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Comment by toast0 | Hacker News Reader

The model lifetime is too short. You can't get any idea of medium term reliability (as a proxy for long term reliability) until when the phones are discontinued.

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The Pixel 6/6 Pro are rumored to have a 5-year support lifetime (in exchange for costing a grand). If true, I'm getting one. The Pixel 2 XL has been a great phone, despite spending all of Android 10 with most of the sensors not working due to some widespread corruption issue that would have necessitated a hard reset.

I'm by no means a google booster, but the 4A 5G is supported through Nov 2023, and the 5 through Oct 2023. That's not bad.

Apple providing 7 years of official support, i think.

And yet they lost a class action related to software updates making the hardware unusable and face more.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22248408/apple-class-acti...

https://www.smartphoneperformancesettlement.com/

Yes turns out dropping support entirely is less risky than bad updates tanking performances, because you’re not immediately and personally causing issues.

Those are real issues but that misses the point that iPhones have seven years of support which also decreases the TCO of the iPhone to around 62% less than the competition.

Technically they didn't lose it -- that's a settlement. This might sound like I'm being pedantic -- and I am -- but it's an important distinction! It means there was never some official legal determination that they did something wrong.

The specific thing they were sued over was "we slowed down your phone when the battery got old, because the alternative was it crashing, and we didn't tell you we were doing it". Not explaining it was bad, but they've since fixed that, and the underlying technical thing they did seems reasonable and, to the point of this discussion, actually prolonged the usable life of the phone.

Assuming you bought one on launch day, that's just-under 4 years of support. That only looks good by the awful standards of Android -- you can expect 50%+ more for Apple's phones, which you'd think Google could at least equal.

Supported means many different things. Ideally, I want to know if the device is going to last, or if it's going to end up bootlooping and being a big PITA like the Nexus 5X, before I buy it. That requires that it be on the market for a considerable amount of time. In this case, the 4a 5G is discontinued after less than a year in the market; it may continue to be sold, but likely not for very long.

Free repair if that happens is nice, but also not that helpful unless being out a phone for a week is fine, and losing your on device data is fine.

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