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Comment by ogre_codes | Hacker News Reader

When you compare it to Android where you're lucky to get 18 months support it comes out ahead. When you compare it to MacOS and Windows 10 which run on 8-10 year old hardware, not as much. Of course how good Windows support is for that older hardware depends largely on OEMs and driver support and varies greatly. Linux can run on 20 year old hardware... or older?

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> When you compare it to Android where you're lucky to get 18 months support it comes out ahead

Google keeps their own hardware updated quite well, I liked the monthly security updates.

With regards to the rest of the tablet market, basically only Samsung and Lenovo are left, and Samsung lost me as a customer a long time ago.

I've been looking at the iPad Air 3 recently and while it looks nice, I just fell in love with the Apple pencil. The fact that they update even their ancient hardware is just a huge plus -- that's commitment to the customer.

Quite well? Google abandons their phones after three years and repair options are limited compared to Apple. Apple has been supplying software updates for their phones for five years lately. On the plus side for Google phones, they are able to run third-party ROMs when Google quits supporting them.

? Google devices receive Android updates well into 5+ years. I had a Nexus 4 (2013) running Android 8.1 (2017-2018).

I also belive Android tends to have fewer breaking OS changes that render modern apps incapable of running on both older and newer OS versions, compared to iOS, so it's significantly worse for usability on iOS with a device that is ~4+ years old.

This got very rare, even for the Nexus devices. The Nexus 5X got only a little over 2 years of feature support, and 3 years of security support, which is the minimum they guarantee.

The Nexus 5X was a disaster of a phone so I don't blame them for sticking to the minimum. I actually switched back from my Nexus 5X after 6 months to my fully working Nexus 4 when I was pleased to find it was continuing to receive all the OS updates. Probably could still finagle a Android 10 ROM onto it if one tried hard enough.

I will grant shitty devices like the 5X is something that happens slightly more often with Google devices than Apple (although the Macbook pro keyboards kind of brought parity).

I still think for the layperson consumer, apps continuing to work even if they are not being actively developed is a bigger deal than continuing to receive constant security updates, from the perspective of device usability past 3 years at least.

Plus they don't have a great track record on the hardware durability. Some anecdotes: I had a bootlooping 5X after 11 months of ownership (that Google refused to replace) and my Pixel stopped being able to receive calls, also after 11 months (again, Google refused to replace it). The Chromecast I bought also only worked when it felt like it, which was, maybe 20% of the time. I won't buy their hardware anymore.

My Pixel C is still being updated four years later.

I do agree about repair options. It's pretty much impossible to repair the screen on a Pixel C.

Pixel 1 just received the Q updates and is still getting security update. Are you comparing premium Apple built phones against 400$ nexus phones which were co-made by Google just to have a vanilla device for development? Nexus line was never meant to be a high-end phone with good support.

Even Apple's $400 phone has been supported longer than the Nexus 4 was.

Apple doesn't have a 400$ phone, unless you're referring to 2 year old phone. And again, Nexus phones were not made by Google.

The iPhone SE started at $400 and is now 3.5 years old. It will probably get another 2 major iOS releases. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_SE)

The Nexus 4 launched November 2013 and got it's last major update to 5.1.1 in May 2015 according to Wikipedia. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_4)

There is this thing called legal contract, that Google could have used to enforce Nexus support.

TBH it's comes down to Qualcomm not updating their drivers .

What about phones running on Kirin or exynos SoCs?

shouldn't be that difficult to support your own fabbed SoC, but yet they sorely lack updates.

My personal pet peeve about Android updates is that they start the clock the day that they release the product, instead of say, starting the doomsday clock on the day they discontinue the product. So if you happen to wait 12 months for the price to drop from $800 to $500, you lose 12 months of software support.

(I bought a Pixel 3 this spring when it was on sale for $400, but support ends in 2 years - October 2021.)

> My personal pet peeve about Android updates is that they start the clock the day that they release the product, instead of say, starting the doomsday clock on the day they discontinue the product. So if you happen to wait 12 months for the price to drop from $800 to $500, you lose 12 months of software support.

It works the same with Apple devices too, though the supported period has typically been longer than in the Android world. For example, the iPhone 8 (introduced in 2017) that Apple continues to sell today as the lowest priced iPhone wouldn’t get five years of software updates from today. It’d likely get its last update sometime in 2023, before iOS 17 is released (assuming that iPhones usually get software updates for about five plus years).

They stopped issuing major updates for the Nexus 5X very shortly after Google Fi stopped selling them brand new on their website.

Google only does it for 3 years, and that's from launch. Apple is supporting devices 5 years old.

I've been buying Google phones (Nexus/Pixel) because they do get the longest support, but I still get frustrated by the fact that if I buy one late in the cycle, I only really get 2 years of support for it.

Android 10 was just released for the original Pixel which came out 6 and a half years ago in 2013.

You're mistaken. The Pixel Chromebook was originally released in 2013. The Pixel brand as a phone only started in 2016 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Pixel#Pixel

Ok you're right, 3 years and going strong is still pretty good.

Google’s minimum is usually 3 years. It is unlikely to get revived for Android 11.

Apple on the other hand is at date of discontinuity + 5 yr hardware support.

Since the oldest Pixel phone is 3 years old we do not know if it will get Android 11 or not.

Google advertises that will provide updates for 3 years for Pixel 3a [1]. I think it should be at least 5 years.

[1] https://www.androidcentral.com/pixel-3a-does-one-more-thing-...

I think they should be made to provide updates for all Android devices while they continue to sell devices with Android and some timeframe beyond. In both Google's and Apple's case they can easily commit to supporting all devices for as long as they commit to selling devices with these operating systems.

Imagine the travesty if Microsoft could turn off Windows updates like this and write off general purpose computers just a few years old or even five years old per Apple. This is a joke, we should not be making exceptions for Google or Apple, their software should not be allowed to render 10s or 100s of millions of competent devices obsolete annually.

This is anti-consumer and stupidly-bad for the environment, and we can see from Windows it is entirely optional and we can see from their $100+ billion in savings each, that Google and Apple could do it too.

I agree 100% for phones sold through the Google Play store. Offer security updates for 100% of their phones indefinitely. Stop the automatic feature updates when the phone becomes slow enough that the new Android version would be a downgrade, but still make it available to users who want to manually upgrade it.

The fact that single individuals in their spare time have been doing ROMs for devices that achieve this for years proves that this isn't the maintenance burden it's sometimes made out to be. The device tree stuff means that even closed source modules aren't that bad to deal with these days.

Here in Germany there are plenty of tablets to choose from, with the best being naturally Samsung, Lenovo, Asus and Huawei, thing is, they happen to be convertibles/2-1/hybrid laptops running Windows 10.

I guess they got fed up with Android tablets just being bigger phones, running upscaled phone apps.

My 2009 Asus laptop is running the latest Window 10 Professional just fine.

Since apple markets their ipados for productivity as an alternative to a MacBook or a windows laptop - I'm not sure Linux can really be included. Simply put - Linux has never been focused on tablet UI UX or that kind of productivity, it's not a technical limitation sure but there's literally 0 polish on any kind of "streamlined tablet experience"

> Simply put - Linux has never been focused on tablet UI UX or that kind of productivity

Used to be true but not any longer; recent versions of GNOME 3 are now quite usable on tablets (and touch-screen enabled laptops) as long as the bare hardware support is there. Sure, this is largely a side effect of Librem's work on smartphone UX support, but the effect is quite real nonetheless. And Linux on a tablet can achieve things that are quite hard or even impossible on other "mobile-ready" OS's.

Smartphones, tablets, Windows, Macs, Linux... they are all similar products targeting marginally different markets. I use my iPad for the same things I used my Linux desktop for not long ago. There are some things one does better than the other, but ultimately there is much more overlap than differences. The bigger the difference in form factor, the bigger the difference in use cases.

Also, less folks forget...

Android is Linux.

> I use my iPad for the same things I used my Linux desktop for not long ago. There are some things one does better than the other, but ultimately there is much more overlap than differences.

I really really don't get this. I like the iPad, but Apple wants to sell me this idea that the iPad is an actual* computer. It's not. It's a toy computer. It's fun. It's not serious. Stop pretending, Apple.

*) An actual computer lets you mark pages as executable.

Just because you can't do "actual work" on a toy iPad, it doesn't mean it's useless for everyone.

I've done production deployments with an iPad + smart keyboard + blink shell, works just fine.

> blink shell

In other words, you did use an actual computer, but remotely.

And more folks forget that Android userspace, and Trebelized drivers couldn't care less what kernel is being used.

In Apple's defense, the SOCs on iPads are improving much, much faster than PC chips. Intel chips have been getting faster at something like 5% per year for the last decade, compared to 50% for Apple's A-series. So I think supporting 5 years worth of iPad devices is somewhat comparable to supporting 20 years worth of PC hardware: in both cases it's about a 100x performance difference between the bottom and top, and beyond that I imagine it's not worth it to try and tune an OS for both.

> in both cases it's about a 100x performance difference between the bottom and top

I don't think five-year-old are a hundred times slower than today's models.

That really isn't a like-like comparison. You are looking at just one product from Apple. In the Android and Windows world for each generation there are hundreds of thousands of hardware combinations from entry level to high end that are expected to run Windows. Also MS/Google cannot test their software with future un-released hardware. If anything, this should be a cakewalk for Apple - if they choose to. I don't know what special "tuning" is required that prevents Apple from supporting the hardware.

They stopped updating 5S because it only has 1Gb of RAM. They only do it when the device really falls short of technical requirements.

If that is indeed the real reason, its unfortunate that they cannot get an OS to run acceptably in 1GB of RAM. Especially when they have such a tiny amount of hardware variations to support.

I thought it's more about the apps.

Microsoft and Google both release their own hardware. AFAIK, Microsoft does a pretty fair job updating software for the Surface. The same cannot be said for Google and Pixel (Or for that matter, Nexus prior to Pixel).

Microsoft supported Windows XP for 12 years, Windows 7 for 10 years (+4 years if you are willing to pay for extended support). During the lifespan of XP the Moore's law was very much working.

The big difference here is Windows XP and Windows 7 had nearly static feature-sets over their lifetimes (or in the case of XP, SP 3 quickly became the baseline). For the vast majority, Windows XP that shipped with your computer was the same for the lifetime of that product. iOS changes features every year, often quite significantly. The challenge is whether the next version of Windows supported your hardware and this was often not the case. If your OEM had funky components and didn't want to update the drivers to the new version of Windows you were SOL. Windows has changes a LOT since XP/ Windows 7 and their update model is more like iOS than XP now so it's hard to use the old model as a baseline.

The OP said that Apple doesn't have to support older devices because they are antiquated as far as performance goes. So I gave an example where software was supported for far longer during bigger increases in performance.

You are saying that as long as the OEM updates drivers for components support is possible. I agree. This is a reason why Android is often not updated even in the modding community (Qualcomm is not releasing drivers). If only Apple was responsible for both the software and hardware... Oh wait...

Install on a 2014 device? Yes you can but it is so slow - it cannot be a daily driver.

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