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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 5 users are plentiful and will be pretty livid if they are locked out of a future major version over this issue. Apple just can't get out of their own way these days. If I were an iPhone 5 user and was forced into a twinked device like the iPhone SE or iPhone 7 I would probably leave the entire ecosystem and hundreds of dollars worth of DRM purchases behind.

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The iPhone 5 was likely to be dropped with iOS 11 anyway, regardless of 64-bit support. It'll be 5 years old at that time. It will still be able to run apps that were compiled with 32 and 64 bit support. It's not necessarily going to be any different to when any previous iPhone stopped getting software updates. I don't see any restriction here on Apple allowing devs to still support 32 bit, they just have to support 64. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

Do you have stats for how plentiful iPhone 5 users are?

The Apple iPhone 5 was released in 2012. Apple has provided those users with 5 years of updates (assuming September is when they will release the new iPhone and also update the major iOS version number).

5 years is a long time in the mobile handset business... I doubt too many people will be livid about anything.

You assume everyone purchased the iphone 5 in 2012. The iphone 5c was still selling new in India less than a year ago.

Also new ones still listed for sale direct from Walmart it appears: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Apple-iPhone-5C-8GB-AT-T-Locked/4...

If you purchased a new device and in less than a year support is dropped, yeah you might be livid.

Standard practice in the world of Android phones. To add even more salt to that wound the OS was probably a couple years out of date when you bought it as well.

I keep an eye on David Smith’s published iOS version stats[0] which say around 23% of his users are running a 32bit CPU. This includes iPhone 5/5C and older iPads.

https://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/

"twinked device like the iPhone SE"

Yes, such a bad purchase, a far faster phone with a better camera, better wifi and cellular connectivity, a better camera, and perhaps most importantly, far, far better security.

If all this does is help encourage people to get onto Secure Enclave-equipped iOS devices, it's a winner.

iPhone SE has its deficiencies (in comparison with 5s), it is darker (contrast ratio 804:1 while 5s has 1219:1) and iPhone SE does not have Corning Gorilla Glass, oleophobic coating: http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=5685&idPhone2=...

There are literally dozens of us!

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