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Comment by AndrewStephens | Hacker News Reader

Apple are already pretty good in this regard - their devices are expensive but made to last, and they directly support them for 4 or 5 years. The upcoming iOS release is supposed to be focused on getting better performance on old devices as well.

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> they directly support them for 4 or 5 years

The 5S is entering its 6th year and will get iOS 12.

I don't agree with your comment. The updates Apple has released have made iPhone 6 and 6S unusable. Everyone is complaining about them, they transformed a perfect phone into something that makes you want to upgrade to a new phone.

Except for cables and the infamous butterfly keys

People pull them out by the cable instead of the connector housing. That’s not Apple’s problem.

Yes it is, because it's a rubbish design with grossly inadequate strain relief.

what?

They ADMITTED to deliberately slowing down phones https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/29/apple-apo...

They admitted to making a trade-off that would throttle performance with older batteries so that the phone wouldn't shut down when the CPU did not receive enough power. Turns out that trade-off was interpreted quite badly by some consumers who apparently would have preferred a phone that stayed as fast as the day they bought it, but instead crashed without warning with poor battery health.

> their devices are expensive but made to last, and they directly support them for 4 or 5 years

Do you think a $1,000+ phone lasting only "4 or 5 years" is really that good?

Do you think a $1,000+ phone lasting only "4 or 5 years" is really that good?

You don't have to buy a $1,000 iPhone to get 4-5 years out of it. You can buy a cheaper model and get the same longevity.

Or you can buy random_chinese_android phone, pay the same $1,000, and get software updates cut off in two years.

When you compare Apples to Apples (as it were).

Apple's iPhone 5s is getting it's sixth year of support starting with the next release of iOS.

If you splurge on Google's own flagship device with a similar pricing model, you only get two years of OS updates with an additional year of security updates.

I think it's significantly better than most non-Apple phones. But I think too that the there is significant invisible engineering required to make the device well recyclable after whatever the lifetime period is, and that's harder to judge. The only visible aspect of that is perhaps Apples acceptance of older units in trade, but it's indefinite, as one would really need a third-party assessment to know how well that was doing.

Imagine you tried to subject your computer to extreme physical conditions - every combination of humidity, heat, cold, pressure, submergence in liquid, dropped, bent, etc, for 18 hours a day for years. How long do you think it would last? Not very long, I’d suspect. I’m amazed phones last as long as they do for as hard as they’re used - harder and for longer hours than almost any consumer-level computers.

There’s a big difference between how long a device is directly supported for, and how long it lasts.

Additionally many people would consider a laptop being directly supported for 5 years pretty good.

High Sierra supported 2009 Macs, but it looks like Mojave is going to be cut off at 2012.

For a device which is heavily used every single day, yes.

Cars cost significantly more, and yet the average age of cars on the road in the US is still only about 11 years.

Yes for a portable personal device, 5 years of typically non-stop daily use is quite solid.

Considering the heavy daily usage, yes.

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