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> If you have powerful computer from 2010, it'll happily run Windows 10 and almost any application, including almost any game in medium (or even high) mode. I wonder, whether this race on mobile platform will continue or iPhone 6S will be able to run iOS 15 without any lags?

I'm not sure the comparison to PCs is fair. Smartphones are still pretty young, and both the OS and chipsets make large leaps every year. If the pace of progress were as fast in the PC industry, you'd also expect a 5-year-old laptop to be unable to keep up.

I expect the pace of progress will slow down for smartphones. Consequently, the iPhone 6S will be usable for longer than the iPhone 4S.

A good precedent has already been set for this. The first iPhone got two major updates, iOS 4.0 being the first version that didn't support it. The 3GS added an extra year to the lifespan, launching with iOS 3.0 and only being left out of support for iOS 7. The 4S added even another year, recently having received the fourth major update of it's lifespan.

So yeah, while there is certainly some performance lost on a 4S running iOS 9, it's not nearly as bad as the original iPad running iOS 5, or the original iPhone running iOS 3. I imagine the 6S will easily be able to handle iOS XV.

Also noteworthy is that the only iPad not still receiving updates is the original model, meaning the iPad 2 has received the most major updates of any iOS device at five.

This is the dilemma I've run across over the past couple of years. Android devices have a much worse track record regarding official OS updates compared to iOS devices. But then on the flipside, when my iOS devices get older, I can't downgrade or install something more "lightweight" like I can with my Android stuff.

Maybe I'm just used to being able to repurpose old laptops and desktops with slimmed down Linux when they run current versions of Windows or OSX too slowly. All I know is that my original Nexus 7 (2012) is not getting the newest Android update while my iPad 2 (2011) is getting the latest iOS...

...but I want nothing more than to be able to put a third party ROM image on that old iPad or even downgrade it to an older iOS because while the Nexus 7 still works fine, the iPad running the latest iOS is practically unusable. Even reading books on it causes hangs and stutters. Task switching is miserable and trying to run more than one or two tabs in the browser is just masochistic.

I don't even care about jailbreaking or rooting or warranties or any of that. These things are both out of warranty and I own both so I accept the risks. But to this day, I still can't find any way to get something less demanding up and running on that iPad 2. I don't mind not having new features that require new hardware. I'd be happy with good performance and a simple set of apps (browser, email, calendar, e-reader, etc) as long as it didn't stutter and lag through it all.

If you are using an old version there are generally known security holes so while the snappier performance might be desirable I don't think it is a good trade off.

You can downgrade iPad 2 to iOS 6.

The iPad 2 is so slow on ios8 and newer that most people wouldn't actually want to upgrade, though [1]. Apple sold the iPad 2 until 2014 as a low-end model, so they can't really stop updates completely, but it isn't really usable.

1: http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/09/a-slide-into-obsolescen...

So it looks like smartphones are going where computers did. That's encouraging!

You are basing your comparison of desktop computers as you are now. Smartphones are more like desktop computers in the 90's. The rate of change was so great, that even a 3 year old computer felt sluggish on a new operating system and often needed settings turned down. (Think 486 vs Pentium).

> On an unrelated note, I really don't understand, why iOS 9 (actually iOS 7+) is so slow on iPhone 4S.

Perhaps it's the memory requirements. The 4S had 512MB RAM, the 6S has 2GB (plain 6/plus have 1GB).

I wonder, how many years iPhone 6S will be able to stay relevant. For example iPhone 4S started lagging on iOS 7. While it's certainly usable on iOS 9, it feels as an old and underpowered device.

The iPhone 4s used the A5, an 800 mhz 32-bit processor with 512MB of RAM.

From the review, the iPhone 6s is a 64-bit processor with access to 2GB of RAM. And with the advancements announced at WWDC like App Thinning and LLVM and Swift optimizations, we may be close to the end of seeing any noticeable slowdown in the foreseeable future of these devices.

> On an unrelated note, I really don't understand, why iOS 9 (actually iOS 7+) is so slow on iPhone 4S.

This bothers me a lot, and cynical as I am I suspect that this is on purpose and Apple's way to encourage people to upgrade to a new phone. My wife has a four years old MacBook Pro, which after two years inexplicably started to slow down more and more to the point where the most trivial tasks like opening a menu became a major pain. It is very hard to imagine legitimate reasons for why this should happen, especially since my wife installed a bunch of programs when the computer was new and since then did not change anything.

Have you cleaned it out at any point? With Macbooks, dust seems to be a pretty common issue after some time, and cleaning it out can make a big difference. Chips don't slow over time, and if the RAM is good and the HD is good, and you didn't install a bunch of new, hungrier, software, then it could be thermally related. Both removing dust and possibly applying new thermal paste can help.

My solution to that is to not upgrade iOS. I too feel pushed with these slow "updates" to just buy a new phone and I refuse to be milked.

What happens when the cows refuse to be milked? Udder chaos. [1]

[1]: http://unijokes.com/joke-10123/

Same here, iOS 6 and iPhone 4. I hate using my phone for anything substantial, whether it's reading an article, writing an article etc, I'm fine doing it on my MBP. So I pretty much just use my phone for whatsapp, fb messenger, checking email, getting directions or checking a store's opening times, music, calls. None of that requires anything extraordinary so I've been fine so far. But then there's the apps that require iOS7 to install or update, and those instances are increasing. So I'm definitely on the verge of an upgrade because I'm being shut out from modernity haha.

Is it just closed source software that does this? With a lot of the big open source projects one can expect incremental speed improvements with every release (although this is far from guaranteed). My LAMP stack is quicker than it was a few years ago, not slower. With my own coding efforts I consider bloat and speed to be really important. Slower is not better unless there are some major features that have been added and not refactored yet. At Apple do they just go anti-pattern? Define the array inside the for loop rather than just do it before entering the loop?

Maybe when iOS 15 comes along someone will put iOS 9 on it somehow and it will blaze along. I doubt it, but I would not be at all surprised if the delays in opening apps are the same in iOS 15 and the hardware that goes with it. There should be a 'Moore's Constant' for this, to describe how all advances in silicon are instantly negated by operating systems at boot time to have a consistent amount of delay when opening apps.

Apple occasionally issues major releases that are more responsive than previous iterations, so no, it's really nothing to do with closed vs open source.

I also have an iPhone 4S. I wondered the same thing. It's really annoying. My guess is that the memory requirements have increased a lot. It kind of still feels fast after a fresh boot. But after a few hours, it feels really slow. Some bigger applications fail at the first run, maybe because too less memory. Some will crash when I open an embedded Safari page. Also, when switching apps, in almost all cases, it has to restart the app.

Also, the battery duration has become worse. But that might also just be its age - although not sure.

Now, just because of that, I'm thinking about buying a new phone.

I wonder, is this similar for Android phones? When I buy a high-end Android phone now, can I expect it to still run fast in 3-5 years or so the future current version of Android?

I had the 4S and was itching for a replacement/upgrade at the 2 year mark. Now I'm on a 5S and I don't think it's lost much at 2 years old - it's maybe gone from "lightning fast" to "fast" in that time, but a raft of convenient added features make that a worthy tradeoff. So Apple are laying the sense of "planned obsolescence" to rest, for me at least. I think they were just pushing against a lot of hardware boundaries in the iPhone's early years.

The 2012 iPhone 5 (and 2013 iPhone 5C, which is essentially the same but plastic) still run iOS smoothly.

But that's probably because the iPhone 4S has half as much RAM and a 0.3GHz slower CPU.

There are definitely not any intentional performance bottlenecks; that's just absurd.

The 4S is now 4 years old. That is a long time. The 4S is also 2 full years older than the first-ever 64-bit smartphone, the iPhone 5S, which really was a tremendous performance leap.

Try anything 5S or newer. You will be very happy.

My main computer at home is a 2008 MBP running El Capitan in 4G and a Core 2 Duo. Its fine. Apple are getting good at eking life out of old devices.

Built in obsolescence?

You mean planned obsolescence and Yes, that is exactly that.

Almost certainly. I try really hard to be as un-cynical as possible about this, but there's a great quote I heard from someone smart whose name I can't recall right now - economics is incentives all the way down - and it applies perfectly here I think.

What possible incentive could any phone manufacturer have to build a phone that significantly over-lasts the rough 2 year cycle that their bulk buyers, i.e the networks, sell the phones on?

That's not rhetorical, I'm really asking - does anyone know of any?

I can think of a couple. I'm not sure if either one is enough to overcome the incentives to do otherwise, though.

1. General brand goodwill. If it's known that the phone you buy today will be functional for the next 5 years, then long-term customer loyalty may incentivize a company to make sure their units last that long

2. App-store market share. The longer your phone lasts, the lest likely its purchaser will replace it with another ecosystem's product. This would increase the lifetime revenue you get from that buyer.

Again, I'm not sure if these two incentives are enough to outweigh the "new every two!" hardware refresh profits.

Customer goodwill?

Consider it this way: the actual evidence we have disagrees with your conclusion. Apple has seemingly gone out of their way to ensure that new releases continue to run on increasingly-older generations of hardware. Look at calvin_c's comment[1] for a complete breakdown of this.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502753

It makes a big difference that Apple won't let you downgrade to a previous OS. Only sheer stubbornness kept me from upgrading my iPhone 4 (iOS 7) to an iPhone 6 when all I really wanted was a phone that didn't take half a second to respond to input. Downgrading to iOS 6 would have accomplished the same thing.

It's hard not to believe that planned obsolesence isn't at least part of that strategy. It's certainly incidental. I don't hold a grudge against Apple for doing this, but not acknowledging it is turning a blind eye.

Think about it from the company/engineer's point of view: would you want to maintain the old version of the code (adding security fixes and the like) for years after it's current, for probably less than 1000 people per version? Remember that the old versions of code probably build with old versions of the compiler, old trains, etc. And you can't not maintain this code, since there will be bugs found, jailbreaks, etc. Every engineering team I know has more features than man-hours, it's hard to imagine them willingly making this tradeoff for such a small gain in their overall user happiness (people posting on HN are the exception, most people just update their devices for the shiniest new features)

It's a near-universal practice for several versions of important system software (like operating systems and databases) to be maintained and supported simultaneously. It's unusual for updates to stop entirely as soon as the next major version is released.

I see this as a necessity mainly for server software which you don't want to change too often. Ubuntu does a great job at this with their LTS releases.

But in the consumer mobile OS space, there are really only a few big players. It looks like google does patch old versions of the OS, albeit up to a limit: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/01/12/google-not-fixing-som...

But on the other hand with the way the android adoption curve looks, that's still a lot of people. I just checked wikipedia right now, something like 35% of users are running a version which google stopped patching. So to have the same coverage of security updates, google has to support more OS versions. And even then, they're leaving a lot of people in the dust.

I'm sure google would like people to upgrade too, less versions for them to maintain, but they've got the whole carrier situation to deal with in that ecosystem.

Seems obvious that displeasing your customer is more likely to send them to a competitor than pleasing them.

Is it obvious?

What if you displease them in one way, by making older phones have a limited lifespan, but redress that by pleasing them enough to make the difference in other ways, for example by developing newer phones with superior features that get them excited enough not to care so much about the shortcomings of the old model (shortcomings which wouldn't necessarily be as apparent if the phone had a longer lifespan)?

Might it then be the best strategy to displease your customers on purpose, and accept the negative impact of that since it's also contributing to a wider goal of selling more phones and making more profit?

Above, you wondered about "what possible incentive" there could be against obsolescence, and said you weren't being rhetorical, you really wanted to know.

@aljones gives such an incentive.

Now, you try to cook up particular parameter values under which this reasoning would not apply ("what if you displease them in one way..."). What is the point of this?

Sorry, with respect I don't really understand your criticism.

I asked for incentives because I'm not aware of any strong ones, aljones replied with what they thought was such an incentive. But, am I obliged to agree? If I disagree, should I not point this out and continue the discussion in a constructive manner?

Additionally, cook up particular parameter values - I don't understand what you mean - we are talking specifically about the 2 year lifecycle of a phone, and the manufacturers' incentives for keeping it as such - I didn't bring that in out of nowhere, that's what we were originally talking about!

Apple is displeasing some would-be customers already by making their hardware so non-free and remote-controlled.

Emphatically yes.

The incentive is called actually giving a fuck about quality, and doing the best job you can.

This is thoroughly ingrained in Apple's culture, and NOT ingrained in competitors' culture.

2 year cycle? Nope. Apple's mobile products have a very solid 4-year cycle. Far superior to competitors.

Apple phones definitely do seem to have a longer lifespan, I agree that quality being the cornerstone of their branding provides a very strong incentive for them to do this, with other manufacturers (my experience is mostly with Samsung) seeming to take a more it'll be fine, after 2 years the S(current+2) will be out and they'll want that anyway because it will be far better hardware type approach. It's one of the reasons I'm now strongly considering switching over to the iPhone after my current Samsung S4 finally dies (it's still just about crawling along with some problems after about 28 months since I bought it)

> Built in obsolescence?

Compared to its competitors, decidedly no. The state of affairs on Android is even worse.

  Samsung Galaxy S2 release: May 2, 2011
  Apple iPhone 4S release: October 14, 2011
  Google Galaxy Nexus: November 17, 2011

  Galaxy S2 last OS release: October 9, 2012
  4S's latest OS release: October 21, *2015*
  Galaxy Nexus' last OS release: October 3, 2013

And that's just from the same generation... I suspect there are even newer flagship Android phones that have hit EOL, where the 4S is still (at least partially) supported...

Compared to other industries, like computers or cars, sure. Maybe it's planned obsolescence.

Or maybe it's just that it's such a new product that innovations and consumer desire are faster than usual (or, likely, sustainable).

-------------------

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_4S

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_S_II

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Nexus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_version_history

To be fair though the iPhone 4S was discontinued in September 2014 whereas the other phones were discontinued much earlier. And from what I've heard the newer iOS versions don't run well on the 4S. Also take into account the fact that most app developers won't bother optimizing for the 4S.

Yes, the 4S was discontinued later, but maybe that's because it was still worth buying, since it was still supported by the manufacturer? ;)

As for the other complaints: yes, it's not a perfect situation, but it's better than the alternatives. At the very least, it is still receiving security updates. Those Android phones' last updates predate Heartbleed...

I am surprised everyone disagrees with this, it's really common and the basis upon which a consumer society is based.

Clothes don't need to break, lightbulbs can be built that last forever, cars can and should run indefinitely when we can build aeroplanes that don't fall out of the sky and the performance of animations on an iOS device do not need to degrade substantially every OS release.

Apple release new versions of their OS to support the App Store (which make billions every year) not at all to increase the longevity of devices but to decrease them!!

I assume some of you think this is a paranoid conspiracy or something??

That's going to depend on whether Apple can be trusted to support their hardware indefinitely or whether they will decide to drop support to force people to give them more money.

A much safer bet would be a popular Android device, where anyone can port the latest Android version to the device and there is no monetary interest in not doing so, and thus it's likely that updates will be available forever.

Except in reality, Apple continues to support their old devices with the latest updates significantly longer than any other Android manufacturer, who practically force you to go through the effort of rooting your phone to get even critical security patches.

Indeed, the most reliable source of updates are not Apple or Android manufacturers, but rather the Android community.

Apple doesn't give users the freedom to run their own software, so you are instead beholden to their benevolence.