want to play video games on their phones will need newer phones, but even they benefit from being able to sell their old one to the people who don't need that instead of having to throw it away.
  - shepherdjerred 4y ago
    You're completely right, but I don't think Apple is targeting those people. Most people don't want an iPhone for just the basics. Aside from that, I'm not sure that even web browsing would be very enjoyable on an iPhone 6s today considering that the performance demands of web pages are getting higher and higher.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    And those people couldn’t use anything older than 5 - the first to support LTE. Many networks wouldn’t even support that.
    - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
      Better phones would be designed with upgradeable modems because the phone would be useful for longer than the modem is, but anything with WiFi can be connected to a hotspot. I'm kind of surprised that isn't more popular in general, because the hotspot lets you connect all your devices with one plan for <$10/month if you don't use a lot of cellular data, e.g. because you mostly use it in your car and spend most of your time connected to some other WiFi.
devy 4y ago
I am talking about mobile phones. Unfortunately Microsoft exited Windows phone business. So what are you talking about gold standard?
scarface74 4y ago
This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986? A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. Computers changed leaps and bounds in the first 20 years just like smartphones have. Sure my 2010 Dell Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM can run Windows 10. But a computer bought in 1997 couldn’t run the then current Windows OS in 2010.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986? Linux can do something very similar. You can run the latest version of Gentoo Linux today on an Intel 486 from 1989.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    The subject was about Microsoft. Could a computer from 1989 be useful with the 2006 web? Flash and all?
- AnthonyMouse 4y ago
  > This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986? The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later. > A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music? Why not connect the USB and turn it into a NAS or a doorbell camera or any of the things anybody would do with a Raspberry Pi?
  - scarface74 4y ago
    > The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later What could you do with it in 2012? A 2010 Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop can run Windows 10. Browse the modern web, mine had gigabit Ethernet, could run the latest version of Office decently and had a 500Gb hard drive. > It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music? Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage. Even back in 2004 - 3 years before the iPhone. I had this https://www.lacie.com/support/multimedia/classic-hd/ https://www.lacie.com/support/multimedia/classic-hd/ It was a much better NAS than trying to repurpose an iPhone with very bad Wifi. You are going to “read text” on a 3.5 inch 320x480 Poot resolution screen in 2023? And you want Apple to continue supporting a “phone” that can’t be used as a phone anymore?
smcleod 4y ago
Which Microsoft phone offered 20 years security updates? They can't even keep the product line alive let alone provide security updates.
_emacsomancer_ 4y ago
Not much of a gold standard really. I've also a laptop built in 2006, it runs [any flavour of Linux I want] and will be supported indefinitely.
- petespeed 4y ago
  Making parallels with phone software, imagine that edge AI inference becomes a necessity in few years which makes a lot of current hardware obsolete.
mrweasel 4y ago
If you where to start a new software project in the mid-90s and had the benefit of hindsight, there is no argument for not starting on Windows NT. Looking back the "correct" career choice would be a C++ developer on the Windows NT platform, you could build a lifetime career on Windows (unless it fails in the next 10 - 15 years, which I doubt). Sure we have abandon-ware that requires a Windows 95 desktop or a Windows 2000 installation, but bringing a piece of actively developed Windows software forward through the version in the past 25+ years has been relatively easy. I picked Linux/Unix and languages like Python 20 years ago, so it's a little late for me, but if I could go back in time, I'm not sure that Windows and C++ wouldn't have been an equally good choice.
bioemerl 4y ago
Don't credit Microsoft for this, credit the fact that the PC is an open platform based on its legacy as an IBM PC clone. We need a good standardized phone and bootloader system so that software comes back into the control of users on cell phones.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

DaiPlusPlus 4y ago

They needlessly broke the start-menu and taskbar in Windows 8 and Windows 11 for no good reason. And there still isn’t a coherent native desktop-app dev story for Windows. Even MS is using Electron for their own software. One step forward, two steps back.

jen20 4y ago

You missed the implied “for phones” in there.

Dylan16807 4y ago

Well a lot of people are looking at Windows 11, which launched in 2021 and required a ~2018 CPU. Especially when Intel's 8th generation chips were barely different from the ones going back years. Chips close to that cutoff are going to have awful support lifetimes from microsoft if you can't get updates past 2025.

doubled112 4y ago
I laughed out loud when the Ryzen 7 1700X (8c/16t @ 3.4GHz) in my main desktop didn't meet the minimum system requirements. It's just 5 years old now, and I have a funny feeling it'll be more than powerful enough for a while yet.
- vxNsr 4y ago
  They’re ways to get around the restrictions though I don’t know why you’d want to. Windows 11 is a virus
  - TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
    Windows is too much of a resource hog to be a virus.
- Pxtl 4y ago
  I have a similarly new PC and found there were BIOS settings needed to allow it to get windows 11 -- some security stuff that wasn't turned on by default. Of course, then I looked into what windows 11 provided and decided I'd wait a bit either way.
  - cptskippy 4y ago
    I initially upgraded a Ryzen 7 1700 system with the hold TPM module, then got an incredible deal on a 5700X. I was surprised how much I had to fiddle in the BIOS with a year old motherboard to get things like Secure Boot and memory isolation working. It was something like 5 or 6 BIOS expeditions before I had all the right features enabled. Windows 11 is meh... They fixed some of my issues with 10 and created new ones. I wouldn't rush anyone to adopt it, it's a Vista/XP/ME style release. I'm expecting Windows 12 to be the keeper.
- cptskippy 4y ago
  I was in the same boat with the base 1700. It likely just needs a TPM module. My ASRock Fatality (sp) motherboard had a port for a module. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/where-to-buy-tpm-2.0-for-windows-11 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/where-to-buy-tpm-2.0-for-w... Win11's line in the sand requirements aren't nearly as "bad" as Vista/XP/ME in terms of disruption. Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support. That's a non-starter because Intel upsell ECC as an "enterprise"/"prosumer" feature and regular, non-high-end/workstation/server processors don't support ECC. Sadly Intel is still the CPU market leader, so that would have meant Win11 not being able to run on most existing hardware at launch.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - cptskippy 4y ago
      Yes, how different are Intel's consumer CPUs from their Enterprise? Is ECC disabled physically in their CPUs or is it simply a software limitation? AMD's CPUs have ECC support but the motherboard manufacturers don't support it. Intel has been shipping TPMs in CPUs for a while. That begs the question, is Intel dictating requirements to Microsoft or is Microsoft dictating them to Intel?
  - ClumsyPilot 4y ago
    > was in the same boat with the base 1700. It likely just needs a TPM module. Oh dear, why is Microsoft upgrade assistant and documentation so misleading? I just got a new CPU!
    - doubled112 4y ago
      I'm not sure they are. I can go into the UEFI settings and enable fTPM on the system. It still doesn't make it see the system as supported. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/minimum/supported/windows-11-supported-amd-processors https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/mi... It is only 2nd gen Ryzen and up. P.S. By reverse logic, I have disabled (f)TPM to block the upgrade on some machines.
AnthonyMouse 4y ago
This is looking at it from the wrong side though. It isn't the hardware vendor ending support there, it's the software vendor. PC hardware can be supported indefinitely because it's documented, more or less. Windows uses a hardware abstraction layer so the old drivers can be used with the new Windows. Hardware only stops being supported by Windows when Microsoft decides it, not Intel or NVIDIA or Broadcom. The Linux community writes open source drivers, or the hardware makers do themselves, so they can be updated by the kernel developers when they make changes to the kernel and continue to work. You can put run the latest Linux kernel on a PC from 1995. But for phones the hardware support comes as an opaque binary blob tied to a specific kernel version, so when that kernel falls out of support, the hardware is slag unless someone has the resources to reverse engineer it. Which they might if it was just the wireless or just the storage controller, but it's not.

ryandrake 4y ago

You are absolutely right and it is shameful what consumers simply accept for software support periods! I try to buy things that I hope/expect to work for 10, maybe 20 years. Appliances, cars, tvs, and electronics including phones. Yet software support for all these things lasts a mere 3-5 years if that. I have an iPad1 original that still works great! But software support ended a year after I bought it—over a decade ago. Totally unacceptable. I hate how the hardware industry forces obsolescence by cutting off software support for devices in the field. Nobody should be grateful for a mere 3 years of software support.

scarface74 4y ago
Yes Apple should support a 2G iPhone that no cellular network supports
- josephcsible 4y ago
  Why shouldn't you be able to keep using it on Wi-Fi only?
  - imwillofficial 4y ago
    You can if your router supports it
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      Yes, but if you can't get security updates for it, then you can't do so safely.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So Apple should try to support a phone with 256MB RAM and a 400Mhz processor in 2007 that doesn’t even work on any cellular network? What do you expect to do with it? The 2010 first generation iPad that came out 4 years later could barely handle modern web pages by 2011.
- foepys 4y ago

atleta 4y ago

Yeah, and Linux will probably have an even longer support period. But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market. The mobile phone business is very different. (But you may argue that that's the problem.) The HW manufacturers sell the SW bundled with the HW. As soon as they have sold the HW, the software is just a liability (while for MS it's a recurrent revenue!). Not only that, but the longer and the better the SW works, the less likely you are to buy new HW from them. (And since that's the only thing they are selling, it means the less likely they will see a revenue from you.) Now this may imply that the business model is flawed and maybe it will change as the market matures and people will stop buying newer and newer phones every year. Just like it happened to desktops and then laptops. (I'm typing this on a 7+ year old Thinkpad and the only thing I miss is +16GB RAM.)

bee_rider 4y ago
Linux is a bit different because you are responsible for supporting yourself really.
- asddubs 4y ago
  not like microsoft is going to help you if you run into problems either. The software supports it in either case
AnthonyMouse 4y ago
> But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market. It's really the opposite problem. Essentially all of the relevant phones run Android; the monopoly doesn't help. And PC/workstation hardware was supported for just as long back in the days of Novell Netware and proprietary Unix. Some of the hardware from those days is still supported now. The problem isn't the lack of a monopoly, it's the presence of one. The majority of the SoCs in phones are from Qualcomm, and they provide neither documentation nor source code, even though the market is clamoring for the longer support lifetimes that would allow, because with limited competition they don't have to. There was some hope that Samsung would do better, and they might increase their market share quite a bit if they did, but a duopoly still isn't much competition. Samsung is already a big enough player that they have to be weighing the increase in market share against the longer repurchasing cycle. The have to decide if they want to be the heroes and capture that much goodwill from the people paying attention and making recommendations to others, or not. So far so fail. We need more competition.

josephg 4y ago

I started programming in the 90s. The other day I found some of the first programs I ever wrote (in qbasic), and ran them in qbasic 4.5 on dosbox on my Mac laptop. I was running an arm laptop, emulating a modern x86_64 chip, emulating an old i386 chip, interpreting a qbasic program unmodified from 30 years ago. Sound, graphics modes, input events - all of it worked perfectly. I didn’t try running it on windows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just worked there too without even needing dosbox. Backwards compatibility on phones is a joke. Decades of phone software is totally lost to history, impossible to download or run anywhere. The web isn’t much better because old websites go down. But at least modern browsers will still happily render webpages from the 90s just fine.

hattmall 4y ago
Phone software is basically a joke anyway. Is it not possible to emulate phones in the same manner?
- t43562 4y ago
  The point of fixing security holes is sometimes to make it not possible to do certain things which applications may have been written to "expect". There's a bit of not being able to have your cake and eat it.
  - josephg 4y ago
    Tosh. The fact you can’t download old iOS apps from the App Store, nor can you run them on modern 64 bit iOS devices has nothing to do with apps using undocumented APIs.
    - t43562 4y ago
      What about documented APIs that are flawed? I'm not an iOS programmer but let's imagine an API that requires an SHA-1 signature ... so those become insecure and the API is dropped - or an API that offers an SSLv1 connection and that's insecure so it gets dropped. The only way to emulate that would be to re-introduce the problem. Perhaps these are bad examples and the real reasons for Apple to not support something is not so neat - I don't know about them - but FWIW my experience from working at Nokia was that compatibility was a big drag to being able to implement improvements and it's a huge effort to maintain it that doesn't come for free.

graderjs 4y ago

Yeah that is pretty good. You're right about MS being the gold standard for backwards compatibility and forward support. Amazon talks about being the best at customer service, I guess that's how MS excelled in customer service, a key differentiator, super-wide compatibility, long lifetimes.

shepherdjerred 4y ago

The original iPhone had 128MB of memory. The iPhone 6s (releasing in 2015, which is the oldest model currently receiving security updates) has 2GB of memory. The latest iPhone, the iPhone 14, has 6GB. It doesn't make sense for Apple to support devices that aren't even going to be able to run the apps that users want. Not many users are going to want to be using a 6-7 year old device when hardware is advancing and therefore the software is becoming more resource hungry.

AnthonyMouse 4y ago
There are tons of people who use their phones to make phone calls and send texts and read the occasional Wikipedia article. They don't need newer hardware. People who want to play video games on their phones will need newer phones, but even they benefit from being able to sell their old one to the people who don't need that instead of having to throw it away.
- shepherdjerred 4y ago
  You're completely right, but I don't think Apple is targeting those people. Most people don't want an iPhone for just the basics. Aside from that, I'm not sure that even web browsing would be very enjoyable on an iPhone 6s today considering that the performance demands of web pages are getting higher and higher.
- scarface74 4y ago
  And those people couldn’t use anything older than 5 - the first to support LTE. Many networks wouldn’t even support that.
  - AnthonyMouse 4y ago
    Better phones would be designed with upgradeable modems because the phone would be useful for longer than the modem is, but anything with WiFi can be connected to a hotspot. I'm kind of surprised that isn't more popular in general, because the hotspot lets you connect all your devices with one plan for <$10/month if you don't use a lot of cellular data, e.g. because you mostly use it in your car and spend most of your time connected to some other WiFi.

devy 4y ago

I am talking about mobile phones. Unfortunately Microsoft exited Windows phone business. So what are you talking about gold standard?

scarface74 4y ago

This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986? A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. Computers changed leaps and bounds in the first 20 years just like smartphones have. Sure my 2010 Dell Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM can run Windows 10. But a computer bought in 1997 couldn’t run the then current Windows OS in 2010.

josephcsible 4y ago
> Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986? Linux can do something very similar. You can run the latest version of Gentoo Linux today on an Intel 486 from 1989.
- scarface74 4y ago
  The subject was about Microsoft. Could a computer from 1989 be useful with the 2006 web? Flash and all?
AnthonyMouse 4y ago
> This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986? The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later. > A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music? Why not connect the USB and turn it into a NAS or a doorbell camera or any of the things anybody would do with a Raspberry Pi?
- scarface74 4y ago
  > The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later What could you do with it in 2012? A 2010 Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop can run Windows 10. Browse the modern web, mine had gigabit Ethernet, could run the latest version of Office decently and had a 500Gb hard drive. > It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music? Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage. Even back in 2004 - 3 years before the iPhone. I had this https://www.lacie.com/support/multimedia/classic-hd/ https://www.lacie.com/support/multimedia/classic-hd/ It was a much better NAS than trying to repurpose an iPhone with very bad Wifi. You are going to “read text” on a 3.5 inch 320x480 Poot resolution screen in 2023? And you want Apple to continue supporting a “phone” that can’t be used as a phone anymore?

smcleod 4y ago

Which Microsoft phone offered 20 years security updates? They can't even keep the product line alive let alone provide security updates.

_emacsomancer_ 4y ago

Not much of a gold standard really. I've also a laptop built in 2006, it runs [any flavour of Linux I want] and will be supported indefinitely.

petespeed 4y ago
Making parallels with phone software, imagine that edge AI inference becomes a necessity in few years which makes a lot of current hardware obsolete.

mrweasel 4y ago

If you where to start a new software project in the mid-90s and had the benefit of hindsight, there is no argument for not starting on Windows NT. Looking back the "correct" career choice would be a C++ developer on the Windows NT platform, you could build a lifetime career on Windows (unless it fails in the next 10 - 15 years, which I doubt). Sure we have abandon-ware that requires a Windows 95 desktop or a Windows 2000 installation, but bringing a piece of actively developed Windows software forward through the version in the past 25+ years has been relatively easy. I picked Linux/Unix and languages like Python 20 years ago, so it's a little late for me, but if I could go back in time, I'm not sure that Windows and C++ wouldn't have been an equally good choice.

bioemerl 4y ago

Don't credit Microsoft for this, credit the fact that the PC is an open platform based on its legacy as an IBM PC clone. We need a good standardized phone and bootloader system so that software comes back into the control of users on cell phones.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]