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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wouldn't object to Apple (or anyone else) charging a reasonable fee for security updates past a certain date. (Where "reasonable" ≠ what Microsoft is charging businesses for Windows 7 support, for instance.)
Making people buy new hardware they don't need just to stay secure isn't merely wasting their money, it's actively harmful to the planet.
I wouldn't expect it to become a cash cow, no, but then neither does continuing to support the iPhone 6S. I do think they could more than break even, and that ought to be enough.
Moreover, companies ought to continue offering security updates because it's the right thing thing to do—for their customers, for their brand, and for the planet.
I’m opposed to Apple charging to update phones, especially if they continue to try to push users to update automatically when you plug in the device at night. It also might be in Apple’s best interest to have the majority of users on the same current OS version, which a paywall might interfere with
Possibly, but I believe this would be interpreted as a regressive tax - charging users with less money more than those with more money for the same software. Maybe it's fair if you consider QA and additional developers, but this is what the public reception would be.
A store in my city (in The Netherlands) replaces an 6S battery for EUR. 39 (US$ 44). They offer a 1 year guarantee. You can do some grocery shopping while they replace it.
Rather it's because it can't supply the same voltage it could when it was new necessitating down-clocking of the CPU and thus the performance slowdown.
I've just bought an iPhone 6S second hand with a new battery. I don't know how fast they used to be, but I've not noticed anything being slow. Animations are silky smooth, and app loading times seem fast too.
I'm also on a 6S and Apple has kept it quite speedy! But, I was playing with a 2016 iPhone SE on iOS 9 about a year ago, and I could instantly tell it was snappier than my 6S on iOS 12.
The iPhone SE had the same CPU, GPU and RAM as the 6S but had far fewer pixels to deal with. That was probably more of a contributor to the snappiness than the iOS version.
In the iOS world, not generally so. Things generally get faster and more optimized (cruft gets removed) in the iOS world (barring some anomalies like iOS 13, but it's gotten back on track).
iOS 7, 11, and 13 are definitely slower than their respective immediate predecessors. iOS 9 and 12 are definitely the opposite.
But while it's hard to prove definitively—largely because highly-out-of-date iOS devices are so rare in the wild—I would posit that even though 12 was faster than 11, 9 and 10 were both faster than 12. That's definitely what I saw in a brief iOS 9 experience I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It's the old frog-in-boiling-water analogy. If it happens slowly, you don't notice.
Negative. The battery on my iPhone 6 was awesome and that phone was slow as molasses. Just switching to a family member's 6S was a dramatic improvement.
Only because I'm involved in this today and have apparently decided to not work on other things while I wait to go to the doctor:
6 -> 6S was a 450MHz clock speed (1.4GHz -> 1.85GHz) jump and doubled the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. That's a significant step up in capabilities. You probably noticed snappier application starts and transitions (more RAM, more apps can stay up at a time, or at least part of them so they start or seem to start faster) and better general performance (that 32% clock speed jump).
Indeed. People like me care when a new phone has 20% more performance because that might mean the difference between being able to emulate a particular game console or not. I can't see why anyone else would care.
Yes but Linux will run on these same specs, while actually being usable (including for web browsing) and even snappy at times. In fact, you could even halve the amount of RAM and still be quite fine. (And 2000 is definitely pushing it. Mid-2000s seems more likely.)
I run Ubuntu on 2017 PC (8700K, 32GB RAM, admittedly, HDD), and it is nowhere near snappy. Boot takes over 2mins until apps actually start to show up, starting new Terminal instance takes over 3sec (if not over 5). Regular programs like VS Code or Firefox are about the same as on Windows.
Software are more bloated than 3 or 5 years ago. Performance with a HDD will suffer as everything has to be loaded to RAM before the CPU runs the code. Put a SSD in this machine and for most tasks your experience will be the same as with a brand new PC.
The beast you mention is even more spec'd than my current main workstation, which has half the RAM, and the entire default install of Ubuntu fits in the cache after boot. The HDD is not to blame; there is something else wrong.
It takes around 2-3 seconds on the first attempt, future launches are instantaneous (cache plus gnome leaves a gnome-terminal-server process floating around).
Sure. I installed the 32-bit version on a "tablet" Lenovo that came with Windows XP, a dual core Centrino, and 2GB RAM originally. Works fine, it's not quite as fast as XP was but no issues. All the pen features work perfectly. If I got the upgrade card to switch it to an SATA SSD and added more memory it would probably be a fully usable machine, thanks mostly to being dual core.
I've installed Windows 10 on HP EliteBook 2730p from 2008, and Toshiba Protege M400 from 2006. For the most part if the machine ran Windows Vista acceptably it will run Windows 10. Disk access is pretty slow. Windows 10 really needs an SSD.
Additionally, on extremely underpowered CPUs, you realistically need to turn off Windows Defender's real-time virus scanner in order for the machine to be usable.
I got an 11" Dell Inspiron with a puny A6-9220e (1.7ghz, 2 core) CPU that is roughly comparable to an Atom, but with a somewhat better GPU. Replaced the HDD with a SATA SSD. Thought it would be a cute little beater netbook.
For all intents and purposes, it's just not usable unless that real-time protection is turned off. Things freeze up for multiple seconds while clicking any button, apps take dozens of seconds to launch, etc. With real-time protection off, it's pretty decent - good enough for web, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, whatever.
Unfortunately, Windows turns real-time protection back on automatically after a certain amount of time. Apparently you need Win 10 Professional or higher to permanently disable it via group policy or something.
>Windows 10 can install on a typical 2005 PC? I'd be surprised if that's the case.
I had it on a 2006 Sony VIAO laptop until last year. It ran better than Windows 8 with 2GB of RAM. Slow without an SSD, but tolerable as downloader/media server.
Some of the OEM drivers (bluetooth, fingerprint scanner etc.) had stopped working in Windows 8 (it was an XP laptop that I upgrade to 7 onward) because Sony stopped supporting them.
The hilarious thing was that in Windows 10 those started working again with builtin drivers from Windows.
I could probably have kept the laptop around longer, but I went on an ecycling binge last year and got rid of a lot of tech crap that was just lying around.
> Windows 10 can install on a typical 2005 PC? I'd be surprised if that's the case.
I have Windows 10 running dual boot on my Dell Inspiron 530s from 2005. It's a Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz. I don't run Windows 10 full time because it's a little sluggish, but it works ok.
(I did upgrade to an SSD + 8GB RAM + Nvidia GT 610 but everything else is 2005).
On the same note, I also have Kubuntu 18.04 on the same machine. Now this is my daily driver. Runs Chrome, plays Youtube etc. and everything else just fine. Things are extremely responsive.
It's almost inconceivable to think I'm using a 15 year old computer in 2020 as my main machine but here we are.
True. The original 530s had a spinning platter drive, 4GB of RAM and Intel integrated graphics.
But the original was also a low-end Dell PC. With these upgrades, it would be a higher-end 2005 machine.
The performance boost was unnoticeable with the added RAM and video card (primarily for driving dual monitors -- the GT 610 was a cheap $70 card, not a high end card by any means). What really changed the performance was the SSD -- which I added much later -- now that was noticeable.
I dont know that "Android" has a two-year policy - certainly all of Google's recent devices were updated longer than that.
Pixel 1: Release Date October 2016, Last Update Dec 2019 (3 years, 2 months)
Pixel 2: Release Date October 2017, still current (2 years, 8 months and counting). Android 11 beta also available. If it is kept updated throughout the 11.0 cycle, that will be ~4 years or so.
Pixel 3, 3a, and 4 are newer but also still current.
Mobile devices are typically underpowered compared to desktop systems. They've caught up to PCs in terms of power (as evidenced by the iPad Pro hardware being used as the basis for the new dev kit by Apple). But the early years, in particular, saw massive annual increases in performance, Moore's Law had stalled on PCs but was alive and well for mobile platforms at that time.
You have to track the actual hardware changes in that time and compare it more to the PC market.
PCs pre-2006 had almost universally 32-bit processors, fixed pipeline GPUs, and maybe 4GB of RAM, probably 2GB. Post 2006, more GPUs got hardware shaders, 4GB of RAM became the baseline, as did 64-bit CPUs (usually with 2 or more cores). Those have all aged reasonably well and can still run most modern software outside of the graphics intensive ones (and even those sometimes if you turn most of the settings down).
The iPhone 3GS (2009) was the first one to have hardware shaders. That right there knocks out the two prior generations from being able to keep up.
The iPhone 5S (2013) was the first 64-bit processor, creating another boundary line for long-term support.
The iPhone 6S (2015) was the first to have > 1GB of RAM (upped it to 2GB), which created another boundary line.
So it's not too surprising that the higher RAM, 64-bit processor, with hardware shader support is the oldest supported iPhone (from this year forward).
Post-2015, the iPhone has improved (obviously if you've switched from a 6S to the 11 like I did) in performance and capabilities, but it's also stabilized in many ways. I haven't dug into the post-2015 phones yet to see if there are any other natural boundaries that will show up as devices drop out over the next 2-3 years, but I'm sure they exist there somewhere. Eventually the OS and the applications will be dependent on specific hardware features that cannot be easily (or efficiently) recreated on old, lower clocked processors.
> Moore's Law had stalled on PCs but was alive and well for mobile platforms at that time.
That's not a very convincing argument. Moore's law was alive and well two decades ago for PCs, but Windows XP (initially released 2001, supported til 2014) was able to run on hardware from 1995 (according to https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_en.htm).
That gets into a difference in motivation as well, but watching hardware changes (for iOS) explains a lot about why different phones have lost support over the years.
Microsoft has a different motivation, in that they were selling Windows and Windows support. Apple didn't sell iOS (and they'd stopped selling OS X sometime in the '00s). MS had a vested interest, then, in supporting all hardware that they could because of businesses (and governments, especially governments) that wanted the latest OS, but didn't want to drop $2-3k on new computers. MS made their money off of the OS, their software on that OS, and the money spent by developers to have access to MS's development tools.
Apple makes their money off of their hardware. So some people like to claim that Apple does a shit job of supporting old hardware, which may be true. They tend to cut off support more readily than many people would like. But in mobile they do a ton better than any Android device manufacturer (who have the same motivation as Apple: selling hardware).
But my point still stands, older versions of iPhones are harder to continue supporting because they lacked hardware capabilities/features of newer ones. From improvements to the GPU, increasing RAM, adding cores, and going to 64-bit. Each of those added capabilities that the OS and app developers took advantage of that created boundary lines that barred older devices. This is more akin to the changes from x86 to x86-64 processors than the 1995->2003 hardware changes (Pentium 1 -> Pentium 4, all 32-bit) and the change from fixed-function GPUs to hardware shader GPUs.
With most technologies, there's a saturation point after which improvements are mostly incremental. For iPhones the saturation point was the 6S. For iPads it was the iPad Air 2.
The 6S is the lowest model that contact tracing apps will run on, and of course the oldest phone the latest iOS will support.
I switched from the 6S to 11 last Christmas, and most of the improvements I noticed were largely incremental -- apart from a handful of things like FaceID and the camera which were significantly better. Ok, the battery is a lot better too. But the 6S didn't feel obsolete at all -- it felt like a current generation phone -- because it was running current generation software.
My iPad Air 2 runs the latest iPadOS and still works great -- not sure when I'll make the jump to a newer iPad.
p.s. the only thing the iPad Air 2 lacks support for is Apple Pencil. But now that I'm into fountain pens and high quality notepads, I don't really miss it. Also if I need to create Martin Kleppmann-esque hand-drawn architecture diagrams -- which I do occasionally -- I just use any number of rubber-tipped styluses (many inexpensive options on Amazon) with the Sketches app. Gets the job done.
Kleppmann himself uses Fifty Three and Maglus styluses I believe. I'm way cheaper -- I just use the styluses that I get as swag from tech conferences.
I agree with your main thesis, but I'm going to disagree on the inflection/saturation points you chose.
I think it's closer to the iPhone X and the iPad Pro, 2nd-generation, or thereabouts.
Compared to the devices you cited, raw speed and graphics power improved massively in the A-series chips during the years in question, the camera system is almost unrecognizably better as is the neural-net processing and computational photography.
The displays improved markedly as well.
I agree with you that the 6S is not obsolete, and that's a credit to Apple, but my current iPad Pro is miles ahead of the Air 2, which I owned as well. This has enabled me to do all kinds of new things with the device, and do them better. I wouldn't be able to go back. The last couple iPad Pros are 3x faster in Geekbench single-core than the Air 2, and more than 4x faster in multi-core.
It's going to start to get hard though, moving forward, to make that kind of massive improvement. We already have 120Hz refresh, we now already have raw CPU power that is superior to almost all current laptop computers including MB Pros, we now have about as good of a screen as can be imagined, laws of physics will start to bar further major physical camera improvements, etc.
Apple's already at the 5nm mode with its silicon; there are only a couple steps left before transistor sizes are just a few atoms across.
You've listed multiple technical improvements, but overall the user experience difference between a 6S and an 8 isn't nearly as big as the difference between the 5S and 6S.
The biggest noticeable difference probably being RAM. The 6S and 8 (non Plus) both have 2GB ram, while the 6 and 5S only had 1GB.
Interesting. Just curious, what do you do on your iPad Pro that you wouldn't have been able to do as well as on the iPad Air 2?
I've been eyeing the iPad Pros for a while now but have never been able to pull the trigger. Just curious what use cases would push me over the edge.
I spend most of my time on the iPad on consumption activities like Twitter, Youtube, Prime Video, etc. My iPad is my travel device -- I don't even own a personal laptop anymore.
My content creation activities include writing stuff on Google Docs, editing photos synced from my iPhone, light 720p video editing on iMovie and of course drawing architecture diagrams on Sketches.
For me, the 12.9" ipad pro screen is just gorgeous. It is an absolute pleasure to read on and side-by-side apps feel right. On the regular ipad, side-by-side felt cramped. For media consumption, the big screen and the the stereo speaker is night and day. I just picked up the new macbook air and I use the ipad pro as a second screen and it feels natural. The one thing you want to think about is the increased weight.
I mean, the apple pencil can be a nice touch which apparently isn't compatible with the 2.
But mostly it's just a more pronounced form-factor of what the iPad is all about, in particular in comparison to an iPhone.
The bezel to body ratio gets cut in half from about 30% of the body, to about 15%. It's kind of crazy when you think of it like that (instead of screen-to-body), as almost 1/3rd of the body is bezel on the Air models. On the original it was even 37%)
At around 15%, you're approaching the iPad's true form-factor: just one big screen. That's pretty wonderful for consuming content. All this screen real-estate is what sets it apart from say an iPhone for content-consumption, while retaining the notion of it being a lightweight mobile-device you can throw in your bag and whip out easier than a laptop e.g. on an airplane, in bed, in the bus, on a trip, on the couch.
But it's not like you can do all that much extra. For me personally though, reading a digital version to a paper newspaper or even a website always felt a little bit cramped on a regular iPad. It feels most websites and magazines are about 13 inches. For example, The Economist is about 13 inches diagonal. It's very natural to read on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Quite alright on the 11 inch, but just a tad too small on the 9.7 inch, requiring more frequent zooming in or alternative views.
The iPad air 3(rd gen) by the way is already a pretty decent middle-ground, at 10.5 inches, nearing a 20% bezel, and very fast for years to come.
But the Pros also have Promotion, which gets you 120 hertz refresh rates. Makes everything buttery smooth. Really not a big deal, but it's one of those things that made me feel like I was using some futuristic device you'd expect in a Star Trek universe. But again, really not a big deal, it's just a feeling. Usually there's some lag, some stutter, some delays. With 120 hertz it feels as if we're moving towards a world in which there is no UI lag and the tech is really futuristic. Combined with an insaaaanely fast device, the only time you get confronted with any latency is when the internet is involved. Not something that'd make me buy the Pro, but it's fun to know that this'll be coming to all normally-priced devices in a few years. You also get more colours, it gets brighter, and there's truetone display. The display is really something else, I'd check it out in stores and see if it matters.
The rest don't matter much to me. FaceID, four really great speakers, ultra fast, better camera, LIDAR, neural engine, I don't really care for. USB-C is a nice touch as I find it's always around for charging. And the magic keyboard is a nice touch together with the pencil, google docs should be a lot nicer with the keyboard and drawing diagrams with the pencil, but then it starts to get quite expensive.
Right. Once you hit a certain feature set (certain clock speed, core count, hardware shaders, minimum RAM, RAM speed, storage speed and capacity) everything after that becomes much smaller improvements. You won't see doublings of the numbers anymore, instead you'll see much smaller percentage increases that, while important in the long run, aren't going to impact users significantly.
So you initially got some major bumps (0%, 50%, 33%, 50%) then it starts slowing down until the jump from 6S to 7 (about 33% again), then it's just creeping up each year. Core count makes a major jump from 7 to 8. But after the 8 there really is no major improvement in the CPU itself (with respect to these raw numbers) so most users won't see a major difference between them on that front.
(NB: I took these numbers from Wikipedia, I'm assuming I read them correctly as I just threw this together in a couple of minutes. There's probably a mistake or two, and I skipped some versions like 5C, XR, and 11.)
Yes, but I got tired of making the tables :) I've pointed that out in some other comments, that was a massive jump and is probably a major reason the 6S is still supported.
Indeed the 6S definitely marks an interesting moment in the iPhone timeline. I'm still using mine after buying, and then returning, an 11 Pro last fall. I've had iPhones since 2009 and had, admittedly, very high expectations for the upgrade. When it didn't thrill me out of the box (as had previous upgrades), I kept using it for a week before deciding to just repair my 6S and save the $1000.
I had a 6 instead of 6S and started getting stutter and slight lags in the UI after the latest ios update around 2018. It was getting annoyingly slow at that point but i was happy with a 7 Plus until i got a good deal for a X recently.
I have the 53 stylus but it isn’t supported anymore that I know of, is Kleppmann still using it as a pointy stick or is there some way to get the old functionality back?
The 6S is the point when a phone got "fast enough". It was fast enough to be useful as a mobile phone without being frustrating to use. Everything since has been gravy, but the 6S is still surprisingly useful as a mobile device.
The 6S (see my other comment near here) was almost 30% faster than the 6, and doubled the RAM to 2GB. Those two factors alone probably made the jump seem so significant, ignoring any other changes they may have included in it. The 7 got another major clock boost, but kept the RAM (7 Plus had 3GB though) so that would've been another noticeable improvement, though mostly in games and such, many applications probably didn't see much change between the 6S and 7.
> Mobile devices are typically underpowered compared to desktop systems.
Early PCs/home computers were also underpowered compared to workstations. The difference is: buyers expected them to be supported for a much longer time and expected developers to (if somehow possible) to write sufficiently fast code that also runs decently on "outdated" computers.
You wouldn't have run Windows 95 on your circa 1987 Tandy, there were massive changes in that time as well that impacted supported hardware when new OSes and software came out.
Mobile phones (smart phones in particular here) saw changes in 1-3 years that took 5-10 years on PCs. That has to be taken into consideration when trying to understand why a piece of hardware isn't supported by the latest OS or software.
A _substantial_ portion of the desktop PC market was running on 512MB of RAM in 2006[0]. Even today a significant portion of budget computers people buy have 4GB which is just barely on the edge of enough to run Windows 10 and a couple modern websites.
> I haven't dug into the post-2015 phones yet to see if there are any other natural boundaries that will show up ...
I suspect TouchID will be the next one we hit, but that is going to be at least four years off because iPhone SE #2.
The neural engine may be a feature cut-off after that, where there are just too many features and services being run on device which can't be done on older hardware.
Other than that, I suspect Apple will still institute a vintage/obsolete lifecycle for phones - just choosing to drop support for phones where the hardware hasn't been sold in a certain amount of time (say five years), official replacement parts like batteries are no longer being made, etc.
+1 on Windows doing this for forever. I regularly use devices that are 10+ years old: printer (10), scanner (11), webcam (10), professional audio interface (12). I can stil install old music software to work with old songs I've recorded/produced.
Every Windows machine but 1 in my house is >5 years old. The 1 that is newer was just built this year to replace a machine with an >11 year old motherboard (CPU/RAM had been upgraded since). It does help that I went 100% SSD and touch (for laptops) when Windows 8 came out.
I don't think there will ever be another OS that has the same level of backwards compatibility that Windows does. It is just too hard. Support longer than iOS on an ecosystem more diverse than Android. Windows users expect it though.
And every new release of windows things break for some group of users, people complain about how quality control at microsoft has really gone downhill lately, and microsoft rolls out a bunch of fixes over time for all those users.
The last android device I bought was a Samsung tablet. It was sort of near the end of its sale life, and I got a good deal. However it received only one update after that - 6 months later. It was basically supported for only 6 months. The final straw was the last update rendered the tablet almost unusable - it added several seconds of latency to almost every operation. I'll never buy a Samsung device again.
Note that the Google branded hardware does seem to be supported for much longer. My old Nexus 7 got updates for many years - but the hardware itself was terrible and I couldn't even charge it after the third replacement's micro usb port failed - another typical Android experience, I'm afraid.
Google are not much better. They supported my Pixel C for 2 years after I bought it (2017-19); and it was more expensive than a Samsung. I basically got scammed. Never again. I've given up on disposable tablets.
> It’s crazy to think supporting a five year old device is now considered ground-breaking.
I wonder if this is slowing down, or speeding up? At some point it feels like we'll find a equilibrium for phones, similar to what we have for general purpose computers...
It was my work computer. It had 8GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, a beautiful 1920x1200 display (as opposed to the 1920x1080 display that became the norm shortly thereafter), gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n (?) wireless. It has a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz processor
It’s running Windows 10. Besides the processor and spinning hard drive, those are still decent specs for modern computers.
An iPhone from that era had a single core 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM with a 480x320 display. A modern iPhone has a 2436x1125 display, 4GB of RAM, 6 core processor - 2 at 2.66Ghz, 4 at 1.82Ghz.
That’s not to mention that the 2008 iPhone doesn’t support 4G.
Now let’s go back further. A PC from 1996 wouldn’t support an operating system released in 2008.
I bought my iPhone 5S used in December 2013, and sold it in mid-2017, in part because I expected that iOS 11 that year would drop support. Nope; both it and iOS 12 supported the 5S, meaning that it could run the newest iOS until September 2019. As mentioned elsewhere, iOS 12 still gets security updates today.
(Based on the difference between the purchase and sale prices I ended up paying about $10 a month to use the 5S for 3.5 years. I sold it after replacing it with an SE that I made money on at purchase because of an insane promotion at Best Buy.)
No one uses 20 year old desktop hardware, unless it's somehow miraculously managed to survive (in a cupboard, ran once a month to do accounting) or it's absolute must control system for a nuclear ship (where actual hardware is replaced every 2 years, but with same old version).
Everyone else who runs XP installs it on new hardware.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
I had a 6S Plus until earlier this year when the port went on the fritz and car play started acting erratically. That was pretty much my sole reason for upgrading.
Performance wasn’t great for a while but after the whole battery kerfuffle last year I took it into the store to get the battery replaced for $30 and it felt like a brand new phone after that.
Like the siblings say, you may have some other problem. I have an iphone 7 that I always keep up to the date. I didn't notice any performace problem, and my battery is supposedly degraded (the settings page says I should change it).
I’ve had the 6S since shortly after launch and it still runs smooth. The only issue is the battery which I can probably get replaced if I wanted to ditch my portable battery. Prior to this, I had an iPhone 4 for many years. While it wasn’t apparent at the start, switching to the Apple ecosystem for my mobile devices has ultimately saved me a lot more money compared to my friends and family that use Android phones.
My iPhone 8 has been my daily driver for 3 years now and runs like fresh out of the box. Battery degradation is the only issue but that's just natural wear and tear.
The update cycle on Android is not so straightforward. For instance RCS messaging, a newly added feature, is also available on Pixel 1 and older devices because such updates are directly sent via playstore to all the phones. So you don't really need full OS updates like in iOS.
Also, you are forgetting that Android phones drop in price almost immediately, so it's not fair to compare launch prices. For instance my Pixel 4 was essentially 74000JPY just 2 months after launch compared to 120000JPY iPhone 11 Pro year round.
You lose major OS updates after 2 years and security updates after 3. You really shouldn't be using a phone that's no longer getting security updates even if the apps themselves are getting updates.
Even at those prices, the iPhone is still a bit less expensive per supported year.
Pixel phones get 3 years of full OS updates, not 2.
The difference comes out to be negligible 666JPY/year. And Samsung phones get even cheaper after launch, couple that with their 4 years of security updates their cost/year is substantially lower than Pixel or iPhone.
> Who in their right mind wants to be stuck with the buggy .0 version of an OS?
Android updates have changed over time, they didn't do 9.1 or 10.1 updates at all. All bug fixes are pushed alongside security patches. And Pixel 1 got 4 updates on Android 10, last one being especially a month late due to fixing of all final bugs.
Two years of OS updates with an additional year of security updates is not the same thing as three years of OS updates.
As far as the Pixel 1, the people I knew who installed Android 10 on it regretted the decision. The couple of patches they got before getting cut off definitely did not iron out all the bugs.
> Two years of OS updates with an additional year of security updates is not the same thing as three years of OS updates.
I don't see what your problem here is? Every Pixel gets 3 year of FULL OS UPDATES. Not 2 years OS + 1 year Security updates.
> As far as the Pixel 1, the people I knew who installed Android 10 on it regretted the decision. The couple of patches they got before getting cut off definitely did not iron out all the bugs.
Android folks tend to moan and complain a lot. Just look at /r/Android. All my non-tech-enthusiasts friends using Pixels have never complained about anything.
If Google has indeed changed their support policy, it's going to take more than an article asking if Google has done so to serve as a citation.
>If Google is indeed adding another year, it would at least move closer to matching the lengthy span of time that Apple’s iPhones continue to receive new features and operating system updates. Security updates are also promised for three years, but that was already the case with the original Pixels.
Also, you'll have to excuse me if I take the word of people I know when they say getting Android 10 right before they were cut off from all other updates resulted in a buggy mess.
At least Pixel 1 is one of the officially-supported lineageos devices, with very straight-forward installation step. Once google stop supporting it, jumping to lineageos is easy enough to do and will give the device another years of life. Nexus 6, an almost 6 years old device, is still officially supported by lineageos, so Pixel 1 will likely get supported well past 5 years as well (assuming the maintainers are motivated enough to keep working on it).
On the other hand, if you use a less popular device, your option will be much more limited as the device get older.
What's the point if you can't update the OS and if you do you have to jailbreak it again, every time, until you reach a point where you device is not supported or there's no jailbreak available and you are back to the doorstop?
Unofficial Android builds are fully supported, maintained and updatable builds, they simply are not released by the phone vendor or Google.
Most Android phones don't have a 'supported' version of LineageOS. It's very hit or miss, usually miss. Hence why my Nexus 6 and my girlfriend's Pixel have supported versions but none of the other Nexus or Pixel phones do. Or the HTC One m8 has a supported build but no other HTC phones do.
"Warning: The Google Nexus 6P is no longer maintained. A build guide is available for developers that would like to make private builds, or even restart official support."
The devices link you included links to legacy builds/devices that are discontinued. The only Google phones currently supported on LineageOS are the Nexus 6 and Pixel 1/1XL. As another data point, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7 have no active support either while the S4 and S5 do.
Apple's upcoming iOS version -- not just current, but the one that's not even released yet -- supports all iPhones released in the last 5 years. There's just no comparison.
I have got my Android phone with twice the resolution of iPhone 6S for $100. And recently updated (after long delay) to Android 10. Another year to go or more.
I went for Xperia 10. Camera sucks but otherwise the phone does the job remarkably well. 90% functionality for 10% price and I don't need to worry about loosing or breaking it.
Of course the phone is de-Googled and runs on stock European Android without operator's crapware which is also nice about Xperias. Full factory install takes 15 minutes with newflasher.
I do not enjoy iPhones and Apple's miserable software in general. I am running ChromeOS/debian on my Macbook Pro (the last good model) for years now.
I think a key (deceptively absent) point of that comparison is that the premium price on Android is coming from replacing it after 3 years. So basically from years 3-5 you are using a 2018 Pixel 3 as opposed to a 2015 iPhone 6S Plus.
Performance of the cheapest iPhone available today is greater than the most expensive android phone, so this is a moot point. You need to upgrade the Android hardware just to maintain parity.
I find it surprising that the 5S has had 6 more updates since it was dropped from support when iOS 13 was released. The last was just over a month ago.
I hope that this is a sign that Apple will continue to provide security updates even after they no longer provide feature updates.
Of course, the upgrade to the 1st gen SE is the obvious path for those who had a 5S so continued upgrades aren't so important, but it might be relevant with the 1st gen SE if Apple don't release a smaller iPhone 12.
Correct and updated my original post. My point still stands about resolution, though. The 6s has a 4.7" 750p screen, so doesn't exactly compare to the 5" 1080p Pixel screen. But even with that screen size difference, the iPhone wins. Handily.
I finally bit the bullet and upgraded from a SE, compromising on the size of the phone. I already notice increased wrist stress and place more sideways weight than is optimal on my pinky (to hold the phone up but also be able to reach single-handed).
So, knowing how life works, we can guarantee that Apple will release a small form factor phone as part of their next offering ;)
Try doing a battery replacement. I bought one off Amazon for $20 and it came with all the necessary tools. The process was pretty easy if you watch a few guides on YouTube beforehand.
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!
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.
This might be a contributing issue, but it seems this is far from the only reason why Android has such shit upgrade lifetimes.
Android itself doesn't have a strict requirement for an updated kernel. It will typically run fine on the original kernel tree the SoC launched with.
OnePlus occasionally does this, they are currently rolling out Android 10 for the OnePlus 5 and 5T, based on the original kernel tree. That's a 3 year old device (and I hate that I'm using a 3 year old device as my best example)
It seems like most Android vendors simply choose not to offer extended updates.
Android device manufacturers make their money when you buy a new device. Apple, on the other hand, makes money when you buy apps (in addition to making money on device sales I'm sure). They have an incentive to make sure that the latest OS runs on as many devices as possible, so that developers can release their apps to a wider audience, and so that Apple can make more money. Google wants apps to run on as many devices as possible, so that's why they bend over backwards to support older devices with their SDK. Samsung doesn't have any incentive to update the Galaxy S6 since that won't bring them any additional revenue.
I have no ability to contribute to this technical analysis, other than to say Apple would never expect an average user to know what a "kernel" is or why it has anything to do with their phone being out of date. I'm sure 100% valid issue here but this is like telling a customer about your back office problems while ignoring their needs. Phones and computers are nice when they're as simple to use as a toaster.
Google doesn't expect an average user to know that either. The difference from such a user's perspectice is just that Android devices become unable to run the most recent software more quickly than iOS ones. The post above is discussing the underlying causes of that. You are on a website called "Hacker News".
Kinda explains why Nvidia was probably the best when it came to Android updates from my experience. They made the SOC themselves and had access to the drivers
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.
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.
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.
I don’t think your car comparison is a fair one. You don’t see your iPhone nag you to take it to an “Apple shop.” They usually update while you sleep.
My Tesla does the same thing, it’s a car that literally gets software updates while I sleep. And it’s AMAZING. I get new features (sometimes a new alarm system, one time a dash cam system, another time Spotify and once it made the car actually faster) for free! There’s no taking it to the shop or nagging or anything. This is an amazing feature.
On the android side you literally have phones that don’t get critical security patches - that’s the scariest type of “it doesn’t work anymore so you need to go buy new hardware” because you don’t even know you’re at risk.
Android devices not getting OS updates after two years, especially $800 android phones, is obscene. There’s no way to defend that.
In my family we have both iOS and Android devices. All Android devices are Android One devices receiving updates.
I wouldn't want unpatched old devices on my network.
Android One is quite successful from what I can tell. This is the reason.
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+.
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.
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 ...).
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.
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.
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.
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?
EDIT2: 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:)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;)
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)
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.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadWindows 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.
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.
When exactly did that happen? The first iPhone received 3 major updates, more than most Android phones even today.
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.
Nokia phones are in my opinion way too underrepresented on the market for the support they give.
[1]https://www.apple.com/environment/
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who is writing those security updates? How do they get paid?
Making people buy new hardware they don't need just to stay secure isn't merely wasting their money, it's actively harmful to the planet.
Moreover, companies ought to continue offering security updates because it's the right thing thing to do—for their customers, for their brand, and for the planet.
It's not just the battery. Newer OS's are just slower.
That's the problem. :)
I'm also on a 6S and Apple has kept it quite speedy! But, I was playing with a 2016 iPhone SE on iOS 9 about a year ago, and I could instantly tell it was snappier than my 6S on iOS 12.
In the iOS world, not generally so. Things generally get faster and more optimized (cruft gets removed) in the iOS world (barring some anomalies like iOS 13, but it's gotten back on track).
But while it's hard to prove definitively—largely because highly-out-of-date iOS devices are so rare in the wild—I would posit that even though 12 was faster than 11, 9 and 10 were both faster than 12. That's definitely what I saw in a brief iOS 9 experience I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It's the old frog-in-boiling-water analogy. If it happens slowly, you don't notice.
Performance capability is reduced if the battery is worn, see iOS Settings > Battery > Battery Health.
6 -> 6S was a 450MHz clock speed (1.4GHz -> 1.85GHz) jump and doubled the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. That's a significant step up in capabilities. You probably noticed snappier application starts and transitions (more RAM, more apps can stay up at a time, or at least part of them so they start or seem to start faster) and better general performance (that 32% clock speed jump).
As far as I know most current laptops fail to do that.
Anyway, the point of the article isn't that five years is all that long, it's that Android's two-year policy is despairingly short.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...
1 GHz CPU, 1GB ram, 800x600 display, 32GB drive. Those are not 2005 specs, those were easily around in 2000.
The boot time (to the first app running) is likely due to Nvidia blob, but who knows?
It's harder to look up RAM numbers, but AMD launched a 1600MHz CPU (and a few others above 1GHz) in 2001.
I got an 11" Dell Inspiron with a puny A6-9220e (1.7ghz, 2 core) CPU that is roughly comparable to an Atom, but with a somewhat better GPU. Replaced the HDD with a SATA SSD. Thought it would be a cute little beater netbook.
For all intents and purposes, it's just not usable unless that real-time protection is turned off. Things freeze up for multiple seconds while clicking any button, apps take dozens of seconds to launch, etc. With real-time protection off, it's pretty decent - good enough for web, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, whatever.
Unfortunately, Windows turns real-time protection back on automatically after a certain amount of time. Apparently you need Win 10 Professional or higher to permanently disable it via group policy or something.
which is what we are comparing here.
I had it on a 2006 Sony VIAO laptop until last year. It ran better than Windows 8 with 2GB of RAM. Slow without an SSD, but tolerable as downloader/media server.
Some of the OEM drivers (bluetooth, fingerprint scanner etc.) had stopped working in Windows 8 (it was an XP laptop that I upgrade to 7 onward) because Sony stopped supporting them.
The hilarious thing was that in Windows 10 those started working again with builtin drivers from Windows.
I could probably have kept the laptop around longer, but I went on an ecycling binge last year and got rid of a lot of tech crap that was just lying around.
I have Windows 10 running dual boot on my Dell Inspiron 530s from 2005. It's a Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz. I don't run Windows 10 full time because it's a little sluggish, but it works ok.
(I did upgrade to an SSD + 8GB RAM + Nvidia GT 610 but everything else is 2005).
On the same note, I also have Kubuntu 18.04 on the same machine. Now this is my daily driver. Runs Chrome, plays Youtube etc. and everything else just fine. Things are extremely responsive. It's almost inconceivable to think I'm using a 15 year old computer in 2020 as my main machine but here we are.
What everything else? You kept the CPU, motherboard, and case? That's not a "typical 2005 PC" anymore.
But the original was also a low-end Dell PC. With these upgrades, it would be a higher-end 2005 machine.
The performance boost was unnoticeable with the added RAM and video card (primarily for driving dual monitors -- the GT 610 was a cheap $70 card, not a high end card by any means). What really changed the performance was the SSD -- which I added much later -- now that was noticeable.
Pixel 1: Release Date October 2016, Last Update Dec 2019 (3 years, 2 months)
Pixel 2: Release Date October 2017, still current (2 years, 8 months and counting). Android 11 beta also available. If it is kept updated throughout the 11.0 cycle, that will be ~4 years or so.
Pixel 3, 3a, and 4 are newer but also still current.
Android 8.0 (released August 2017) was updated this month: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/refs/tags/...
You have to track the actual hardware changes in that time and compare it more to the PC market.
PCs pre-2006 had almost universally 32-bit processors, fixed pipeline GPUs, and maybe 4GB of RAM, probably 2GB. Post 2006, more GPUs got hardware shaders, 4GB of RAM became the baseline, as did 64-bit CPUs (usually with 2 or more cores). Those have all aged reasonably well and can still run most modern software outside of the graphics intensive ones (and even those sometimes if you turn most of the settings down).
The iPhone 3GS (2009) was the first one to have hardware shaders. That right there knocks out the two prior generations from being able to keep up.
The iPhone 5S (2013) was the first 64-bit processor, creating another boundary line for long-term support.
The iPhone 6S (2015) was the first to have > 1GB of RAM (upped it to 2GB), which created another boundary line.
So it's not too surprising that the higher RAM, 64-bit processor, with hardware shader support is the oldest supported iPhone (from this year forward).
Post-2015, the iPhone has improved (obviously if you've switched from a 6S to the 11 like I did) in performance and capabilities, but it's also stabilized in many ways. I haven't dug into the post-2015 phones yet to see if there are any other natural boundaries that will show up as devices drop out over the next 2-3 years, but I'm sure they exist there somewhere. Eventually the OS and the applications will be dependent on specific hardware features that cannot be easily (or efficiently) recreated on old, lower clocked processors.
That's not a very convincing argument. Moore's law was alive and well two decades ago for PCs, but Windows XP (initially released 2001, supported til 2014) was able to run on hardware from 1995 (according to https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_en.htm).
Microsoft has a different motivation, in that they were selling Windows and Windows support. Apple didn't sell iOS (and they'd stopped selling OS X sometime in the '00s). MS had a vested interest, then, in supporting all hardware that they could because of businesses (and governments, especially governments) that wanted the latest OS, but didn't want to drop $2-3k on new computers. MS made their money off of the OS, their software on that OS, and the money spent by developers to have access to MS's development tools.
Apple makes their money off of their hardware. So some people like to claim that Apple does a shit job of supporting old hardware, which may be true. They tend to cut off support more readily than many people would like. But in mobile they do a ton better than any Android device manufacturer (who have the same motivation as Apple: selling hardware).
But my point still stands, older versions of iPhones are harder to continue supporting because they lacked hardware capabilities/features of newer ones. From improvements to the GPU, increasing RAM, adding cores, and going to 64-bit. Each of those added capabilities that the OS and app developers took advantage of that created boundary lines that barred older devices. This is more akin to the changes from x86 to x86-64 processors than the 1995->2003 hardware changes (Pentium 1 -> Pentium 4, all 32-bit) and the change from fixed-function GPUs to hardware shader GPUs.
Strictly speaking, Apple sold iOS for a while. iOS 2 was a $10 paid upgrade for iPod touch users.
The 6S is the lowest model that contact tracing apps will run on, and of course the oldest phone the latest iOS will support.
I switched from the 6S to 11 last Christmas, and most of the improvements I noticed were largely incremental -- apart from a handful of things like FaceID and the camera which were significantly better. Ok, the battery is a lot better too. But the 6S didn't feel obsolete at all -- it felt like a current generation phone -- because it was running current generation software.
My iPad Air 2 runs the latest iPadOS and still works great -- not sure when I'll make the jump to a newer iPad.
p.s. the only thing the iPad Air 2 lacks support for is Apple Pencil. But now that I'm into fountain pens and high quality notepads, I don't really miss it. Also if I need to create Martin Kleppmann-esque hand-drawn architecture diagrams -- which I do occasionally -- I just use any number of rubber-tipped styluses (many inexpensive options on Amazon) with the Sketches app. Gets the job done.
Kleppmann himself uses Fifty Three and Maglus styluses I believe. I'm way cheaper -- I just use the styluses that I get as swag from tech conferences.
I think it's closer to the iPhone X and the iPad Pro, 2nd-generation, or thereabouts.
Compared to the devices you cited, raw speed and graphics power improved massively in the A-series chips during the years in question, the camera system is almost unrecognizably better as is the neural-net processing and computational photography.
The displays improved markedly as well.
I agree with you that the 6S is not obsolete, and that's a credit to Apple, but my current iPad Pro is miles ahead of the Air 2, which I owned as well. This has enabled me to do all kinds of new things with the device, and do them better. I wouldn't be able to go back. The last couple iPad Pros are 3x faster in Geekbench single-core than the Air 2, and more than 4x faster in multi-core.
It's going to start to get hard though, moving forward, to make that kind of massive improvement. We already have 120Hz refresh, we now already have raw CPU power that is superior to almost all current laptop computers including MB Pros, we now have about as good of a screen as can be imagined, laws of physics will start to bar further major physical camera improvements, etc.
Apple's already at the 5nm mode with its silicon; there are only a couple steps left before transistor sizes are just a few atoms across.
The biggest noticeable difference probably being RAM. The 6S and 8 (non Plus) both have 2GB ram, while the 6 and 5S only had 1GB.
I've been eyeing the iPad Pros for a while now but have never been able to pull the trigger. Just curious what use cases would push me over the edge.
I spend most of my time on the iPad on consumption activities like Twitter, Youtube, Prime Video, etc. My iPad is my travel device -- I don't even own a personal laptop anymore.
My content creation activities include writing stuff on Google Docs, editing photos synced from my iPhone, light 720p video editing on iMovie and of course drawing architecture diagrams on Sketches.
But mostly it's just a more pronounced form-factor of what the iPad is all about, in particular in comparison to an iPhone.
The bezel to body ratio gets cut in half from about 30% of the body, to about 15%. It's kind of crazy when you think of it like that (instead of screen-to-body), as almost 1/3rd of the body is bezel on the Air models. On the original it was even 37%)
At around 15%, you're approaching the iPad's true form-factor: just one big screen. That's pretty wonderful for consuming content. All this screen real-estate is what sets it apart from say an iPhone for content-consumption, while retaining the notion of it being a lightweight mobile-device you can throw in your bag and whip out easier than a laptop e.g. on an airplane, in bed, in the bus, on a trip, on the couch.
But it's not like you can do all that much extra. For me personally though, reading a digital version to a paper newspaper or even a website always felt a little bit cramped on a regular iPad. It feels most websites and magazines are about 13 inches. For example, The Economist is about 13 inches diagonal. It's very natural to read on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Quite alright on the 11 inch, but just a tad too small on the 9.7 inch, requiring more frequent zooming in or alternative views.
The iPad air 3(rd gen) by the way is already a pretty decent middle-ground, at 10.5 inches, nearing a 20% bezel, and very fast for years to come.
But the Pros also have Promotion, which gets you 120 hertz refresh rates. Makes everything buttery smooth. Really not a big deal, but it's one of those things that made me feel like I was using some futuristic device you'd expect in a Star Trek universe. But again, really not a big deal, it's just a feeling. Usually there's some lag, some stutter, some delays. With 120 hertz it feels as if we're moving towards a world in which there is no UI lag and the tech is really futuristic. Combined with an insaaaanely fast device, the only time you get confronted with any latency is when the internet is involved. Not something that'd make me buy the Pro, but it's fun to know that this'll be coming to all normally-priced devices in a few years. You also get more colours, it gets brighter, and there's truetone display. The display is really something else, I'd check it out in stores and see if it matters.
The rest don't matter much to me. FaceID, four really great speakers, ultra fast, better camera, LIDAR, neural engine, I don't really care for. USB-C is a nice touch as I find it's always around for charging. And the magic keyboard is a nice touch together with the pencil, google docs should be a lot nicer with the keyboard and drawing diagrams with the pencil, but then it starts to get quite expensive.
https://phonesized.com/compare/#483,1422,1423
Let's just look at the CPUs:
So you initially got some major bumps (0%, 50%, 33%, 50%) then it starts slowing down until the jump from 6S to 7 (about 33% again), then it's just creeping up each year. Core count makes a major jump from 7 to 8. But after the 8 there really is no major improvement in the CPU itself (with respect to these raw numbers) so most users won't see a major difference between them on that front.(NB: I took these numbers from Wikipedia, I'm assuming I read them correctly as I just threw this together in a couple of minutes. There's probably a mistake or two, and I skipped some versions like 5C, XR, and 11.)
Geekbench does a far better job of capturing the massive improvement in Apple's CPUs in recent years. And the GPU improvements have been even larger.
Early PCs/home computers were also underpowered compared to workstations. The difference is: buyers expected them to be supported for a much longer time and expected developers to (if somehow possible) to write sufficiently fast code that also runs decently on "outdated" computers.
Mobile phones (smart phones in particular here) saw changes in 1-3 years that took 5-10 years on PCs. That has to be taken into consideration when trying to understand why a piece of hardware isn't supported by the latest OS or software.
Windows 95 (formally) did run on a PC that has an Intel 80386DX CPU of any speed and 4 MB of system RAM:
The 80386DX CPU was launched in October 1985:https://www.technologytips.com/windows-system-requirements/
The software/application story is certainly better on desktops, I'll grant you that.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/YiMobdC.png
I suspect TouchID will be the next one we hit, but that is going to be at least four years off because iPhone SE #2.
The neural engine may be a feature cut-off after that, where there are just too many features and services being run on device which can't be done on older hardware.
Other than that, I suspect Apple will still institute a vintage/obsolete lifecycle for phones - just choosing to drop support for phones where the hardware hasn't been sold in a certain amount of time (say five years), official replacement parts like batteries are no longer being made, etc.
Every Windows machine but 1 in my house is >5 years old. The 1 that is newer was just built this year to replace a machine with an >11 year old motherboard (CPU/RAM had been upgraded since). It does help that I went 100% SSD and touch (for laptops) when Windows 8 came out.
I don't think there will ever be another OS that has the same level of backwards compatibility that Windows does. It is just too hard. Support longer than iOS on an ecosystem more diverse than Android. Windows users expect it though.
Windows users are an ungrateful bunch.
Note that the Google branded hardware does seem to be supported for much longer. My old Nexus 7 got updates for many years - but the hardware itself was terrible and I couldn't even charge it after the third replacement's micro usb port failed - another typical Android experience, I'm afraid.
I wonder if this is slowing down, or speeding up? At some point it feels like we'll find a equilibrium for phones, similar to what we have for general purpose computers...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Latitude-E6500.12268.0.ht...
It was my work computer. It had 8GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, a beautiful 1920x1200 display (as opposed to the 1920x1080 display that became the norm shortly thereafter), gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n (?) wireless. It has a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz processor
It’s running Windows 10. Besides the processor and spinning hard drive, those are still decent specs for modern computers.
An iPhone from that era had a single core 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM with a 480x320 display. A modern iPhone has a 2436x1125 display, 4GB of RAM, 6 core processor - 2 at 2.66Ghz, 4 at 1.82Ghz.
That’s not to mention that the 2008 iPhone doesn’t support 4G.
Now let’s go back further. A PC from 1996 wouldn’t support an operating system released in 2008.
It was released September 2013 (6.5yr), discontinued September 2014 for the 64GB version (5.5yr), March 2016 for the 16, 32GB versions (4yr).
(Based on the difference between the purchase and sale prices I ended up paying about $10 a month to use the 5S for 3.5 years. I sold it after replacing it with an SE that I made money on at purchase because of an insane promotion at Best Buy.)
Everyone else who runs XP installs it on new hardware.
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?
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.
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.
RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm even running the iOS 14 Developer beta on my 8 Plus right now and it still runs like a dream.
Check battery health?
Performance wasn’t great for a while but after the whole battery kerfuffle last year I took it into the store to get the battery replaced for $30 and it felt like a brand new phone after that.
I'd suggest checking your battery health and maybe doing a reset.
Also, you are forgetting that Android phones drop in price almost immediately, so it's not fair to compare launch prices. For instance my Pixel 4 was essentially 74000JPY just 2 months after launch compared to 120000JPY iPhone 11 Pro year round.
Even at those prices, the iPhone is still a bit less expensive per supported year.
The difference comes out to be negligible 666JPY/year. And Samsung phones get even cheaper after launch, couple that with their 4 years of security updates their cost/year is substantially lower than Pixel or iPhone.
Also, they cut off that particular Pixel from further updates right after switching to the .0 version of the new OS.
Who in their right mind wants to be stuck with the buggy .0 version of an OS?
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/4/16403922/g... Every Pixel has 3 year of support mentioned in it's support page.
> Who in their right mind wants to be stuck with the buggy .0 version of an OS?
Android updates have changed over time, they didn't do 9.1 or 10.1 updates at all. All bug fixes are pushed alongside security patches. And Pixel 1 got 4 updates on Android 10, last one being especially a month late due to fixing of all final bugs.
As far as the Pixel 1, the people I knew who installed Android 10 on it regretted the decision. The couple of patches they got before getting cut off definitely did not iron out all the bugs.
I don't see what your problem here is? Every Pixel gets 3 year of FULL OS UPDATES. Not 2 years OS + 1 year Security updates.
> As far as the Pixel 1, the people I knew who installed Android 10 on it regretted the decision. The couple of patches they got before getting cut off definitely did not iron out all the bugs.
Android folks tend to moan and complain a lot. Just look at /r/Android. All my non-tech-enthusiasts friends using Pixels have never complained about anything.
>If Google is indeed adding another year, it would at least move closer to matching the lengthy span of time that Apple’s iPhones continue to receive new features and operating system updates. Security updates are also promised for three years, but that was already the case with the original Pixels.
Also, you'll have to excuse me if I take the word of people I know when they say getting Android 10 right before they were cut off from all other updates resulted in a buggy mess.
On the other hand, if you use a less popular device, your option will be much more limited as the device get older.
My mom still uses my old Galaxy S2, which probably costed 50 euros/year over almost 10 years and supports Android 10 thanks to LineageOS.
An iPhone's faith is to become a doorstop no matter what.
Unofficial Android builds are fully supported, maintained and updatable builds, they simply are not released by the phone vendor or Google.
That's the original point
you can' update your phone, because it's not yours
If you're happy, good for you, but it's not ok.
In Europe the most popular smartphone brand is Samsung.
Lineage supports basically all of their models.
Also: Nexus support is not bad
Nexus 6 and 6p are supported
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#google
They even support all my Xiaomi devices, including a very old Mi pad second edition.
It's probably the OS that actively supports more devices in existence right now.
iOS doesn't even support all the iPhones.
The devices link you included links to legacy builds/devices that are discontinued. The only Google phones currently supported on LineageOS are the Nexus 6 and Pixel 1/1XL. As another data point, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7 have no active support either while the S4 and S5 do.
This is where you should look: https://download.lineageos.org/
Apple's upcoming iOS version -- not just current, but the one that's not even released yet -- supports all iPhones released in the last 5 years. There's just no comparison.
Exactly.
One supports just a few devices, the other supports hundreds.
One is free, the other is not.
Guess which is which.
if Nexus 6P is not supported is Google's fault
Nexus 6P was a bad phone, with sever problems, it was discontinued after a year and you could obtain a compensation if you had one that was faulty.
Still the community tried to support it
They decided wasn't worth anymore
The community is people, Apple is not people.
So it is more like 25$ per year for Android.
Not a perfect phone but good enough.
Of course the phone is de-Googled and runs on stock European Android without operator's crapware which is also nice about Xperias. Full factory install takes 15 minutes with newflasher.
I do not enjoy iPhones and Apple's miserable software in general. I am running ChromeOS/debian on my Macbook Pro (the last good model) for years now.
Guess that makes me odd guy..
Personally, I dont think CPU performance has been an important factor for years on midrange and higher phones, but that's a matter of opinion.
The six got cut off after "only" five years because it didn't have enough RAM to run the current version of iOS.
Now the original SE and 6s will also receive that sixth year of support.
If you bought that original iPhone SE, that works out to $67 per supported year.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/22/apple-issues-ios-...
best. smartphone. ever.
(I actually just dug mine out to give it another go, but the battery is nuked from sitting untouched for eighteen months :\ )
I do still really hope so though...
So, knowing how life works, we can guarantee that Apple will release a small form factor phone as part of their next offering ;)
>the 5.4-inch iPhone won’t be much bigger than the original (2016) 4-inch iPhone SE 131 x 64 mm (5.15 x 2.51-inches)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/05/07/apple-ip...
I'm die hard fan of SE (SE ONE of course!) and form factor is perfect for me.
I was paid to buy my SE (https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/6lyjyl/cheap_pr...)!
You can buy a poco f1 (Snapdragon 835) for 250$ that will perform just as well as any pixel.
For that price you can buy a new flagship killer every year.
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.
If anything, a new update changing anything in the UX might be met with negativity.
So OEMs have even less reasons to care sadly.
Android itself doesn't have a strict requirement for an updated kernel. It will typically run fine on the original kernel tree the SoC launched with.
OnePlus occasionally does this, they are currently rolling out Android 10 for the OnePlus 5 and 5T, based on the original kernel tree. That's a 3 year old device (and I hate that I'm using a 3 year old device as my best example)
It seems like most Android vendors simply choose not to offer extended updates.
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.
It absolutely impacts the reasoning for some iPhone and Android users.
edit: added words to the last sentence
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.
My Tesla does the same thing, it’s a car that literally gets software updates while I sleep. And it’s AMAZING. I get new features (sometimes a new alarm system, one time a dash cam system, another time Spotify and once it made the car actually faster) for free! There’s no taking it to the shop or nagging or anything. This is an amazing feature.
On the android side you literally have phones that don’t get critical security patches - that’s the scariest type of “it doesn’t work anymore so you need to go buy new hardware” because you don’t even know you’re at risk.
Android devices not getting OS updates after two years, especially $800 android phones, is obscene. There’s no way to defend that.
Android One is quite successful from what I can tell. This is the reason.
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.
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-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 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:)
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.
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).
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.
I don't understand why they wouldn't keep issuing security updates when they already did the hard part of the major update.
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...
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.
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.
† 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.
I went to an Apple Store and they just cleaned-up for me (walk-in). I bet the same applies to the headphone jack ;)
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.