This is a bizarre comment. Apple supports their hardware for a very long time and builds everything to last. Show me an android phone that still works well after eight years of daily use. Most fall apart within two.
Still rocking my MI A1 after 5 years, and allowed to actually replace its parts too without signing into proprietary repair program which requires apple to remotely activate your new installed parts. I hate when useful things that work just fine are artificially reduced to e-waste. Now if we could go back to the nokia times, when swappable batteries were thing and spare parts were actually sold by the manufacturers.
Still have my original Galaxy Note 1. Original battery, screen recently replaced with a third party one for cheap. Calls and texts work fine, navigation is OK, I don't care about the rest.
Do you still get software updates from the manufacturer?
Also, you do understand that you are probably the exception to the rule that in general iphones seem to get support longer than android phones.
In my opinion, in general, unsafe (outdated) devices should not be used as they are a huge attack vector because there are so many of them.
Despite being an Android One phone, it was released with Android 7 but got stuck in Android 9 (Android 13 being the latest version). That makes it two years of updates. Yeah, the Android ecosystem is pathetic like that.
Last update was 2020, but I don't really care about the updates nor "security", which is just blanket term for lockdown, aka security for the vendor, not your security. Android allows me to do things and does not treat me like a criminal in addition to feeling like I actually own the device.
I don't know if I would keep some of my most private information on a device that has not had security upgrades for two years. Especially when exploits like [CVE-2022-20465](https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-2046...) which bypass the lockscreen exist.
I wouldn't keep anything important on a phone no matter what phone it is. And even then if I did, I would use separate encryption app for storing such data.
even if that was true, they'd rather have a vulnerable device than a brick. just like they'd rather not have their 5+ year old car seized and their 5+ year old house demolished for their own safety
My sister's Galaxy S3 Mini is alive and well. Just needed a battery replacement.
Same goes for my SO's Galaxy Ace 4 Style, which she left lying there for an iPhone SE, but might return to the Samsung because the iPhone, while being a great device overall, will now require a battery replacement procedure because it wasn't designed for doing that at home and the battery is very much dead.
My Galaxy S8 is humming along nicely even though I subject it to a lot of environmental stress daily by e.g. showering with it in hand.
Bottom line is iPhones aren't that special in this regard anymore.
The main issue on Android for longevity isn't hardware. It's that you rarely get software updates - or even security updates - beyond a couple of years. An 8 year old device may be completely usable based on the hardware, but still not be able to run or download new apps, all while being a walking botnet.
You'll have to use my imagination, since I don't believe there's a way to attach a photo, but pretend I'm showing you the Android phone that's currently in my pocket.
Maybe some budged non-flagship Android. You ought to compare iPhones to flagship Android devices. Because iPhone is a flagship device. Don't spread misinformation.
Is there any source for this that is not a YouTube video? Last week I tried to unlock my old iPhone SE to use it as a data logger, but I forgot the passcode. At least I thought so because the device wouldn’t unlock. Am I affected by this or did I just really forget the code?
The crux of Hugh Jeffreys' argument is that sometimes, upgrading reduces the performance of the device. Therefore, a lot of people want to keep old devices on old versions of iOS, so as to maintain the "out-of-box experience" / performance.
I don't know that I have an opinion on this, but that's what Hugh Jeffreys' argument seems to be.
I don’t care about the “2022 experience”, whatever that is supposed to mean, I care about having an experience as close as possible to the phone that I purchased (I think I bought this last one in 2018 or so).
This is mostly superstition and anecdotes with no real data to back it up.
Yes, a fresh iOS install sometimes causes some slowdown for a day or two maybe when the local-only ML models go through your local-only data and recalculate the new stuff it now knows how to do in the background.
After that it's going to be as smooth as it ever was.
No, to prevent serious battery degradation due to overuse from changes in iOS, allegedly. And as if that's an excuse - if that was the real issue, they could have provided it as an option.
If a new update slows down your phone on purpose, for whatever reason, and hides that from you, people understandably might avoid new updates.
The battery was already shutting down when the processor was being overworked as the battery degraded. This is physics. The update tried to alleviate that. Would you rather your phone shut down or slow down?
This part from the first paragraph is important for you to understand:
> slowed down the performance of older iPhones in order to stop them shutting down without warning
This didn’t affect someone whose phone was working perfectly. It changed it so your phone got slow instead of crashing.
The reason some people held off on updates was that a bunch of confidently wrong people went around saying this was planned obsolescence and never went back to apologize for giving false advice.
Upgrading probably does reduce performance slightly, but is it a noticeable difference; or is it something people say because of degraded batteries and go "hurr durr update bad"?
It's somewhat perceptible. The worst, for me, is the search for apps, which visibly lags. My battery has been replaced and shows 99% capacity. This is an iphone 7 with the latest ios upgrade it can get, 15.6.something IIRC.
I think another issue is that apps do tend to get more sluggish, since they probably expect to be running on newer hardware. If you stick to an older ios version, if they're deemed incompatible, they won't update. But as soon as you're on the latest ios, you get the app updates, too, if you've left the default on.
Google maps, for example, is clearly more sluggish than before. Apple maps is practically unusable. Youtube crashes reliably (but works fine in the browser...)
I had a 3rd generation iPad which became borderline unusable after updating to iOS 7 or something like that (they added the custom keyboard function then and after that update the onscreen keyboard took seconds to appear)
That was before the battery went bad.
I think there is a psychological aspect here as well due to confirmation bias — all caches will be wiped during an update so even due to that the first few hours/days may be slightly slower. If people make this assumption they can later easily find evidence for that (or its negative as well, if they would try to look for that)
What apps are these? Have you considered paying the developers for continued support? They are obsolete! Surely there are alternatives, don’t let stuff drag you back to the past.
It’s a meditation app that works perfectly fine. I keep a device around just to run it.
No, I didn’t consider funding the developers to update the version as that’s a lot of money. Especially for something that completely meets my needs.
It’s not dragging me to the past, it’s a functional tool that I acquired in the past and works into the future. Is my socket set I bought 30 years ago dragging me into the past because it’s obsolete?
I avoid generalizations and extreme thinking when it’s inappropriate.
Apple discontinued support for 32-bit apps in iOS 11. There are a large number of apps that never got updated to 64-bit. Because Apple controls which iOS versions can be installed on a given phone at a given time, it's impossible to upgrade a phone from the OS version it shipped with to any other version besides the latest.
I saw this a while ago and I'm confused about this issue. It seems like you can upgrade to a newer iOS version and activate just fine. Is there a specific reason this is not option?
Because in the past, Apple has marked iOS versions as compatible even where the hardware performance isn’t sufficient for reasonable use. Since Apple also doesn’t support downgrades of iOS versions, users are reasonably wary at taking Apple at their word for compatibility.
Just once, for one device. It was one of the iPad Airs I think. It had a way too high resolution display for the CPU and really suffered from OS updates.
It's not a problem anymore since most Apple devices are ridiculously overpowered and they have separated iOS from iPadOS.
Many people mistakenly attribute what the OS does when it detects a degraded battery as an example of this, since it appeared in an update and wasn't properly explained (and no opt-out was provided initially).
It's hard to fault them honestly, most people don't understand how degraded batteries affect their device, they think it's just about how many hours the device lasts on a full charge, when in reality it's much more complex.
I’m also not sure why “just once” is supposed to buy back trust. They still don’t allow for iOS downgrades, so the underlying issue hasn’t been addressed.
Different case. That was Apple assuming that people would rather have a slower phone that worked instead of a fast phone that just randomly shut down.
Took them like two weeks to release a patch where you can pick which option you like.
As someone who had an iPhone that claimed to have 30-40% battery and then just shut down completely when trying to make a call, I really would've preferred the slowdown option.
This is literally a company doing something nice for a change (fixing old hardware’s bug that its aging battery can’t output the necessary output, so decrease the necessary voltage because a phone literally restarting in the middle of the day is just useless), though objectively with terrible PR getting hated for it.
There was literally no malice here, a very serious bug that obsoleted an otherwise out-of-support device of their got fixed. Sure, the best option is the one that was later implemented (people can choose which option they prefer) thanks to governments(!), but let’s not sell this story as something else.
This upgrade will break any 32 bit iOS apps you might have on your device, and you have absolutely no recourse and downgrading is not permitted. I've lost access to several _paid_ apps due to this.
How many apps are really still like this? Surely it would be better to pay a few quid to developers that keep their builds current? Or are you bothered because you can’t use a £1 app for over eight years or something?
The way I see it, the complaint here is that Apple does not say why they do this (regulatory violations in outdated iOS versions). As long as there is an upgrade path or some alternative for data retrieval, I do not see the issue, but this rather clickbaity video does not make this clear.
The upgrade path in this scenario is clicking the Upgrade option when having the phone plugged in to iTunes or Finder. This however needs a bigger computer to do it.
What's your opinion about the Samsung Galaxy Note 7? That's the one whose battery tended to explode, maybe ten years ago. Samsung offered to replace them, and eventually bricked the remaining devices.
Let’s add for completeness’s sake that most Androids will literally wipe their proprietary firmware for e.g. their cameras, giving you a very expensive device that takes much shittier photos then it is capable of. They are not at all like laptops where you can freely change the OS, the only devices like that are Pixels.
That would merely incentivize locking down general purpose devices until they can no longer be considered general purpose. Perhaps by restricting the set of programs that can be installed. Probably you'd end up with some kind of "app store" that... wait...
Thank the Lord iphones need to be "activated". That way if you steal mine you can't use it. If I wasn't interested in this kind of security I wouldn't buy an iphone: everybody has that choice.
Android also has activation lock, except it is implemented locally and you can still unlock the bootloader if you don't want that feature. You can complete the initial setup on a new device and get to the launcher all completely offline.
There are also zero technical obstacles to implementing the activation lock such that you can use your own server. All that this requires is little bit of non-volatile storage that is not cleared during factory reset. Which is what modern Android devices already have.
What you mean is the FRP lock and it's not local because you have to log into a Google account to complete activation of the phone. You can factory reset or change ROMs or do whatever you want and the phone will still refuse to work until you log in using the last Google account the device had.
That's not how it works. If the bootloader is unlocked, it won't work, obviously — and that's a prerequisite for flashing custom ROMs. Unlocking the bootloader on modern devices requires enabling the unlock in developer settings in the stock OS, and this requires unlocking the device.
what do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.
A bricked iPhone is worth way less than a functional one, making the victim much less of a “juicy” target (lower odds of a violent mugging, broken car window, home burglary, etc). It’s a perfectly rational decision to want iPhones to be known as worth 5% of their retail value if stolen. Less funding for organized criminal cartels, too.
Of course they do. Until third party repair shops created a huge market for stolen iPhone parts, stealing them was significantly less attractive than other phones.
Well, they do. iPhones are still valuable after being parted out, although Apple has been combating this by requiring parts to be registered by them (and shamed for much of the same on HN)
What does that look like? Stolen parts will always be cheaper.
The warehouses full of people in Shenzhen tearing down millions and millions of stolen iDevices would still be chugging along, inserting stolen parts into the supply chain.
Apple enforcing DRM on parts is very much a pro-consumer move, steadily taking us towards a world where a stolen iPhone will be worth nothing.
Stolen parts are always going to be cheaper unless the cost of producing the parts is lower than the disassembly cost. That could happen for screws but it’s never going to happen for the advanced components which are why the devices are actually being stolen.
> he will still get some money for it from a fence.
From my understanding of the activation lock, the phone is effectively bricked - no-one can ever use it again. No fence is going to pay for a useless device.
This is a problem for people that refuse to update their devices from ios 9.
It is all related to changes in the activation protocol, which was utterly broken and allowed all kinds of iCloud bypasses for activation; update it to a newer version, and it uses the newer protocol and no problem at all.
This is a nine-year-old device that can still be updated.
it was so good if it was security update only and not f-ing up existing functionality - on top of poor security release fixes - and forcing on the user unrelated and never needed other things as well. this 'security' rasoning for update thing is a big fat lie! do security updates only then!
Most software nowadays is network centric and talk to other computers. Protocols evolve for reasons beyond security, and thus, updating your customer device is required to keep inter-operability
If they do security updates for obsolete versions of software this means a huge amount of resources testing and developing patches against it that could be spent improving current software.
Improving must mean here making even bigger and more complex pile of whatever, making it more vulnerable by complexity and new, barely tested or thought through new versions. We could live without that easily!
They could divert resources from "improvements" easily then and consequently making the job of ensuring the quality of already sold vulnerable products to live up to the minimum standards! Testing much much less of existing and broadly distributed products by not making so many obsolete versions so rapidly, putting resources where it counts instead of flashy pile of superficial sh*t! Something truly and reliable useful at last!
Remember that in many cases security fixes involve architectural improvements. You can get those by installing the free system updates and those don’t break existing functionality so it’s understandable that they don’t double the workload by patching very old releases, especially since that’s paying more to have a slower phone with fewer features.
security is both real, and potentially an infinite excuse to require new purchases, new validation, new terms of services and anything else that the party in control deems 'required', at any interval they can get away with...
Because it is not a standalone computer but a computer which is permanently connected to the internet and where most software was built specifically for connected use cases or where non-connected use-cases don’t even make sense.
So, unless you’re using your old iPhone like an early 90’s PC without a modem or any other kind of networking it is perfectly reasonable to expect you to update it if you want it to talk to cloud services
Cool, but then what use is smartphone without internet access? It just becomes an oversized and inefficient clock. Especially, since on iPhones you can't easily sideload apps offline like you can on Android.
It's a normal security practice to prevent untrusted apps from calling home. The problem is Apple thinks you are ok to trust them after reviewing their binary code for 120 seconds.
They aren't saying disable internet for the whole phone. Just a select few apps. Some android roms have this feature (or rooted users can use AFwall) and it's amazing. You can install a game, block its internet, and the game can't track you, show you annoying ads, or show you full screen newsletters fetched from the internet.
Edit: you already can disable internet for the whole phone just leave it on airplane mode for eternity. But as you said, the use cases are quite limited
> But for that you can also use a Nokia 3310, not spend hundos on an iPhone.
You don't have to spend anything if you already have that device. For instance, it could be a hand-me-down from a relative. In my family, we do have an older Android 2.x device which is currently being used as just a phone (for calls, SMS, and yes, an oversized clock); it has passed through the hands of three people already, and only the first of them used the smartphone functionality. After that, it was factory reset and never connected to a data network again (because it would then try to update all built-in apps... and that tiny phone simply has not enough storage for all these updates). It works perfectly as a phone.
Why would someone refuse to update? Stolen iPhone comes to mind…
Edit: keep in mind, in OP’s video they are refusing to update even after their device is essentially throwing its hands up and saying “upgrade or I’m a brick now” and they prefer the brick for some reason. The performance of a brick is pretty bad…
This hasn’t been true for years. Since like iOS 12 or so it tended to be the same or faster. The problem is that the first time it boots after an upgrade things like photo reindexing happen and that didn’t use to give you a warning, so people would say it’s slower and never retract that statement when the problem went away the next day.
Older devices are def slower. I have an iPod Touch 5, iphone 6, iPhone 7, 8 Plus, SE 2020, 13 Pro, iPad 4, iPad Air 3, iPad Air 4. There’s differences with the older devices. They’re clearly slower. Starting with iPhone 8 Plus, it doesn’t matter as much.
I've mentioned this in another comment but: this update will permanently disable any 32 bit iOS apps you have on your device with no recourse or downgrade possible.
So, reason not to update: you like using software you've paid for.
I remember when iPhones first truly became useless if stolen. Tech support forums were filled with sob stories about why a particular person couldn’t activate their iPhone, begging for a secret bypass. They would make up sob stories because otherwise people would just call them a thief and ignore them. But the tech support forums usually called them a thief anyway because most of the time, they were, and part of the cost of ownership of these devices is keeping them up to date and remembering the activation password…
Anyway I’m sharing this because the “my ancient unsupported 32 bit applications will fail”, while a minimally valid reason not to upgrade, reminds me a bit of the sob stories people would tell to get tech support for their stolen iPhones…
>They would make up sob stories because otherwise people would just call them a thief and ignore them.
You're being unfairly harsh here. Most likely they bought it off the second hand market because in many countries people can't afford the prices of new iPhones, and then realized it's a stolen phone.
Sure, but unless the police catches the crook an seizes their money then return it to the victims, then the person who unknowingly bought the stolen good can't magically un-buy it and get their money back.
This makes the unwary buyer a victim of the thief as well. All the more reason to brick stolen devices and make them unsellable by the thief so they can't victimize more people.
I am reminded of a line from G.K. Chesterton: ‘Thieves respect property; they merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.’
I think the harshness is on point. We've gotten to a point where people's lives are deeply connected inside their devices and people need to understand that it's not "just a phone" anymore.
Just like it's the buyers responsibility to make sure they aren't purchasing a stolen vehicle, it should be equally the buyers responsibility to ensure they are not purchasing a stolen phone. Proof of a clean IMEI would be a start. The problem stems from most countries outside the US not taking the IMEI database seriously and so in some countries it's possible to activate a phone with a reported stolen IMEI.
I personally think Apple's choice to restrict activating stolen iPhones is a smart move overall. If countries won't use the IMEI database, this is the next best thing. It's not our responsibility to "unlock" phones for people because they didn't perform due diligence.
>We've gotten to a point where people's lives are deeply connected inside their devices and people need to understand that it's not "just a phone" anymore.
Then it your responsibility to have backups no? Forget theft, if you keep all your most valuable data on just your phone alone, you're one accident away from loosing it al, via so many ways other than theft.
>Just like it's the buyers responsibility to make sure they aren't purchasing a stolen vehicle, it should be equally the buyers responsibility to ensure they are not purchasing a stolen phone
Now you're moving the goalposts. A phone is not a car. If my car is stolen, I can't just walk into a Ford-Store and buy a new one on the spot for $1000.
What about stolen bikes? Police don't bother investigating such things and they'll basically laugh you out of the police station.
A growing number of people only have a smartphone. This is probably alien to most people here, but I've had more than a few friends who haven't owned a laptop or tower in years, if they ever did. It's only recently that you could even connect a USB mass storage device to most phones to do an offline backup. I'm not sure apps for that even exist.
>A growing number of people only have a smartphone.
Yes, so do I and everyone else, but that's why most people pay for cloud backup services (iCloud, etc) or set up their own if they're tech savvy enough. So when they break their phone, their data is still safe.
Still, this has nothing to do with theft. You can easily drop your phone on the ground or have it fall in the ocean on vacation. If your phone is such a valuable tool to you that you can't live without then it's up to you to get various insurance policies (phone insurance, a backup phone, etc.)
You could connect mass storage to an Android Phone for a very very long time if not from the start. Certainly from the beginning if you consider SD cards to be mass storage.
And you could physically connect mass storage to an iPhone since before the iPhone (iPod days, same connector, same adapter) but unless it was jailbroken you could do almost nothing with it
In life sciences, knowledge stagnates and rots. An undergrad-level Pathophysiology textbook published 10 years ago would probably mention that Alzheimer’s dementia is caused by the formation of plaques in the brain.
This might not be apparent to engineers who see everything as a formula waiting to be solved from first principles.
I am in life sciences! While you can find some examples of things becoming outdated you don’t need entire new textbooks. Addenda/errata can be appended to the document. Or the instructor can point out the error and teach the new “truth”
You’re right; smaller-scale changes can be captured in errata.
However, some things move pretty quick and warrant updates to the whole document especially when the document is used a handbook in critical situations. The ACLS protocol manual, updated quinquennially, comes to mind.
Some textbook publishers are intentionally making small changes from year to year to intentionally make the life of those using second hand text books miserable.
Corporations have long since realised that often their biggest competition comes from their own products therefore we now have planned obsolescence (someone who already has your product and doesn't want to buy another) and the war on secondary markets (someone other than you selling your, old, product).
Just because your drop saw burns out in 10 years that doesn't automatically make my code obsolete in 10 years.
I can make a same counter argument using the same logic. I have a car that runs fine well past 10 year mark. Why can't I expect a software do the same?
You did not depend on the manufacturer to do that maintenance. The manufacturer could have even gone out of business and you could still fix or find someone to fix your car.
You however depend on the original developer to click that build button because proprietary software. If it was FLOSS, you could.
But don't worry, thanks to DRMed parts you won't be able to fix anything on your car either (or phone, or any other smart device) without the involvement of the original manufacturer. Ain't property wonderful when the manufacturers intelectual property has precedence over your physical property?
I think you misunderstood the analogy - the app is the car, not the parts. Once you correct that it’s easy to understand why the rest of your message doesn’t make sense.
Because software is more like the song on a record than a record player: I have songs that were bought on vinyl, transferred to cassette, then transferred again from vinyl to CD, then from CD onto my computer as digital files, then copied from device to device for the last 2 decades. The record player, in contrast, died years ago.
Software's even better! Since it was inherently digital to begin with, I'm able to make leaps like that with ZERO data loss! The only thing that kills software permanently is planned obsolesce. It doesn't matter what the lifetime of your saw is, that's like arguing that you should be free to shoot nonagenarians because most people don't live that long anyway. It's not about how long other stuff lasts, it's about the fact that it was perfectly capable of going on living until it was killed.
Fortunately, unless you're doing hacky bullshit, changing from 32 to 64 bit should be trivial. Unfortunately, companies go out of business, so can't be relied on to update their own software into perpetuity. Fortunately, it probably doesn't have to the original company to update the software, because it should be a straightforward update of some build parameters. Unfortunately, proprietary, source-unavailable code is the norm in commercial software development, so no one but the original company has the source code. Thus it's the original company's fault for not being at least source-available.
Fortunately, we have the technology to run 32 bit software on 64 bit operating systems. Unfortunately Apple has decided to not do so any more. Fortunately, Apple used to allow this, so your software still works on an older version of the operating system. Unfortunately, Apple has decided to brick that version of the operating system, forcing you to update it and lose access to the software you were perfectly capable of running on your device before Apple's unilateral decision. Thus, it's Apple's fault, for breaking backward compatibility and then forcing people to update.
I have an older device. I had to delete all the apps, all the data and even then my iOS update failed due to lack of space. It’s only when I cleared the OS cache by doing a factory reset that I was able to update to iOS 15.
This device was a spare I just use for reading ebooks but I imagine if it were my primary phone I would balk at deleting everything just to update the OS.
I had an iPad 1 a long time ago. After just a few years, it stopped receiving updates. This meant that I could no longer install or update most apps. And then the apps broke as well because they needed updates to continue to function. The hardware was still perfectly fine. But the device became essentially bricked after a few years. Terrible experience.
Forgot to add that I also made the mistake of uninstalling Vlc at some point. It was still working. But then I couldn't get it back because the app store didn't let me install it any more.
Developers can decide to allow the download of the latest compatible version for old devices, but it seems a lot decides to against it.
So unless you manually backup the apps, it's really a pain to restore things on old devices.
Don’t try to install it from its store page, but from your “Purchased” list on your account. That should get the latest version you had access to. I haven’t tried that in years, so something may have changed.
I made this same mistake with an old iPod. It would have been nice if Apple had at least warned me on uninstall before slapping me in the face. That was the last day I used that device.
I've received an old iPad to play around with running iOS 9. Safari is essentially crippled by a lack of software updates but old versions of the apps can still be installed.
Because of Apple's great software design, you need an old version of iTunes. From there, you can add apps to your account. Then, on the iPad, you can install "purchased" apps. The store itself is completely useless as nothing will install, but the "purchased" page will let you download the last version that works on the device.
The ephemerality of iOS applications is the biggest tragedy in software preservation history. So many memories, so much software history, locked away forever on some Apple internal archive server.
I think world might have transitioned past that. Snapchat, Instagram stories all hinge on fact shit moves on. I'd say Slack's best feature on free plan is the fact there isn't way to search all history (potentially wasting you time and giving incorrect outdated information).
> I had an iPad 1 a long time ago. After just a few years, it stopped receiving updates... the device became essentially bricked after a few years.
Last month I bought a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR old iPad, which was working fine, but couldn't be updated to the latest iOS versions, and which was therefore missing some applications (like Netflix).
Plenty of apps still worked fine - including Safari, Mail, and most other applications.
The device is not "bricked" - which is an absurd and totally misleading description of a piece of technology that is slightly outdated, but works fine with most 'essential' apps.
Saying something is "bricked' means it cannot be used, at all. Which is totally not the case.
It could not be used for my (really pretty standard) purposes. So I stand by "bricked". Unless you consider it a light source. In which case I'd say ok yeah it could still have had some uses as a (not very bright) lamp.
Obviously if you're claiming that the only application that was still working on your iPad was the lamp, then there's really nothing left for me to discuss, as I don't think that's factually the case for even the oldest existing iPads.
“Bricked” has a pretty generally accepted meaning as non-responsive/completely non operational — it does not mean reduced functionality or incompatible with modern operating systems. By abusing the term, you’re being disingenuous rather than having an honest discussion about how to deal with the aging of technology and how to balance security and forward progress with efforts required for backward compatibility.
Where’s the moral outrage about my Macintosh SE not being able to run any version of OS X? Yes, that would be absurd. So where do we draw the line? It must be drawn somewhere - but Apple didn’t brick your device and claiming that gets in the way of reasonable discussion.
The worst is that you can't update the browser, so you can't even use the modern web on devices that are left behind, and nobody besides Apple can help you, even if they wanted to.
Thankfully with iOS 17 it looks like this will no longer be the case!
Fair enough, the iPad 1 is ancient, but my comment applies to any iOS device stuck in iOS 12 or older.
I'm thinking particularly of the lack of support for popular ES2020 features like nullish coalescing, which is simple to implement (but Apple prohibits developers from shipping browsers), and can technically be transpiled away, but is indeed more commonly seen in production code every day.
There are a lot of 2014 iOS devices in this category, all with dual-core CPUs and 1GB RAM, which should be totally fine for simple web browsing in theory. E.g. iPads Air 1st gen and mini 3rd gen, as well as the hugely popular iPhone 6/6 Plus.
Yes, these are old devices, and I don't suggest they continue to be used, but there is no performance-based reason they should be incapable of rendering a simple web site in 2022, provided someone were allowed to build a new browser for them.
Try buying an iPad 2 that had a weird 9 month life.
I’ve been looking for a lightweight JS library I can build a home dashboard with. Then I’d like to mount the iPad 2 in a wall to control my smart home. It can barely open a modern webpage.
This is not true. You could download “the last compatible version” on an older iPad. If there wasn’t a compatible version, what do you expect?
I was able to do just that as late as 2018. Netflix, Crackle, Hulu, Spotify and a few other apps that I tried ran on a reset iPad 1.
But let’s be honest, the iPad was obsolete the day it was introduced. It came with only 256MB of RAM when the iPhone 4 that came out 3 months later came out with 512MB of RAM. It couldn’t run Safari without crashing with iOS 5.
If you don't update your iPad, if apps stop working it's because the app developer has declared your iPad obsolete probably because older APIs are not supported. It's not something about the iPad or Apple per se.
It's hard to understand because software does not degrade with use so everything else being equal it should last an eternity. But in this particular case, everything is not equal because the 3rd party app has moved on.
I still have one just used as a picture frame and at-hand web browser. compared to modern devices it's very slow, but that's OK.
To me it's like keeping around a very old car because it has a little functionality you'd occasionally find handy to have (large cargo capacity, or 4WD).
I'm pretty happy that apple devices work as long as they do.
Yesterday I tried to help out my motorcycle instructor (and owner of the entire motorcycle school) whose business Facebook page had disappeared (the business account was still there). I downloaded the logs for the account and they were blank too, it was like the page never existed. I have no idea if:
- He or an employee deleted it accidentally
- Facebook deleted it.
- His account was hacked and it was deleted
He had no form of 2FA switched on so I tried to help him set it up in case it was the latter in order to prevent it happening again. My first port of call was to try and use the built in Apple passwords in the iPhone settings that now allows you to scan QR codes and set keys. To my surprise, the setting was not there. Why? Because he was using an iPhone that cannot update past iOS 12.
It got worse. Rather than dotting out the passwords and requiring you to click on them to reveal them, the passwords were just sitting there in plain sight for all to see. If I had been a black hat I would have been having a field day.
After failing with the built in Apple option I tried to download a third party authenticator app but there were no applications in the App Store that supported iOS 12. In the end I had to settle for SMS authentication.
I asked him why he was still using such an old iPhone (he could clearly afford to update to a newer model) and explained the security risks of using such an old device. His response was that he didn’t like phones and didn’t want to spend any money on another one.
I get the scepticism around Apple doing this but I’m not entirely sure it’s a bad thing.
> It got worse. Rather than dotting out the passwords and requiring you to click on them to reveal them, the passwords were just sitting there in plain sight for all to see.
Isn’t this only once you authenticate with password or biometrics? The passwords are shown in clear text so they can be cut and pasted for use.
I don’t think this is a risk as it means someone gave you access to the device password in the first place.
I was going to read through the comments, but, as per usual, there is the "Android is better 'cos I can unlock it and do what I want".
Yes, this is true. Don't buy an iPhone/iPad/Mac. I've been hacking for 30+ years, I like that Apple has locked down the phones and the Mac is not locked other than Apple locking their OS. It doesn't stop me installing Macports and then the endless array of FOSS that I want.
General purpose computing is slowly evolving, like every other technology before it, to separation of the creation of code from the use of code. Computers and phones are a tool for most people, the act of coding and/or going outside the provided ecosystem is something that the majority of people, for the majority of the time, don't want or, in a lot of cases, need.
Most people don't have shortwave radios anymore, neither are they interested in amateur radio etc. Government regulations have "locked down" the radio ecosystem but maintained the capabilities for those that want to explore radio "hacking". Computing is going the same way.
If you want to hack your own environment, there are perfectly cromulent alternatives. Android and AOSP for phones and tablets, Linux and the *BSDs for general computing.
I think it should be mandatory for tech companies with some revenue threshold to open-source the necessary bits (bootloader, driver spec, etc) required for the community to port Linux or other open-sources OS on devices they intent on stop supporting.
Maybe 20 years ago and before, devices were made obsolete so fast that it would not have made sense to try to extend the live of hardware but it's no longer the case. Old phones and tablets are perfectly fine for a lot of use cases, they took a lot of natural resources to build and they can only collect dust in drawers or fill landfills now. Finally we are realising that the Earth has finite resources and we should try to make the most of what we have.
Increasing the life of existing IT devices by not withholding informations would be a good first step.
The nice part about such a law, is that companies that want to keep their stuff private would have a way to do so: just keep supporting the devices. If it's not worth supporting, you should not be allowed to keep the IP closed if that prevent the devices from being useful.
I was hoping that the new gatekeeper laws in the EU would go this far, but they don't. I'm still very happy about them, but I really was hoping they would force Apple to give customers the ability to unlock the bootloader of iOS devices.
It sounds like they're unlikely to actually change anything. Apple is still going to require reviewing all of the apps you'll just get to choose different GUIs for downloading them.
Yep, it’s actually kinda disappointing how seemingly nobody saw this coming and years of legal effort went into a law that will have very little practical effect except making companies shuffle things around and then continue business as usual.
I'd say iPhone 6S isn't even old. I was expecting this to be about iPhone 2 or something like that. I even planned to buy an iPhone 4 because I like its design.
These devices are not "bricked"! That is misinformation intended to cast Apple as a villain and these users as poor innocents. In reality, these devices still work fine, and these users are trying to run unsupported software on them.
My partner prefers the old iPhone SE and she has no problem running the latest version of iOS on it.
One of the worst thing on old systems not supported anymore is the lack of updates of SSL certificates, nowdays you can't do nothing without valid certificates, everything stops working.
I still have a working iPhone 4 which I use together with a alarm clock with dock as a expanded alarm clock and I do not have any issues at all.
So maybe the trick is when you do not use your old iPhone as daily driver anymore pull out the SIM card and everything seems to be OK (would not recommend to use old iPhones in the wild anyway, due to severe security risks)
205 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] threadIn my opinion, in general, unsafe (outdated) devices should not be used as they are a huge attack vector because there are so many of them.
lol
half the people in the third world use their phones for 5+ years
Same goes for my SO's Galaxy Ace 4 Style, which she left lying there for an iPhone SE, but might return to the Samsung because the iPhone, while being a great device overall, will now require a battery replacement procedure because it wasn't designed for doing that at home and the battery is very much dead.
My Galaxy S8 is humming along nicely even though I subject it to a lot of environmental stress daily by e.g. showering with it in hand.
Bottom line is iPhones aren't that special in this regard anymore.
Maybe some budged non-flagship Android. You ought to compare iPhones to flagship Android devices. Because iPhone is a flagship device. Don't spread misinformation.
I don't know that I have an opinion on this, but that's what Hugh Jeffreys' argument seems to be.
And iOS 15 performance on the 6s is far from abysmal. Sure you don't have the out of the box experience. But you have the 2022 experience.
Yes, a fresh iOS install sometimes causes some slowdown for a day or two maybe when the local-only ML models go through your local-only data and recalculate the new stuff it now knows how to do in the background.
After that it's going to be as smooth as it ever was.
If a new update slows down your phone on purpose, for whatever reason, and hides that from you, people understandably might avoid new updates.
> slowed down the performance of older iPhones in order to stop them shutting down without warning
This didn’t affect someone whose phone was working perfectly. It changed it so your phone got slow instead of crashing.
The reason some people held off on updates was that a bunch of confidently wrong people went around saying this was planned obsolescence and never went back to apologize for giving false advice.
I think another issue is that apps do tend to get more sluggish, since they probably expect to be running on newer hardware. If you stick to an older ios version, if they're deemed incompatible, they won't update. But as soon as you're on the latest ios, you get the app updates, too, if you've left the default on.
Google maps, for example, is clearly more sluggish than before. Apple maps is practically unusable. Youtube crashes reliably (but works fine in the browser...)
No, I didn’t consider funding the developers to update the version as that’s a lot of money. Especially for something that completely meets my needs.
It’s not dragging me to the past, it’s a functional tool that I acquired in the past and works into the future. Is my socket set I bought 30 years ago dragging me into the past because it’s obsolete?
I avoid generalizations and extreme thinking when it’s inappropriate.
It's not a problem anymore since most Apple devices are ridiculously overpowered and they have separated iOS from iPadOS.
It's hard to fault them honestly, most people don't understand how degraded batteries affect their device, they think it's just about how many hours the device lasts on a full charge, when in reality it's much more complex.
2017: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iph...
I’m also not sure why “just once” is supposed to buy back trust. They still don’t allow for iOS downgrades, so the underlying issue hasn’t been addressed.
Took them like two weeks to release a patch where you can pick which option you like.
As someone who had an iPhone that claimed to have 30-40% battery and then just shut down completely when trying to make a call, I really would've preferred the slowdown option.
It was fixed by a 50€ new battery.
There was literally no malice here, a very serious bug that obsoleted an otherwise out-of-support device of their got fixed. Sure, the best option is the one that was later implemented (people can choose which option they prefer) thanks to governments(!), but let’s not sell this story as something else.
The Mini 2 was ruined by iOS 11. I was lucky that I was able to immediately downgrade back to iOS 10.
iPhone 3G was made unusable by iOS 4.
There are also zero technical obstacles to implementing the activation lock such that you can use your own server. All that this requires is little bit of non-volatile storage that is not cleared during factory reset. Which is what modern Android devices already have.
Deservedly. If there was a normal market, or at least access to spare parts, there would be no need for donor devices.
The warehouses full of people in Shenzhen tearing down millions and millions of stolen iDevices would still be chugging along, inserting stolen parts into the supply chain.
Apple enforcing DRM on parts is very much a pro-consumer move, steadily taking us towards a world where a stolen iPhone will be worth nothing.
From my understanding of the activation lock, the phone is effectively bricked - no-one can ever use it again. No fence is going to pay for a useless device.
almost everything else is soldered onto the logic board and is futile to transfer
so i think that stolen iphones with activation lock are 100% paperweights.
I, for one, WANT my phone to be as hard to steal as possible.
This is a problem for people that refuse to update their devices from ios 9.
It is all related to changes in the activation protocol, which was utterly broken and allowed all kinds of iCloud bypasses for activation; update it to a newer version, and it uses the newer protocol and no problem at all.
This is a nine-year-old device that can still be updated.
Edit: you already can disable internet for the whole phone just leave it on airplane mode for eternity. But as you said, the use cases are quite limited
A phone. You can make and receive calls with it. And also SMS.
You don't have to spend anything if you already have that device. For instance, it could be a hand-me-down from a relative. In my family, we do have an older Android 2.x device which is currently being used as just a phone (for calls, SMS, and yes, an oversized clock); it has passed through the hands of three people already, and only the first of them used the smartphone functionality. After that, it was factory reset and never connected to a data network again (because it would then try to update all built-in apps... and that tiny phone simply has not enough storage for all these updates). It works perfectly as a phone.
That would be a 6s, the 6 supports only 12.5.6
Edit: keep in mind, in OP’s video they are refusing to update even after their device is essentially throwing its hands up and saying “upgrade or I’m a brick now” and they prefer the brick for some reason. The performance of a brick is pretty bad…
So, reason not to update: you like using software you've paid for.
Anyway I’m sharing this because the “my ancient unsupported 32 bit applications will fail”, while a minimally valid reason not to upgrade, reminds me a bit of the sob stories people would tell to get tech support for their stolen iPhones…
You're being unfairly harsh here. Most likely they bought it off the second hand market because in many countries people can't afford the prices of new iPhones, and then realized it's a stolen phone.
Just like it's the buyers responsibility to make sure they aren't purchasing a stolen vehicle, it should be equally the buyers responsibility to ensure they are not purchasing a stolen phone. Proof of a clean IMEI would be a start. The problem stems from most countries outside the US not taking the IMEI database seriously and so in some countries it's possible to activate a phone with a reported stolen IMEI.
I personally think Apple's choice to restrict activating stolen iPhones is a smart move overall. If countries won't use the IMEI database, this is the next best thing. It's not our responsibility to "unlock" phones for people because they didn't perform due diligence.
Then it your responsibility to have backups no? Forget theft, if you keep all your most valuable data on just your phone alone, you're one accident away from loosing it al, via so many ways other than theft.
>Just like it's the buyers responsibility to make sure they aren't purchasing a stolen vehicle, it should be equally the buyers responsibility to ensure they are not purchasing a stolen phone
Now you're moving the goalposts. A phone is not a car. If my car is stolen, I can't just walk into a Ford-Store and buy a new one on the spot for $1000.
What about stolen bikes? Police don't bother investigating such things and they'll basically laugh you out of the police station.
Yes, so do I and everyone else, but that's why most people pay for cloud backup services (iCloud, etc) or set up their own if they're tech savvy enough. So when they break their phone, their data is still safe.
Still, this has nothing to do with theft. You can easily drop your phone on the ground or have it fall in the ocean on vacation. If your phone is such a valuable tool to you that you can't live without then it's up to you to get various insurance policies (phone insurance, a backup phone, etc.)
And you could physically connect mass storage to an iPhone since before the iPhone (iPod days, same connector, same adapter) but unless it was jailbroken you could do almost nothing with it
Sure tools etc can last a lifetime , but my drop saws motor will probably burn out in 10 years and will be replaced with an upgraded model ?
This might not be apparent to engineers who see everything as a formula waiting to be solved from first principles.
However, some things move pretty quick and warrant updates to the whole document especially when the document is used a handbook in critical situations. The ACLS protocol manual, updated quinquennially, comes to mind.
Some textbook publishers are intentionally making small changes from year to year to intentionally make the life of those using second hand text books miserable.
Corporations have long since realised that often their biggest competition comes from their own products therefore we now have planned obsolescence (someone who already has your product and doesn't want to buy another) and the war on secondary markets (someone other than you selling your, old, product).
I can make a same counter argument using the same logic. I have a car that runs fine well past 10 year mark. Why can't I expect a software do the same?
Why is it up to others to spend resources supporting backwards compatibility instead of you to keep your code compiled for modern arch?
You however depend on the original developer to click that build button because proprietary software. If it was FLOSS, you could.
But don't worry, thanks to DRMed parts you won't be able to fix anything on your car either (or phone, or any other smart device) without the involvement of the original manufacturer. Ain't property wonderful when the manufacturers intelectual property has precedence over your physical property?
/s
Software's even better! Since it was inherently digital to begin with, I'm able to make leaps like that with ZERO data loss! The only thing that kills software permanently is planned obsolesce. It doesn't matter what the lifetime of your saw is, that's like arguing that you should be free to shoot nonagenarians because most people don't live that long anyway. It's not about how long other stuff lasts, it's about the fact that it was perfectly capable of going on living until it was killed.
Fortunately, unless you're doing hacky bullshit, changing from 32 to 64 bit should be trivial. Unfortunately, companies go out of business, so can't be relied on to update their own software into perpetuity. Fortunately, it probably doesn't have to the original company to update the software, because it should be a straightforward update of some build parameters. Unfortunately, proprietary, source-unavailable code is the norm in commercial software development, so no one but the original company has the source code. Thus it's the original company's fault for not being at least source-available.
Fortunately, we have the technology to run 32 bit software on 64 bit operating systems. Unfortunately Apple has decided to not do so any more. Fortunately, Apple used to allow this, so your software still works on an older version of the operating system. Unfortunately, Apple has decided to brick that version of the operating system, forcing you to update it and lose access to the software you were perfectly capable of running on your device before Apple's unilateral decision. Thus, it's Apple's fault, for breaking backward compatibility and then forcing people to update.
This device was a spare I just use for reading ebooks but I imagine if it were my primary phone I would balk at deleting everything just to update the OS.
It's inconvenient but it's not like you lose any data.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...
Because of Apple's great software design, you need an old version of iTunes. From there, you can add apps to your account. Then, on the iPad, you can install "purchased" apps. The store itself is completely useless as nothing will install, but the "purchased" page will let you download the last version that works on the device.
Last month I bought a new iPad to replace my TEN YEAR old iPad, which was working fine, but couldn't be updated to the latest iOS versions, and which was therefore missing some applications (like Netflix).
Plenty of apps still worked fine - including Safari, Mail, and most other applications.
The device is not "bricked" - which is an absurd and totally misleading description of a piece of technology that is slightly outdated, but works fine with most 'essential' apps.
Saying something is "bricked' means it cannot be used, at all. Which is totally not the case.
Obviously if you're claiming that the only application that was still working on your iPad was the lamp, then there's really nothing left for me to discuss, as I don't think that's factually the case for even the oldest existing iPads.
Where’s the moral outrage about my Macintosh SE not being able to run any version of OS X? Yes, that would be absurd. So where do we draw the line? It must be drawn somewhere - but Apple didn’t brick your device and claiming that gets in the way of reasonable discussion.
Thankfully with iOS 17 it looks like this will no longer be the case!
I'm thinking particularly of the lack of support for popular ES2020 features like nullish coalescing, which is simple to implement (but Apple prohibits developers from shipping browsers), and can technically be transpiled away, but is indeed more commonly seen in production code every day.
There are a lot of 2014 iOS devices in this category, all with dual-core CPUs and 1GB RAM, which should be totally fine for simple web browsing in theory. E.g. iPads Air 1st gen and mini 3rd gen, as well as the hugely popular iPhone 6/6 Plus.
Yes, these are old devices, and I don't suggest they continue to be used, but there is no performance-based reason they should be incapable of rendering a simple web site in 2022, provided someone were allowed to build a new browser for them.
I’ve been looking for a lightweight JS library I can build a home dashboard with. Then I’d like to mount the iPad 2 in a wall to control my smart home. It can barely open a modern webpage.
I was able to do just that as late as 2018. Netflix, Crackle, Hulu, Spotify and a few other apps that I tried ran on a reset iPad 1.
But let’s be honest, the iPad was obsolete the day it was introduced. It came with only 256MB of RAM when the iPhone 4 that came out 3 months later came out with 512MB of RAM. It couldn’t run Safari without crashing with iOS 5.
It's hard to understand because software does not degrade with use so everything else being equal it should last an eternity. But in this particular case, everything is not equal because the 3rd party app has moved on.
To me it's like keeping around a very old car because it has a little functionality you'd occasionally find handy to have (large cargo capacity, or 4WD).
I'm pretty happy that apple devices work as long as they do.
As a user who buys such an old phone i would expect grave security holes. But not being able to use the phone at all is harsh.
Planned obsolescence?
- He or an employee deleted it accidentally
- Facebook deleted it.
- His account was hacked and it was deleted
He had no form of 2FA switched on so I tried to help him set it up in case it was the latter in order to prevent it happening again. My first port of call was to try and use the built in Apple passwords in the iPhone settings that now allows you to scan QR codes and set keys. To my surprise, the setting was not there. Why? Because he was using an iPhone that cannot update past iOS 12.
It got worse. Rather than dotting out the passwords and requiring you to click on them to reveal them, the passwords were just sitting there in plain sight for all to see. If I had been a black hat I would have been having a field day.
After failing with the built in Apple option I tried to download a third party authenticator app but there were no applications in the App Store that supported iOS 12. In the end I had to settle for SMS authentication.
I asked him why he was still using such an old iPhone (he could clearly afford to update to a newer model) and explained the security risks of using such an old device. His response was that he didn’t like phones and didn’t want to spend any money on another one.
I get the scepticism around Apple doing this but I’m not entirely sure it’s a bad thing.
Isn’t this only once you authenticate with password or biometrics? The passwords are shown in clear text so they can be cut and pasted for use.
I don’t think this is a risk as it means someone gave you access to the device password in the first place.
Yes, this is true. Don't buy an iPhone/iPad/Mac. I've been hacking for 30+ years, I like that Apple has locked down the phones and the Mac is not locked other than Apple locking their OS. It doesn't stop me installing Macports and then the endless array of FOSS that I want.
General purpose computing is slowly evolving, like every other technology before it, to separation of the creation of code from the use of code. Computers and phones are a tool for most people, the act of coding and/or going outside the provided ecosystem is something that the majority of people, for the majority of the time, don't want or, in a lot of cases, need.
Most people don't have shortwave radios anymore, neither are they interested in amateur radio etc. Government regulations have "locked down" the radio ecosystem but maintained the capabilities for those that want to explore radio "hacking". Computing is going the same way.
If you want to hack your own environment, there are perfectly cromulent alternatives. Android and AOSP for phones and tablets, Linux and the *BSDs for general computing.
Maybe 20 years ago and before, devices were made obsolete so fast that it would not have made sense to try to extend the live of hardware but it's no longer the case. Old phones and tablets are perfectly fine for a lot of use cases, they took a lot of natural resources to build and they can only collect dust in drawers or fill landfills now. Finally we are realising that the Earth has finite resources and we should try to make the most of what we have.
Increasing the life of existing IT devices by not withholding informations would be a good first step.
The nice part about such a law, is that companies that want to keep their stuff private would have a way to do so: just keep supporting the devices. If it's not worth supporting, you should not be allowed to keep the IP closed if that prevent the devices from being useful.
I had my entire phone backing up to iCloud. Logged in on the new phone and it downloaded all my data. But music is gone!
I don't know what your plans are for this iPhone 4 but it doesn't support 4G and won't work most places (like all of the US).
My partner prefers the old iPhone SE and she has no problem running the latest version of iOS on it.
So maybe the trick is when you do not use your old iPhone as daily driver anymore pull out the SIM card and everything seems to be OK (would not recommend to use old iPhones in the wild anyway, due to severe security risks)