People complain a lot about planned obsolescence but i'm mildly impressed, even if this update is only to keep the lights on and nothing else.
I remember people complaining that the design of the 5 was already outdated when it was new and they needed to have bigger screens and be thinner to compete with Samsung...
I'm not a fan of Apple's walled garden mindset and resistance to inter-operating with other platforms, but this degree of legacy support is a case of Apple doing a good thing and deserves praise. Note: I'm not saying that Google/MSFT et al are much better than Apple, but they're not quite as bad.
tokyobreakfast is right that this is just a certificate fix, not a real software update. But it's still notable.
Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.
I ran a 5S that I bought in December 2013 as my primary phone all the way up to around March 2020, just as the pandemic was really winding up.
The battery, after ailing for a little while, had eventually just given up. I'd gone skiing a couple of times, with the last trip being just before lockdown, and I think it was the cold exposure of the second trip that dealt the mortal blow, and it died shortly after I returned.
I liked that phone a lot. It did, at the time, everything I needed, and it was a really nice size, but that period in 2020 was a bad time to try to get a phone repaired. I did attempt to replace the battery myself using the guide on iFixit but, sadly, that did not go well due to some contradictory/out of order instructions, and all I succeeded in doing was damaging the phone, I think, beyond repair.
Really good to see that Apple are still supporting them though.
I wonder if this is because some people keep their iPhone 5s around as a backup phone or for some other reason?
My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.
I'm on my 8th year of using my original iPhone SE, have replaced the battery a few times and the screen a couple of times. It's still doing what I need it to do on iOS 15, but I noticed a few big names apps have stopped supporting iOS 15 in the past year so the installed versions are the last compatible versions (e.g. the installed versions of Uber and Netflix are > 6 months old).
Performance-wise, it can stutter a bit on modern websites and sometimes in some apps, but otherwise works reasonably well. A few weeks ago I noticed it was struggling more than usual and chewing up more battery, but then I cleared up some disk space and it's been running fine.
The minimum supported iOS version for some of my must-have apps (e.g. WhatsApp, my banking app) is currently iOS 15, so I imagine when that changes I'll need to finally upgrade my phone. Feels like its days are numbered.
I am locked out of my older iOS devices. I cannot login to my Apple account on these devices because "the OS is too old", and I cannot update iOS without logging into my Apple account. They bricked those devices just by flipping a switch remotely. One of those is an iPhone 6S Plus, for instance.
happy about this since I still daily an iphone se 2016 (same form factor as the 5s but 6s internals) and about to change it's tiny battery and maybe get yet another iphone og se just in case this one stops working.
abysmal battery life and tiny screen makes for the perfect dumb smartphone.
aside from google search, the phone is virtually ai free (most of the ai and majroity of the social apps do require at least ios16 o 17),
i do have to have an older android to use 'institutional' apps (meaning that there's a phone always at home with my banking and govt id apps).
sent from the tiny screen of the SE
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] threadI remember people complaining that the design of the 5 was already outdated when it was new and they needed to have bigger screens and be thinner to compete with Samsung...
Wake me when old versions of OS X can access the App Store again.
I busted my wife's old iPhone 8 out when I found it digging for other things ... still runs nice.
My android devices over the year I use for development, most just up and die or performance just degrades over time until it is unusable.
Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.
The battery, after ailing for a little while, had eventually just given up. I'd gone skiing a couple of times, with the last trip being just before lockdown, and I think it was the cold exposure of the second trip that dealt the mortal blow, and it died shortly after I returned.
I liked that phone a lot. It did, at the time, everything I needed, and it was a really nice size, but that period in 2020 was a bad time to try to get a phone repaired. I did attempt to replace the battery myself using the guide on iFixit but, sadly, that did not go well due to some contradictory/out of order instructions, and all I succeeded in doing was damaging the phone, I think, beyond repair.
Really good to see that Apple are still supporting them though.
Instills great confidence.
AMD drops support as soon as it possibly can for "old" GPUs.
My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.
Performance-wise, it can stutter a bit on modern websites and sometimes in some apps, but otherwise works reasonably well. A few weeks ago I noticed it was struggling more than usual and chewing up more battery, but then I cleared up some disk space and it's been running fine.
The minimum supported iOS version for some of my must-have apps (e.g. WhatsApp, my banking app) is currently iOS 15, so I imagine when that changes I'll need to finally upgrade my phone. Feels like its days are numbered.
Has anyone gotten hold of a newer ios 18 for phones more recent than 5s?