Hilarious how 2016 is "*extremely outdated*". Only in tech does anyone think this. :)
Fashion industry would like a word
I have lots of clothes that I wear that are much older than that. And most that are newer than that use designs from long before 2016. They are only newer because the older ones wore out from use. I can only think of a few articles in my closet that could be identified definitively as newer than 2000 by appearance. I imagine this is true for many men, less often for women I suppose.
A lot of perishables (food, medicine, gasoline) get "outdated" pretty fast. Sure, as a concept, lettuce will stay with us for a long time. But an individual Bibb head won't last long, even under perfect conditions.
The very few incumbents that control the modern web infrastructure have (for quite some time now) been intentionally breaking old technology, with absolutely no plans to change this for the future.
It's planned obsolescence, plain and simple. It's just surprising how frequently they obsolete things now. I fully expect them to "train" all the good little consumers out there to replace their phones every year lest most of the web stop working on them.
As someone who had to endure IE6 on the web, I disagree.
There is a difference between "planned obsolescence" and "not wanting to spend a disproportionate amount of development time making sure old devices work".
If 6% of Android users globally are on an ancient OS version, how many man-hours would it be sensible for my to spend testing that our systems work for them? How many of those 6% are likely to be paying customers for us?
Where could we source enough Android devices with pre-7.1 OS versions? How much time and money would that cost?
The small market share of old device isn't a given. There aren't few of them out there because we, the developers, make them unusable and people have to switch.
Most people don't care about having the latest specs, they want the latest features. If new features only ship to devices that are < 2 years old (like Android updates), older devices will quickly become obsolete. The hardware is still fine - I'm writing this on an almost exact 7 year old OnePlus 3 running a barely year old version of Android and the vast majority of things perform perfectly fine. Even the camera is perfectly fine even for modern standards now that I've switched to a modern camera app by tricking it into thinking my phone is a Pixel.
If we stop making old devices obsolete, dealing with old devices will be a lot easier.
The issue here is software, not hardware. An old Android device would be perfectly capable of running the updated root store if the manufacturers bothered to update it. IE6 also could be switched from, at least theoretically.
> If 6% of Android users globally are on an ancient OS version, how many man-hours would it be sensible for my to spend testing that our systems work for them? How many of those 6% are likely to be paying customers for us?
From a purely financial point of view, I agree. But it stills sucks for the 6% and indirectly this is one of the reasons for electronic waste.
In a way there is a long tail of consumers with smaller incomes and living in countries with weak currencies that benefit from computer hardware and software and services that are developed targeting wealthier consumers but still have to deal with the fact they aren't really the target market.
It depends; there’s also fashion or entertainment; in some aspects also education, law and I’m sure many others.
Compare a 2016-era phone with the current equivalent (e.g. iPhone 7 vs iPhone 14) and there is a huge difference, many of the specs. are 4x those of the older model.
Don't get me wrong, I really don't like the whole 'disposable hardware' culture, but you can't deny there has been a huge leap in tech over the last ~7 years.
There are computing devices that are not mobile phones or laptops that also depend on encrypted connections. Usually these devices last a lot longer.
But usually these other devices can also update their software, it is quite unique for the android operating system to run old and unupdatable software.
Or they should if they are web facing. For security reasons at least.
If your whatever device doesn't support a root CA from 2016, chances you should not let it connect to anything over the internet. Most bad software comes from "hardware" vendors, who think they can handle them the same as any other physical part. Stop blaming software people.
I don't agree, I have an iPad Mini4 from 2015, and that's still good for most day to day tasks (although it feels slower than in the beginning thanks to iOS updates being less optimized).
Same with my mid-2014 13" MBP. While my M1 MBP is a lot faster for things like building complex C++ code bases, for stuff like web browsing the old Intel Mac doesn't feel much different.
Compared to the incredible hardware progress between 1995 and 2005 (where a 2x increase per year was quite normal) it definitely feels like we're on a plateau since around 2010.
I know people who refuse to watch movies that are older than a couple of years.
It is in tech terms. Just deal with it.
Phones from 2016 are ancient and you can buy newer phones dirt cheap. The Samsung A series costs almost nothing, same with all the cheap Redmi phones and Oppo and whatnot.
You can do it but that doesn’t mean you should.
Throwing away a phone whose hardware may be perfectly working, but its manufacturer decided to be too cheap to use anything but walled-garden components, feels like an utter waste of resources.
(By walled-garden components, I mean chips whose suppliers make it difficult or impossible to develop an open-source driver.)
The typical tax-related depreciation term for computer hardware is 5 years over here. Which is already half of what typical office equipment is expected to last. After which it is usually resold or given away to goodwill. 2016 is just 7 years back, so there will quite certainly mobile phone where the tax writeoff period isn't even through which are affected by this. Truly hilarious!
Its not even 10 years old. The hardware is aging but the only reason its “outdated” is due to a software lifecycle forced by one or more corporate entities. These are an obvious tool to force sales/upgrades.
I’d be nice if this community weren’t so quick to defend planned obsolescence, especially at a 2-3 year pace.
Note that in this particular case you can still use alternative browsers that come with updated root CAs.
Be nice if government out in laws to force at least a decade of "consistent operations" (it works as well at year 9 as year 1).
Theres really no reason that can't be done, it's not like phones have the amount of variety as PCs and MS and Linux have both managed to handle some much older hardware.
When talking about security updates it most certainly is. You can’t blame LE for that. That responsibilty lies squarely on manufacturers who are not even maintaining the bare minimum of security patching like an up-to-date root cert list.
I just checked and my own phone is affected by this. Coincidentally I just started getting the "everything feels so slow" thing that seems to inevitably happen to old devices.
That is even worse when you consider that tech brands often design their full lineups with the buying-power of rich countries in mind, their lowest option each year often being way too expensive to the lower classes on developing or poor countries, so there they often advertise previous years' models as the official budget option (often two, three or four years behind). As result that "2016" is more like 2018 in many countries, that is, someone may have walked into a reputable store, bought a "brand new" phone in 2018, and then it will be unable to access those websites just 5 years later.
I dunno, mayonnaise in my fridge from 2016 is probably extremely outdated.
No no, that's just cave aged mayonnaise, and it sells for a premium. Throw in a blurb about hand crafted artisan, and it'll be a rocket to the moon looking sales chart. You just gotta know how to sell it. These aren't outdated Android devices, they're vintage legacy devices.
I was walking round our Hq last week and noticed some monitoring screens. Running the code I wrote back in 2005. Code that is now old enough to drink.
Still works.
I agree. Personally, nothing from 2016 counts as "extremely outdated" to me.
It's not that 2016 devices are outdated per se, as a counter point, see the iPhone 7, which runs now on iOS 15.x from 2021, but still receives updates [1].
It is cheap Android handsets stuck on Android 6 Marshmallow or worse that never have received an OS upgrade.
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213811 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213811