iPhone 6S getting iOS 14 is like the Galaxy S6 getting Android 11
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
From a consumer perspective, it’s crazy how often we’re expected to replace mobile devices (even though the story now isn’t as crazy as it was five years ago) and how much we shell out for them (even putting aside the monthly bills associated with them). Not to mention a PC was shared by the family and now every kid needs their own phone. Great for the economy but oh so wasteful.
And, for that matter—and this is where iPhones do miss the mark—why does my phone not perform those actions as well as it did when new? That we have even faster chips nowadays shouldn't make the old ones slower.
Who is writing those security updates? How do they get paid?
Making people buy new hardware they don't need just to stay secure isn't merely wasting their money, it's actively harmful to the planet.
Moreover, companies ought to continue offering security updates because it's the right thing thing to do—for their customers, for their brand, and for the planet.
It's not just the battery. Newer OS's are just slower.
That's the problem. :)
I'm also on a 6S and Apple has kept it quite speedy! But, I was playing with a 2016 iPhone SE on iOS 9 about a year ago, and I could instantly tell it was snappier than my 6S on iOS 12.
In the iOS world, not generally so. Things generally get faster and more optimized (cruft gets removed) in the iOS world (barring some anomalies like iOS 13, but it's gotten back on track).
But while it's hard to prove definitively—largely because highly-out-of-date iOS devices are so rare in the wild—I would posit that even though 12 was faster than 11, 9 and 10 were both faster than 12. That's definitely what I saw in a brief iOS 9 experience I mentioned elsewhere in this thread.
It's the old frog-in-boiling-water analogy. If it happens slowly, you don't notice.
Performance capability is reduced if the battery is worn, see iOS Settings > Battery > Battery Health.
6 -> 6S was a 450MHz clock speed (1.4GHz -> 1.85GHz) jump and doubled the RAM from 1GB to 2GB. That's a significant step up in capabilities. You probably noticed snappier application starts and transitions (more RAM, more apps can stay up at a time, or at least part of them so they start or seem to start faster) and better general performance (that 32% clock speed jump).
As far as I know most current laptops fail to do that.
Anyway, the point of the article isn't that five years is all that long, it's that Android's two-year policy is despairingly short.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...
1 GHz CPU, 1GB ram, 800x600 display, 32GB drive. Those are not 2005 specs, those were easily around in 2000.
The boot time (to the first app running) is likely due to Nvidia blob, but who knows?
It's harder to look up RAM numbers, but AMD launched a 1600MHz CPU (and a few others above 1GHz) in 2001.
Windows 10 really needs an SSD
I got an 11" Dell Inspiron with a puny A6-9220e (1.7ghz, 2 core) CPU that is roughly comparable to an Atom, but with a somewhat better GPU. Replaced the HDD with a SATA SSD. Thought it would be a cute little beater netbook.
For all intents and purposes, it's just not usable unless that real-time protection is turned off. Things freeze up for multiple seconds while clicking any button, apps take dozens of seconds to launch, etc. With real-time protection off, it's pretty decent - good enough for web, YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, whatever.
Unfortunately, Windows turns real-time protection back on automatically after a certain amount of time. Apparently you need Win 10 Professional or higher to permanently disable it via group policy or something.
which is what we are comparing here.
I had it on a 2006 Sony VIAO laptop until last year. It ran better than Windows 8 with 2GB of RAM. Slow without an SSD, but tolerable as downloader/media server.
Some of the OEM drivers (bluetooth, fingerprint scanner etc.) had stopped working in Windows 8 (it was an XP laptop that I upgrade to 7 onward) because Sony stopped supporting them.
The hilarious thing was that in Windows 10 those started working again with builtin drivers from Windows.
I could probably have kept the laptop around longer, but I went on an ecycling binge last year and got rid of a lot of tech crap that was just lying around.
I have Windows 10 running dual boot on my Dell Inspiron 530s from 2005. It's a Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz. I don't run Windows 10 full time because it's a little sluggish, but it works ok.
(I did upgrade to an SSD + 8GB RAM + Nvidia GT 610 but everything else is 2005).
On the same note, I also have Kubuntu 18.04 on the same machine. Now this is my daily driver. Runs Chrome, plays Youtube etc. and everything else just fine. Things are extremely responsive. It's almost inconceivable to think I'm using a 15 year old computer in 2020 as my main machine but here we are.
What everything else? You kept the CPU, motherboard, and case? That's not a "typical 2005 PC" anymore.
But the original was also a low-end Dell PC. With these upgrades, it would be a higher-end 2005 machine.
The performance boost was unnoticeable with the added RAM and video card (primarily for driving dual monitors -- the GT 610 was a cheap $70 card, not a high end card by any means). What really changed the performance was the SSD -- which I added much later -- now that was noticeable.
Pixel 1: Release Date October 2016, Last Update Dec 2019 (3 years, 2 months)
Pixel 2: Release Date October 2017, still current (2 years, 8 months and counting). Android 11 beta also available. If it is kept updated throughout the 11.0 cycle, that will be ~4 years or so.
Pixel 3, 3a, and 4 are newer but also still current.
Android 8.0 (released August 2017) was updated this month: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/refs/tags/...
You have to track the actual hardware changes in that time and compare it more to the PC market.
PCs pre-2006 had almost universally 32-bit processors, fixed pipeline GPUs, and maybe 4GB of RAM, probably 2GB. Post 2006, more GPUs got hardware shaders, 4GB of RAM became the baseline, as did 64-bit CPUs (usually with 2 or more cores). Those have all aged reasonably well and can still run most modern software outside of the graphics intensive ones (and even those sometimes if you turn most of the settings down).
The iPhone 3GS (2009) was the first one to have hardware shaders. That right there knocks out the two prior generations from being able to keep up.
The iPhone 5S (2013) was the first 64-bit processor, creating another boundary line for long-term support.
The iPhone 6S (2015) was the first to have > 1GB of RAM (upped it to 2GB), which created another boundary line.
So it's not too surprising that the higher RAM, 64-bit processor, with hardware shader support is the oldest supported iPhone (from this year forward).
Post-2015, the iPhone has improved (obviously if you've switched from a 6S to the 11 like I did) in performance and capabilities, but it's also stabilized in many ways. I haven't dug into the post-2015 phones yet to see if there are any other natural boundaries that will show up as devices drop out over the next 2-3 years, but I'm sure they exist there somewhere. Eventually the OS and the applications will be dependent on specific hardware features that cannot be easily (or efficiently) recreated on old, lower clocked processors.
That's not a very convincing argument. Moore's law was alive and well two decades ago for PCs, but Windows XP (initially released 2001, supported til 2014) was able to run on hardware from 1995 (according to https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_en.htm).
Microsoft has a different motivation, in that they were selling Windows and Windows support. Apple didn't sell iOS (and they'd stopped selling OS X sometime in the '00s). MS had a vested interest, then, in supporting all hardware that they could because of businesses (and governments, especially governments) that wanted the latest OS, but didn't want to drop $2-3k on new computers. MS made their money off of the OS, their software on that OS, and the money spent by developers to have access to MS's development tools.
Apple makes their money off of their hardware. So some people like to claim that Apple does a shit job of supporting old hardware, which may be true. They tend to cut off support more readily than many people would like. But in mobile they do a ton better than any Android device manufacturer (who have the same motivation as Apple: selling hardware).
But my point still stands, older versions of iPhones are harder to continue supporting because they lacked hardware capabilities/features of newer ones. From improvements to the GPU, increasing RAM, adding cores, and going to 64-bit. Each of those added capabilities that the OS and app developers took advantage of that created boundary lines that barred older devices. This is more akin to the changes from x86 to x86-64 processors than the 1995->2003 hardware changes (Pentium 1 -> Pentium 4, all 32-bit) and the change from fixed-function GPUs to hardware shader GPUs.
Strictly speaking, Apple sold iOS for a while. iOS 2 was a $10 paid upgrade for iPod touch users.
The 6S is the lowest model that contact tracing apps will run on, and of course the oldest phone the latest iOS will support.
I switched from the 6S to 11 last Christmas, and most of the improvements I noticed were largely incremental -- apart from a handful of things like FaceID and the camera which were significantly better. Ok, the battery is a lot better too. But the 6S didn't feel obsolete at all -- it felt like a current generation phone -- because it was running current generation software.
My iPad Air 2 runs the latest iPadOS and still works great -- not sure when I'll make the jump to a newer iPad.
p.s. the only thing the iPad Air 2 lacks support for is Apple Pencil. But now that I'm into fountain pens and high quality notepads, I don't really miss it. Also if I need to create Martin Kleppmann-esque hand-drawn architecture diagrams -- which I do occasionally -- I just use any number of rubber-tipped styluses (many inexpensive options on Amazon) with the Sketches app. Gets the job done.
Kleppmann himself uses Fifty Three and Maglus styluses I believe. I'm way cheaper -- I just use the styluses that I get as swag from tech conferences.
I think it's closer to the iPhone X and the iPad Pro, 2nd-generation, or thereabouts.
Compared to the devices you cited, raw speed and graphics power improved massively in the A-series chips during the years in question, the camera system is almost unrecognizably better as is the neural-net processing and computational photography.
The displays improved markedly as well.
I agree with you that the 6S is not obsolete, and that's a credit to Apple, but my current iPad Pro is miles ahead of the Air 2, which I owned as well. This has enabled me to do all kinds of new things with the device, and do them better. I wouldn't be able to go back. The last couple iPad Pros are 3x faster in Geekbench single-core than the Air 2, and more than 4x faster in multi-core.
It's going to start to get hard though, moving forward, to make that kind of massive improvement. We already have 120Hz refresh, we now already have raw CPU power that is superior to almost all current laptop computers including MB Pros, we now have about as good of a screen as can be imagined, laws of physics will start to bar further major physical camera improvements, etc.
Apple's already at the 5nm mode with its silicon; there are only a couple steps left before transistor sizes are just a few atoms across.
The biggest noticeable difference probably being RAM. The 6S and 8 (non Plus) both have 2GB ram, while the 6 and 5S only had 1GB.
I've been eyeing the iPad Pros for a while now but have never been able to pull the trigger. Just curious what use cases would push me over the edge.
I spend most of my time on the iPad on consumption activities like Twitter, Youtube, Prime Video, etc. My iPad is my travel device -- I don't even own a personal laptop anymore.
My content creation activities include writing stuff on Google Docs, editing photos synced from my iPhone, light 720p video editing on iMovie and of course drawing architecture diagrams on Sketches.
But mostly it's just a more pronounced form-factor of what the iPad is all about, in particular in comparison to an iPhone.
The bezel to body ratio gets cut in half from about 30% of the body, to about 15%. It's kind of crazy when you think of it like that (instead of screen-to-body), as almost 1/3rd of the body is bezel on the Air models. On the original it was even 37%)
At around 15%, you're approaching the iPad's true form-factor: just one big screen. That's pretty wonderful for consuming content. All this screen real-estate is what sets it apart from say an iPhone for content-consumption, while retaining the notion of it being a lightweight mobile-device you can throw in your bag and whip out easier than a laptop e.g. on an airplane, in bed, in the bus, on a trip, on the couch.
But it's not like you can do all that much extra. For me personally though, reading a digital version to a paper newspaper or even a website always felt a little bit cramped on a regular iPad. It feels most websites and magazines are about 13 inches. For example, The Economist is about 13 inches diagonal. It's very natural to read on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. Quite alright on the 11 inch, but just a tad too small on the 9.7 inch, requiring more frequent zooming in or alternative views.
The iPad air 3(rd gen) by the way is already a pretty decent middle-ground, at 10.5 inches, nearing a 20% bezel, and very fast for years to come.
But the Pros also have Promotion, which gets you 120 hertz refresh rates. Makes everything buttery smooth. Really not a big deal, but it's one of those things that made me feel like I was using some futuristic device you'd expect in a Star Trek universe. But again, really not a big deal, it's just a feeling. Usually there's some lag, some stutter, some delays. With 120 hertz it feels as if we're moving towards a world in which there is no UI lag and the tech is really futuristic. Combined with an insaaaanely fast device, the only time you get confronted with any latency is when the internet is involved. Not something that'd make me buy the Pro, but it's fun to know that this'll be coming to all normally-priced devices in a few years. You also get more colours, it gets brighter, and there's truetone display. The display is really something else, I'd check it out in stores and see if it matters.
The rest don't matter much to me. FaceID, four really great speakers, ultra fast, better camera, LIDAR, neural engine, I don't really care for. USB-C is a nice touch as I find it's always around for charging. And the magic keyboard is a nice touch together with the pencil, google docs should be a lot nicer with the keyboard and drawing diagrams with the pencil, but then it starts to get quite expensive.
Let's just look at the CPUs:
1st gen: 412MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked)
3G : 412MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked)
3GS : 600MHz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked)
4 : 800Mhz, 1 core, 32-bit (under clocked)
4S : 800MHz, 2 core, 32-bit (under clocked)
5 : 1.3GHz, 2 core, 32-bit
5S : 1.3GHz, 2 core, 32-bit
6 : 1.4GHz, 2 core, 64-bit
6S : 1.85GHz, 2 core, 64-bit
7 : 2.34GHz, 2 core, 64-bit (4 cores, 2 used)
8 : 2.39GHz, 6 core, 64-bit
X : 2.39GHz (2 cores) & 1.42GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit
XS : 2.49GHz (2 cores) & 1.52GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit
11 Pro : 2.66GHz (2 cores) & 1.82GHz (4 cores), 6 cores, 64-bit
(NB: I took these numbers from Wikipedia, I'm assuming I read them correctly as I just threw this together in a couple of minutes. There's probably a mistake or two, and I skipped some versions like 5C, XR, and 11.)
Geekbench does a far better job of capturing the massive improvement in Apple's CPUs in recent years. And the GPU improvements have been even larger.
Early PCs/home computers were also underpowered compared to workstations. The difference is: buyers expected them to be supported for a much longer time and expected developers to (if somehow possible) to write sufficiently fast code that also runs decently on "outdated" computers.
Mobile phones (smart phones in particular here) saw changes in 1-3 years that took 5-10 years on PCs. That has to be taken into consideration when trying to understand why a piece of hardware isn't supported by the latest OS or software.
Windows 95 (formally) did run on a PC that has an Intel 80386DX CPU of any speed and 4 MB of system RAM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Windows_95&oldid=962821687#System_requirements
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Intel_80386&oldid=952503560https://www.technologytips.com/windows-system-requirements/
The software/application story is certainly better on desktops, I'll grant you that.
I suspect TouchID will be the next one we hit, but that is going to be at least four years off because iPhone SE #2.
The neural engine may be a feature cut-off after that, where there are just too many features and services being run on device which can't be done on older hardware.
Other than that, I suspect Apple will still institute a vintage/obsolete lifecycle for phones - just choosing to drop support for phones where the hardware hasn't been sold in a certain amount of time (say five years), official replacement parts like batteries are no longer being made, etc.
Every Windows machine but 1 in my house is >5 years old. The 1 that is newer was just built this year to replace a machine with an >11 year old motherboard (CPU/RAM had been upgraded since). It does help that I went 100% SSD and touch (for laptops) when Windows 8 came out.
I don't think there will ever be another OS that has the same level of backwards compatibility that Windows does. It is just too hard. Support longer than iOS on an ecosystem more diverse than Android. Windows users expect it though.
Windows users are an ungrateful bunch.
Note that the Google branded hardware does seem to be supported for much longer. My old Nexus 7 got updates for many years - but the hardware itself was terrible and I couldn't even charge it after the third replacement's micro usb port failed - another typical Android experience, I'm afraid.
I wonder if this is slowing down, or speeding up? At some point it feels like we'll find a equilibrium for phones, similar to what we have for general purpose computers...
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Latitude-E6500.12268.0.ht...
It was my work computer. It had 8GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, a beautiful 1920x1200 display (as opposed to the 1920x1080 display that became the norm shortly thereafter), gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n (?) wireless. It has a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz processor
It’s running Windows 10. Besides the processor and spinning hard drive, those are still decent specs for modern computers.
An iPhone from that era had a single core 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM with a 480x320 display. A modern iPhone has a 2436x1125 display, 4GB of RAM, 6 core processor - 2 at 2.66Ghz, 4 at 1.82Ghz.
That’s not to mention that the 2008 iPhone doesn’t support 4G.
Now let’s go back further. A PC from 1996 wouldn’t support an operating system released in 2008.
It was released September 2013 (6.5yr), discontinued September 2014 for the 64GB version (5.5yr), March 2016 for the 16, 32GB versions (4yr).
(Based on the difference between the purchase and sale prices I ended up paying about $10 a month to use the 5S for 3.5 years. I sold it after replacing it with an SE that I made money on at purchase because of an insane promotion at Best Buy.)
Everyone else who runs XP installs it on new hardware.
So the next version of android comes along and requires a newer kernel, and the phones built around these chipsets can't be updated.
The chipset folks see no new revenue for forward-porting their hacked up kernels and drivers, and therefore aren't interested in updating.
That is the problem the Android ecosystem needs to solve.
Because Apple controls the full stack, they have no problem forward porting any custom changes that they need. It's all the same codebase.
If anything, a new update changing anything in the UX might be met with negativity.
So OEMs have even less reasons to care sadly.
Android itself doesn't have a strict requirement for an updated kernel. It will typically run fine on the original kernel tree the SoC launched with.
OnePlus occasionally does this, they are currently rolling out Android 10 for the OnePlus 5 and 5T, based on the original kernel tree. That's a 3 year old device (and I hate that I'm using a 3 year old device as my best example)
It seems like most Android vendors simply choose not to offer extended updates.
If you bought a Pixel 1 128GB at launch, it cost you $749. $249.67 per supported year over 3 years.
(The iPhone 6S Plus has same 1080p resolution as the standard size Pixel phone, which is why I use them as the base, but for folks wondering...)
If you bought a Pixel 1 XL 128GB at launch with the higher resolution screen, it cost you $849. $283 per supported year over 3 years.
I have an iPhone 8 which hasn't been usable since the last update. Most functions work but the performance has taken a nose dive. Some apps crash randomly.
I would not use that device as my daily phone.
I'm even running the iOS 14 Developer beta on my 8 Plus right now and it still runs like a dream.
Check battery health?
Performance wasn’t great for a while but after the whole battery kerfuffle last year I took it into the store to get the battery replaced for $30 and it felt like a brand new phone after that.
I'd suggest checking your battery health and maybe doing a reset.
Also, you are forgetting that Android phones drop in price almost immediately, so it's not fair to compare launch prices. For instance my Pixel 4 was essentially 74000JPY just 2 months after launch compared to 120000JPY iPhone 11 Pro year round.
Even at those prices, the iPhone is still a bit less expensive per supported year.
The difference comes out to be negligible 666JPY/year. And Samsung phones get even cheaper after launch, couple that with their 4 years of security updates their cost/year is substantially lower than Pixel or iPhone.
Also, they cut off that particular Pixel from further updates right after switching to the .0 version of the new OS.
Who in their right mind wants to be stuck with the buggy .0 version of an OS?
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/4/16403922/g... Every Pixel has 3 year of support mentioned in it's support page.
> Who in their right mind wants to be stuck with the buggy .0 version of an OS?
Android updates have changed over time, they didn't do 9.1 or 10.1 updates at all. All bug fixes are pushed alongside security patches. And Pixel 1 got 4 updates on Android 10, last one being especially a month late due to fixing of all final bugs.
As far as the Pixel 1, the people I knew who installed Android 10 on it regretted the decision. The couple of patches they got before getting cut off definitely did not iron out all the bugs.
I don't see what your problem here is? Every Pixel gets 3 year of FULL OS UPDATES. Not 2 years OS + 1 year Security updates.
> As far as the Pixel 1, the people I knew who installed Android 10 on it regretted the decision. The couple of patches they got before getting cut off definitely did not iron out all the bugs.
Android folks tend to moan and complain a lot. Just look at /r/Android. All my non-tech-enthusiasts friends using Pixels have never complained about anything.
>If Google is indeed adding another year, it would at least move closer to matching the lengthy span of time that Apple’s iPhones continue to receive new features and operating system updates. Security updates are also promised for three years, but that was already the case with the original Pixels.
Also, you'll have to excuse me if I take the word of people I know when they say getting Android 10 right before they were cut off from all other updates resulted in a buggy mess.
On the other hand, if you use a less popular device, your option will be much more limited as the device get older.
My mom still uses my old Galaxy S2, which probably costed 50 euros/year over almost 10 years and supports Android 10 thanks to LineageOS.
An iPhone's faith is to become a doorstop no matter what.
Unofficial Android builds are fully supported, maintained and updatable builds, they simply are not released by the phone vendor or Google.
That's the original point
you can' update your phone, because it's not yours
If you're happy, good for you, but it's not ok.
In Europe the most popular smartphone brand is Samsung.
Lineage supports basically all of their models.
Also: Nexus support is not bad
Nexus 6 and 6p are supported
https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#google
They even support all my Xiaomi devices, including a very old Mi pad second edition.
It's probably the OS that actively supports more devices in existence right now.
iOS doesn't even support all the iPhones.
The devices link you included links to legacy builds/devices that are discontinued. The only Google phones currently supported on LineageOS are the Nexus 6 and Pixel 1/1XL. As another data point, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S7 have no active support either while the S4 and S5 do.
This is where you should look: https://download.lineageos.org/
Apple's upcoming iOS version -- not just current, but the one that's not even released yet -- supports all iPhones released in the last 5 years. There's just no comparison.
Exactly.
One supports just a few devices, the other supports hundreds.
One is free, the other is not.
Guess which is which.
if Nexus 6P is not supported is Google's fault
Nexus 6P was a bad phone, with sever problems, it was discontinued after a year and you could obtain a compensation if you had one that was faulty.
Still the community tried to support it
They decided wasn't worth anymore
The community is people, Apple is not people.
So it is more like 25$ per year for Android.
Not a perfect phone but good enough.
Of course the phone is de-Googled and runs on stock European Android without operator's crapware which is also nice about Xperias. Full factory install takes 15 minutes with newflasher.
I do not enjoy iPhones and Apple's miserable software in general. I am running ChromeOS/debian on my Macbook Pro (the last good model) for years now.
Guess that makes me odd guy..
Personally, I dont think CPU performance has been an important factor for years on midrange and higher phones, but that's a matter of opinion.
The six got cut off after "only" five years because it didn't have enough RAM to run the current version of iOS.
Now the original SE and 6s will also receive that sixth year of support.
If you bought that original iPhone SE, that works out to $67 per supported year.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/19/07/22/apple-issues-ios-...
best. smartphone. ever.
(I actually just dug mine out to give it another go, but the battery is nuked from sitting untouched for eighteen months :\ )
I do still really hope so though...
So, knowing how life works, we can guarantee that Apple will release a small form factor phone as part of their next offering ;)
>the 5.4-inch iPhone won’t be much bigger than the original (2016) 4-inch iPhone SE 131 x 64 mm (5.15 x 2.51-inches)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2020/05/07/apple-ip...
I'm die hard fan of SE (SE ONE of course!) and form factor is perfect for me.
I was paid to buy my SE (https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/6lyjyl/cheap_pr...)!
You can buy a poco f1 (Snapdragon 835) for 250$ that will perform just as well as any pixel.
For that price you can buy a new flagship killer every year.
I've my issues with Apple like anyone else, but at least my phone is supported for a reasonable amount of time - 5 years or so?
My mom is used to android phones, its complex but she's understood the basic design language and can navigate the phone easily. Whenever she needs help though, its a massive struggle for me to do tech support over phone / video call. Each android phone is different, and we've never had the same phone, and we both get frustrated because the menus and the steps needed to modify settings is different.
With an iPhone though, regardless of the iPhone model, I can send her a screen recording that she can easily replicate on her phone. Consistency is extremely valuable for a non power-user, and only iPhones offer such consistency over multiple generations of iPhones, and iOS updates. Yes there are changes, such as the switch from TouchId to FaceId in iPhone X, but they are incremental, as compared to the confusing experience of switching from a Samsung device to a OnePlus or a Xiaomi device.
I have been considering getting a new phone and I keep eyeing up the iPhone 11 Pro, mostly because of the longevity of available software updates. Secondly, with an Apple I'm not subject to waiting for the carrier to push out the update.
However, Apple rightly foster "brand loyalty" (awful phrase), by doing exactly the opposite. And with the knowledge that people sell phones second hand, thus increasing Apple's market share, and future customers.
It sounds like Samsung could learn a lesson or two.
A phone does have a shelf life though (4g, 5g...), but it's not as short as these companies would like you to believe.
Those are early 2000's technologies which telcos are upgrading from to increase subscriber density, but on the customer optics, they are mostly equivalent to 4G.
I'm a previous Android user, my iPhone 8 is almost 3 years old and I'm thinking of keeping it for another year or 2. I also have 2 Macbook Pro laptops at home from 2012 and 2015 respectively and I actually prefer them over the 2019 model from work. And a first generation iPad Pro (2015) that's better than what I see on the market for Android.
Was just thinking of getting a Samsung tablet, but this is making me reconsider. All of my Apple products still work and are kept up to date.
My mom doesn't have a lot of apps installed on her phone, just something like maps, the local transit provider app and whatsapp. She sometimes browses the web.
I actually installed LineageOS on her phone a while ago, but I think even that isn't updated anymore (for her particular model).
There are other reasons I don't use Android, but this was very distinctly the single reason I bought iOS initially and I've never regretted it.
I still use that OP2 as my daily driver, now with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10, the current version) installed on it. It's not blazing fast but the battery is at 80% capacity and it otherwise works well (and has a 3.5mm jack).
This obviously is the enthusiast option, but the first OnePlus had Cyanogenmod as the factory installed OS on there. If their relationship had continued and Cyanogen hadn't imploded it's quite possible that the OP2 would have the latest build on there officially as LineageOS is what Cyanogen became. Unfortunately there are no builds of 17 for the OP1.
That iPhone of the same vintage? I gladly gave it back when it was stuck on the then just-outdated iOS 12 and there wasn't much of an obvious future for it.
I don't understand why they wouldn't keep issuing security updates when they already did the hard part of the major update.
It's probably time that I upgraded it, but nothing new even appeals to me anymore due to nearly all phones ditching the headphone jack, even the phablets. The "newest" phone I can find that ticks all the boxes I want (wireless charging, headphone jack, expandable memory slot) would have to be a regular S10, which is over a year old at this point.
Similarly, my laptop from 10+ years ago works flawlessly With Debian 10.
It'll certainly keep running without a company backing it, but there have been so many similar initiative, I'm personally curious how this one will turn out.
RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.
Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.
I guess the SSD is also slower than the RAM, so generally, storage is always slower. Ethernet/wifi is generally as fast as a HDD, in order of magnitude.
There are many possible ways to avoid accessing the HDD, by buffering things and storing them on ram as often as possible. If HDD worked well on windows 7/xp/linux desktops, there are no credible arguments why it would not work properly on windows 10.
Again I would say the problem is Wirth's law, which here easily benefits SSD. At one point, for an OS like windows is becoming so much complex that it becomes just impossible to optimize things appropriately for something else than a HDD. Backward compatibility and hardware compatibility might be one source of the problem, but I'm sure there are other things at play.
I'm suspecting that in the end, the hardware people and people at microsoft decided to abandon the idea of having an OS that works well on a HDD, because the SSD industry would obviously benefit from this.
Wirth's law has completely replaced Moore's law, in my view. I say this over and over, but when climate problems will cause economic problems, computing will return to an era of lightweight software and hardware.
I'm running an iPad 3 with iOS9 and a OnePlus 3 running Android 9 that I bought off Craigslist for $200. I know it's like driving a 20 year old Corolla, but does lack of the latest OS make a device unusable? If my current car worked I wouldn't buy a new one to get auto distance cruise control.
I haven't found features on smartphones very compelling probably since 2015. Fingerprint sensor is nice, more speed is nice, but the complexity of what I use it for isn't that significant.
As part of the "Android Enterprise Recommended" program, some Android devices (such as rugged devices) receive FIVE years of updates.
Unfortunately they are all very expensive and most of these devices are not standard phones.
[1] https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/1...
[2] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en
Its not the exact same as vendors supporting it though since its los devs backporting Android 10 to 5 year obsolete kernels but it is the power of free software at work.
It absolutely impacts the reasoning for some iPhone and Android users.
edit: added words to the last sentence
I switched from iPhone to Android because I end up breaking my phones after about two years and I can't be paying more per annum for a phone than for a car. I need an email client, web client, maps and sometimes a camera for taking a reference photo. It's astounding to me that the cost of meeting those needs seems to be increasing over time instead of decreasing.
We've seen over time how Apple uses software updates to aggressively force new hardware purchases. The latest OS doesn't support version X of the software, and more often than not your device doesn't support OS version Z so open up thy wallet and get the latest hardware. This is precisely the reason people are terrified of updating their software. It goes from working to not working. This impacts my reasoning for NOT buying Apple hardware.
EDIT: You know what, I change my mind. This gains some respect from me for Apple. I hate phones in general and I'm just grumpy.
My Tesla does the same thing, it’s a car that literally gets software updates while I sleep. And it’s AMAZING. I get new features (sometimes a new alarm system, one time a dash cam system, another time Spotify and once it made the car actually faster) for free! There’s no taking it to the shop or nagging or anything. This is an amazing feature.
On the android side you literally have phones that don’t get critical security patches - that’s the scariest type of “it doesn’t work anymore so you need to go buy new hardware” because you don’t even know you’re at risk.
Android devices not getting OS updates after two years, especially $800 android phones, is obscene. There’s no way to defend that.
Android One is quite successful from what I can tell. This is the reason.
I think the notch and home-screen-bar layouts were a bit tricky but they did have APIs in place and it was OK.
The biggest issue really was the 32-bit to 64-bit hardware transition; I remember seeing weird graphical issues because floating-point results were slightly different with float vs. double.
Normally I'd feel a bit bummed about missing features and long term support is a problem but there wasn't much that was new to Android.
† Battery is shot and lightning connector bent from their impractical dock I fancied in years past. Very difficult now to get the perfect angle to allow charging.
I went to an Apple Store and they just cleaned-up for me (walk-in). I bet the same applies to the headphone jack ;)
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightnin...
It looks good but after a few years destroys the port due to lack of support.
I own several pairs of extremely high quality and highly accurate headphones, and; no - I don’t want to carry an adapter around for headphones that prevents charging while headphones are plugged in. That’s obviously logistically a no go for anyone performing live with an iPad. I’d never want to rely on battery power live.
Even if I hadn’t invested in my audio gear and headphones specifically so much, the latency on Bluetooth has made it a non option forever - unless I buy one of the select few W1 certified Beats units, which then is just an additional expense.
Apple does not currently offer, and it seems that they have no interest in offering, a phone that I will buy in the future. I couldn’t believe they pulled the headphone jack on the SE2, it seemed like the last ‘fuck you’ to the audio content creators they’ve claimed to support forever.
iOS 14 support on iPhone 6S means Apple keeps me as an iPhone user for maybe another year.
I will probably be downgrading to a dumbphone and an old, flash-drive modded iPod gen 3 or 4.
Can't say the same about any Andorid phones from the same era.
Looking forward to this new era of Apple ARM chips in desktops!
Switched to iPhone SE a while ago because of this.
I had an Android Gingerbread (2.3) phone for a while when KitKat was out, and I had lots of software to download. Then I updated to one on Marshmallow (6.0) and it had plenty of software and probably still does. I'm not sure how much software is still available that works on Nougat (7.0.1) on the S6 all the way through Android 10, but I was really disappointed that I couldn't even keep the iPhone 4S alive as a toy because all the old software was gone.
However, it's lame that Google drops security updates so early.
I'm having trouble finding out whether this truly helps though; do either of those have a bootloader/firmware that provides device tree info to the booted OS, or are they still relying on the booted system to have its own device tree to describe the hardware?
EDIT: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/devicetree/usage-mode... implies that u-boot can probably feed a device tree file to Linux at boot time?
EDIT2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_tree says, "As an example, Das U-Boot and kexec can pass a device tree when launching a new operating system.", so yeah it looks like that would work! Sweet:)
So somehow, despite getting updates, old iPhones were becoming less functional and users would get the feeling that they have to change it for a shiny new recent more powerful iPhone!
The latter makes the device unreliable and unusable, the former makes it reliable and maybe unusable for some applications. It's also rectifiable by replacing the battery (which I've done on several iPhones myself, and used stores for others just for the convenience). That last part is what Apple should have communicated to people. We did that with my dad's old iPhone 6 and it went from "slow but usable" to "like brand new and snappy".
EDIT: A note, the device I had that did that to me was a laptop with a spinning disk hard drive. When the battery started failing the laptop was fine until I hit the GPU (which was often, I was in grad school and doing a lot of graphics programming). Plugged in there were no issue, but on battery it'd bring the system down when I ran anything that made the GPU and CPU run close to full-speed. Fortunately I was able to get the data off, unfortunately I'd pretty well fucked the system before I realized why it was happening (so it happened a few times) and ended up just replacing the whole laptop rather than just getting a new battery.
So before the update, your phone was reasonably fast. A new phone/os version comes out, you have an automatic update, and then your phone will be slower to do the tasks that it was doing well before.
So, as an user what will be you conclusion? If you are not even aware that performance slow down is due to the update, you will think "my phone become older, I need to buy a more recent one!".
For memory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
"Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone's Performance"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iph...
And to be remembered, they were fined for that by the French regulator:
When Apple says "that's all, folks" they mean it - the device will no longer get updates. When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device.
I'm using a Galaxy SIII - using it right now in fact - with Android 9 more or less because I have not updated it to v10 (the current version of Android) yet. I might upgrade it, then again I might not, the thing works fine on v9. For reference, this phone was launched in 2012 (3 years before the iPhone 6s) with Android 4.0 and got official updates to 4.4. It then got updates through Cyanogenmod, later through LineageOS. It is still updated OTA (as in 'over the air', like when it was new). Once Android 11 comes around it'll probably be ported to the SIII, the limiting factor tends to be driver support.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-android-10-samsung...
The problem is that a tiny percentage of users actually do that. It leaves the rest vulnerable to any security issues that are found after the last update.
Windows has a different reason why they're so focused on desktop BC: lock-in. Had Windows not taken care of BC over decades and a provable track record of that from the beginning of the DOS era, enterprises with tens of thousands of licenses would have fled the ship (and funded WINE with ludicrous amounts of money, probably). On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable.
Yep, a fatal mistake, made by leadership brought in from outside Windows. Pretty much wrote the epitaph for Windows with that move.
signed: bitter Windows Phone user.
When exactly did that happen? The first iPhone received 3 major updates, more than most Android phones even today.
Apple tends to drop support when some hardware feature or limitation doesn't play well with the new OS. For instance, the iPhone 6 only has 1GB of RAM.
Nokia phones are in my opinion way too underrepresented on the market for the support they give.
I doubt very much that Apple is being arbitrary in their support cutoff for phones. If it's capable of the features they build into the OS, it gets support. If I had to make a guess, the next cutoff point (iOS 15?) is going to be a chip having the Bionic Neural Engine, which would make the iPhone 8 the oldest supported phone.
Hopefully we'll see Mac's with longer lifecycles and macOS support as well. I think the Mac side is a tad short at the moment.
From a software and developer side, it makes sense to drop 32 bit support early. It's less radically different architectures to target. It means they can guarantee the performance of the os and apps. But as processors got good enough to handle most things, the need to drop the slow ones, and the slow ones holding back the software evolution is minimized.