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Generally I support this but Apple is a strange target. Many Android devices are supported for timeframes practically measured in months. Meanwhile my iPhone 6
by kkielhofner 3y ago
Generally I support this but Apple is a strange target.
Many Android devices are supported for timeframes practically measured in months. Meanwhile my iPhone 6 from 2014 still gets updates…
- josephcsible 3y agoWhen an Android device stops getting official updates, you can unlock the bootloader and install LineageOS or something to keep getting community updates indefinitely. Apple goes out of their way to keep you from being able to do that on an iOS device.
- rchowe 3y agoI think many more people are going to use the vendor-supported updates than jailbreak their device.
- Zak 3y agoUnlocking the bootloader on many Android devices is not a jailbreak; it's officially supported to varying degrees, though Google also has official support for helping apps sabotage users' ability to run them on unlocked devices so it's a bit of a mixed bag. Ultimately, it's easy and reliable enough for someone who's interested in tech and likes to tinker, but I cannot recommend it for (to use the canonical example) my mother.
- danaos 3y agoLinageOS is sadly available only on the most popular devices.
- nicoburns 3y agoTo be fair, that almost certainly include Apple devices if installing 3rd party OS's would supported. Especially as the Asahi Linux project for macs has already done a lot of the hard work.
- josephcsible 3y agohttps://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ looks like it's hundreds of devices.
- Zak 3y agoIt's hundreds of devices that have been supported at some point. It's far fewer that have official builds of the current version. The Pixel 3 line (2019) for example, doesn't have builds of LineageOS 20 (Android 13), though there are still updates for the LineageOS 19 (Android 12) builds.
- realusername 3y agoI currently have a Galaxy S5 running Android 13 in front of me and it's as snappy as a modern device just bought from the store. The camera is of course the biggest drawback but apart from that, everything is fine.
- hutzlibu 3y agoDid you say this to support parents argument? The Galaxy S5 was one of the most popular phones and I especially bought it some years ago, because LineageOS support was supposed to be good. And it did run kind of ok, but certainly not "as snappy as a modern device just bought from the store".
- realusername 3y agoThe S5 is certainly not a popular phone in 2023 anymore, it's close to 10 years old. And no, it does run as snappy as a modern device with the latest Android flashed to it, I can make a video if you don't believe me. Ironically it's even faster now in Android 13 than it ever was during its prime era.
- kaba0 3y agoWe are talking about old devices, and you brought up a former flagship from the biggest android manufacturer. You definitely would have much less luck with a random huawei.
- realusername 3y agoSure, it's a former flagship but it's also an old device at almost a decade old
- hutzlibu 3y agoI have one lying around with LineageOS. It is not snappy by any metric, that I would use. Otherwise it would be still in use.
- ninth_ant 3y agoGiven that "other" marketshare is consistently measured to be less than 1% of usage observed in the wild -- and LineageOS would be a fraction of that -- I think this is safe to say is not quite relevant to actual consumer behaviour.
- realusername 3y agoYou can't force people to reuse old phones, you can only make laws to make it possible
- gavaw 3y agoOf course you can: you can tax phones until most people can't buy new ones. That's what will happen once these laws are imposed and people keep buying new phones because they don't give a fuck. 100% democratic!
- realusername 3y agoThat's kind of what is done in France as well actually, there's some subside for repairs and I'm pretty sure the money is taken from a tax on new phones. That's not too significant yet but I'm expecting the amounts to increase
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago>you can unlock the bootloader on a laughably small subset of devices >and install LineageOS or something to keep getting community updates indefinitely. false and only partially true for an even smaller subset of devices
- realusername 3y agoA lot of devices have unlockable bootloaders, including a lot of the newest flagships, that one isn't really true. For the lineageos support, you usually need to wait a bit but that's not really an issue since it's likely the manufacturer is still making updates while the device is pending support.
- nicoburns 3y agoApple's software support is pretty great, but that doesn't help you much if the hardware fails.
- ramesh31 3y ago>Apple's software support is pretty great, but that doesn't help you much if the hardware fails. Fortunately it never does. There have been some mistakes in the PC lines, but iPhone has always been rock solid from the first.
- Zak 3y agoEven assuming a defect rate of zero, Li-ion batteries wear out, and people break screens by dropping them.
- ramesh31 3y ago>Meanwhile my iPhone 6 from 2014 still gets updates… Unfortunately it's the end of the line for that era. My SE (the iPhone 6 internals) just got cut off with the iOS 16 update last fall. Sad times.
- ericpauley 3y agoFor feature updates yes. For (most) security updates no.
- alanfranz 3y agoIos 15 still gets critical security updates.
- ohgodplsno 3y agoApple is not a target, it's just Wired sensationalizing titles for views. Everyone is targeted, from gluing batteries to serialising parts.
- kaba0 3y agoWhat’s bad with gluing batteries? I prefer maximizing the capacity of my device, and having waterproofness.
- bdcravens 3y agoWhat is being discussed here isn't software. It's practices like serialization that makes repairing iPhones expensive. If your iPhone 6 needed a repair, the economics would probably drive you to a new iPhone, which is the issue.
- xenospn 3y agoI would argue that keeping parts for an iPhone 6 around (or making new ones) is a much bigger form of waste.
- realusername 3y agoProducing parts is a bigger form of waste than producing a whole new device?
- Arnt 3y agoThere's production: You have to produce a large number of parts in a production run. If you sell a small number, that's a lot of waste. And there's storage: Storing things in warehouses costs money per year. I've heard figures well above $1 per part and year. If you use half a warehouse for storing things that will eventually not be used, you're wasting that warehouse and spending money to do it.
- bdcravens 3y agoVery true, but you can literally buy new transmissions for 70 year old cars. More importantly, the issue of serialization prevents reuse of parts already in the wild, such as buying a broken phone for parts, often in an on-demand way.
- Arnt 3y agoI'll trust you on that. I've heard that it also prevents fake parts, ones made in a similar way to what you can read about at https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=1022 Would you say that's a bigger or smaller effect than not being able to use parts from a broken phone?
- quitit 3y agoTargeting iPhones is deliberate - the changes they're against are the ones which make it hard to hack. If they were truly interested in this goal they'd be targeting devices which aren't made from recycled materials, are poorly constructed, made from environmentally harmful processes and sold cheaply to flood the market (and subsequently landfill.) I look at this cynically: Child safety is the pretext to removing encryption, yet low-hanging fruit to protect children from these harms is not enacted. Easy repairs are the pretext to removing secure hardware, as if normal people are just lining up to do at home repairs (which are already available contrary to the slant of the article, as well a simpler device construction which iFixIt themselves state as easier to repair than earlier models.)
- kibwen 3y ago> I look at this cynically The cynic would say that Apple doesn't give a damn about privacy, only about control. Locking down their devices is only a pretext to prevent competition and abolish general-purpose computing so that they can continue to enact their rent-seeking on their captive population of digital serfs.
- quitit 3y agoSorry no. Consumers arent stupid idiots: they know what they are buying and there is massive choice in the markets these devices participate. Also malware statistics don’t lie.
- kibwen 3y agoImagine being on Hacker News and arguing against user freedom. Do you realize where you are?
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoA lot of devs work for Apple (or Microsoft or TikTok or...); engineering and ethics are totally orthogonal. ;p
- surgical_fire 3y agoBut android devices are typically not hard to root and then install something on them. Apple devices become fancy paperweights over time.
- kaba0 3y agoIt is very far from trivial, plus plenty (most?) devices have no open drivers, or will wipe the proprietary firmware on root, leaving you with much worse hardware.