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Comment by selsta | Hacker News Reader

Apple is still providing security updates for the iPhone 5S, that’s an over 7 year old device.

Which is to imply they're not still providing security updates for the iPhone 4, which is 7 years newer than the first generation AMD64 machines you can still install the latest version of Windows or Linux on.

Microsoft provides a version of Windows 10 that works on machines with 512 megabytes of RAM like the iPhone 4 has?

Nope. Windows 10 and iOS both require two Gigs of RAM at a minimum, although Microsoft's minimum OS requirements have always been regarded as something of a joke in the industry.

> Microsoft provides a version of Windows 10 that works on machines with 512 megabytes of RAM like the iPhone 4 has?

Linux does. For that matter Android does.

Also, machines from 2003 support 16GB of RAM:

https://www.tyan.com/Motherboards_S2885_Thunder%20K8W

Whose fault is it that you can't upgrade the memory on the iPhone 4?

You are nitpicking. Traditional electronics have a much longer support window then even iPhones, which themselves do much better than their competition in this regard.

Traditional electronics haven't seen large leaps in hardware capabilities on a yearly basis for a very long time.

Apple supports iPhones for as long as they have enough resources for the new version of the OS to continue running on them.

Google does not. The fact that they only provide half as many years of support at best proves the point.

You keep saying "Google" but there is nothing about Android that can't run on the earliest Android devices given driver support in recent kernels, and Google doesn't control the drivers.

Meanwhile Apple, like most Android phone makers, don't publish the information needed for third parties to make drivers for their hardware. Which is why you can't install the latest Android on an iPhone 4. And what is Google supposed to do about that? But Apple could do something about it.

Your bias is appalling.

In all your comments on this page you have contorted every negative for Google into a positive but every positive for Apple into a negative.

Have you considered the possibility that it's because Apple (like Huawei and Qualcomm) have a profit motive to make you to buy a new phone on regular basis even if you're satisfied with your existing one, and Google doesn't?

The last update for the iPhone 5S was iOS 12.4.8, released July 15, 2020. In the meantime, various vulnerabilities were found in e.g. Safari [1]. I don't believe all of that is backported into iOS 12.x.

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=safari

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