Meanwhile, my flagship android phone from 2018, the Samsung Galaxy S9, is stuck on the last version of Android. At least it still gets security updates, some manufacturers don't even go that far.
If in October 2013 you bought a just released iPhone 5S, you would have had official updates until - apparently - June 2021. Three months ago. Assuming that was really the last security update to iOS 12.
An official Apple device has received one and a half year's worth more updates than two official Google devices put together. The difference between Android support and iOS support is insane.
It's easy to point out that you'd probably need to get your battery fixed at least once to make a 5S last that long, and in 2021 it won't be any fun to use. The people that want to make things last have had the option though, and that's what's important. And with Moore's Law being dead and buried, it's going to be a lot easier to get things to last, too.
However, for many of us, we were simply left with a brick of a useless phone with no resolve.
https://www.androidcentral.com/nexus-6p-owners-eligible-400-...
This is one reason I pay the Apple premium: as a family, we get a lot more mileage out of the devices. Also, I don't have to stress about security, because I know they will be protected by updates and cloud backup for years and years to come.
The 4S never had a screen or battery change. It’s battery doesn’t last long with YouTube or video calls, but if charged at night and used for emails and voice calls, will last the whole day. It is perfectly usable, can do FaceTime etc.
We will need to replace it soon, though. Her school buddies all use WhatsApp which is no longer supported on iOS 9 (the latest on 4S).
I wouldn’t let her use it much longer for lack of security updates. The hardware - and even battery - are still usable at 10 years. Almost pleasant, even. Best form factor ever.
that and not having to mail in my phone, and wait a week for it to come back. that was completely frustrating and silly.
Wait a second are you sure about that? The last official version released was 6.0.1 which was released in October of 2015.
I remember this because the Nexus 5 was the phone that finally sealed the deal for me in leaving the Android ecosystem for good.
These "engineers" on the Android team did not QA their software so when I upgraded to 4.4.4, it broke the camera such that every video I recorded had messed up garbled audio. It totally ruined a special eurotrip where I had taken tons of video. I guess it was my mistake for trusting Google enough to update right before the trip started.
Anyway seeing that there is a section on Wikipedia devoted to all the hardware/software issues of the Pixel line, I think I made a wise choice to stop wasting my time with this ecosystem.
Went to a used iPhone 5S and ended up using that phone for 5 years. Was the best phone I ever owned.
I am not, as I didn't own the device (I did own a Nexus 4 around this time). I'm going by Google's available factory images [1].
Thats 6 years, 5 days of "full updates" if you consider the release day of iOS 13 to be the end of life support.
LineageOS and Amazon can’t generally provide security updates for older chips. Only Qualcomm can compile new kernels for the Snapdragon 800, say. And Qualcomm stops giving you updates after four years (recent change: it used to be the three).
The updates LineageOS and Amazon and anyone else provides are updates to Android’s open source components. That’s all great - but they’re not complete security updates, and driver issues are a big vector.
The cost of a new battery is around 10 bucks and some patience to install it.
That's inexcusable, and this attitude carried over to security updates is a big reason some corporates left Samsung and went to Apple -- e.g. the A5, a midrange phone comparable with the iPhone SE, lost access to updates when the device was perfectly usable.
Samsung must've felt the feedback, because this year they announced a formal policy on security updates -- too late for the S9, but customers from S10 onwards ought to benefit[1]. They've been a lot better with Android updates on newer phones too -- Project Treble probably played a role.
> Galaxy devices will now receive regular security updates for a minimum of four years after the initial phone release. By extending support for security updates delivered on a monthly, quarterly or biannual basis
[1] https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-takes-galaxy-securit...
Turns out that, despite the model numbers and identifiers being identical, this one phone in this one country in SE Asia had a slightly different GPU setup and there was a bug in the drivers it shipped with that was crashing our game.
So even though we worked with this user for like two weeks to try and figure out why it was just him, it turns out that it was because the Android manufacturer/carrier partnership situation is a gigantic mess for no discernible reason; the manufacturer didn't distinguish between two phones that had technically different specs, and the carrier didn't give a shit enough to ship the updated driver that would fix the issue.
MS Windows is Heaven on earth in this regard.
I'm at the point of thinking of ditching the android ecosystem for the apple ecosystem for my next phone precisely because no android carrier seems to want to support devices for much longer than 3 years.
There are no hardware problems which keep me from using the phone, just the lack of software updates.
The other issue is that we seem to be at somewhat of a plateau of phone performance. My pixel 5 is not significantly faster than my old pixel 2XL.
Long official support is absolutely a benefit when looking at smartphones, however, articles keep popping up about Apple basically buying and sitting on vulnerabilities for latest and greatest iOS, because that’s what works economically.
Well yea. The longer the lifespan of a phone, the higher the resale value, and the higher the retail price you can support. If you want to sell at AAPL prices, you should be able to support devices for AAPL durations.
OEM quality is all over the place for Android, crapware is standard. It's been 4 years of iPhone for me and the only complaint I have is how bad Apple Maps can be
For me it's just a cleaner, simpler, less ad-infested version of Google Maps
I want to like it because, as you pointed out, it's a cleaner interface
They do have a mechanism for filing corrections from within the app, which I've used a couple times and it seems to actually result in fixes, which is great
Hopefully they give more priority to a wider set of areas in the future
I can upgrade my iPhone every 2 or 3 years and spend a lot less overall. My wallet was always open when I tried to stay current with Android flagships.
My strategy for my last phone was to buy the previous year's flagship for this reason.
Currently using a cheap backup device I normally use for app dev while I workout what my plan for the next one is.
FWIW, the iPhone 6S (first avail oct 2015) gets iOS 15 ; and iPhone 6 still got a security update in mid 2021 despite being out of feature support.
I’m actually typing this on an iPhone 6S that I usually use for app development. I’ve just upgraded it to iOS 15, and honestly it’s still a great phone. UI is very snappy. Probably the best budget phone on the market right now, considering you can get one for ~£70 (I paid £100 a year ago for one that had had it’s battery replaced)
Could I sell my phone for more than $530? Yes. Is it worth my time to deal with asshats on Craigslist who arrange a time to meet up and then ghost you for three days, just to get a bit more out of it? Nah.
(Despite initially trying to sell it, my iPhone Xs sat on a shelf for two years until someone saw it and said "Hey are you selling that? My phone is dying.")
Presumably that also means that the phone is going to get refurbished, or maybe stripped for parts and recycled by Apple's fancy disassembly robots, which is nice.
I fully intend for my next device to be an iPhone 8 so that I can eventually pull the same thing with an upgrade to the SE 2.
I could, of course, install a custom ROM. But that usually means (in my experience) that not all hardware features work, battery life is worse, I have to install updates myself and I am usually not as confident about device security. Despite these, I used to install and love custom ROMs a lot in college. when I had the time but not anymore.
On my iPad (while it lasted, RIP), I would get updates on the same day as official iOS release. Night and day difference.
Considering all the major non-Google Android phone manufacturers are also the same that manufacture Black Friday TVs that fail on schedule, don't you sense this was a problem not with Android but with your choice of manufacturer?
I now have an iPhone 12.
Getting meaningful updates for the duration of how long I want to use the hardware for is a huge differentiator to me.
I guess it's probably even more frustrating if you're paying Apple-like prices for a Galaxy S series device and not getting updates. At least I can think, "well, I got what I paid for."
You can get both an affordable device and many years of support after the sale.
Eg, is this premature ending of support a Samsung thing, or is it endemic to the whole Android ecosystem, including Google?
>One aspect in which Android has always fallen behind iOS is updates, with iPhones receiving as many as six years worth of updates, while some Android phones are lucky to get two years. In this area, Google’s Pixel series have held the crown, offering their phones three full years of updates, including monthly patches and three major Android versions. The original Google Pixel was gradually updated from Android 7.1 Nougat to Android 10 — an extension from the original promise to only offer two major updates.
https://9to5google.com/2021/02/22/comment-four-years-android...
(Added) Of course, this doesn't explain why Samsung doesn't provide longer support. And I also don't know the reason but I guess their mobile division perhaps doesn't have enough power to negotiate against its chip division...
I'm not sure whether this is a good thing though. After each major update, older devices become less and less usable. I would appreciate security updates, but I'd gladly skip all these new features that make my phone crawl.
I know people who are actually annoyed but the update notification...
I could, and someday will, install a custom ROM, but for now, shit just works.
You should still do the security update if you're on Android though.
They should go back to the old style where major OS update happens every two years. Although I am not sure the current Apple understand this.
Personally this is why I tried out Android and have so far stuck with it, (splitting my devices up between two OSes but whatever). So far my Androids get 2 years of bi-monthly security updates and at least 2 major Android releases by manufacturer policy, which is all I've needed, and they don't effectively render my device useless (so far, fingers crossed).
People complaining about their phones being slow have aged batteries, a nearly full filesystem, and have likely gone through numerous system updates.
On iOS it is trivial to move off files you don't need on the device anymore and then do a backup, full wipe, and restore.
Updates are how they deliver updated battery management algorithms, not the metric they use to determine battery age.
You have absolutely no evidence to support this statement.
> That said, I didn’t like their approach of secrecy
Apple is under no obligation to disclose every practice or behavior, especially one which is completely innocuous and benefits the customer with zero downside. The alternative to slowing down the processor to account for increased internal resistance is "the phone crashes", which is exactly what iPhone 6S models did until Apple released the fix in an iOS 10 update.
Several generations of iPhones have been clearly specifically designed to make the battery and screen easy to replace (Apple even uses pull-tab-releaseable adhesives for the battery), and doesn't place the lightning connector on the main board unlike damn near every Android phone; it's an easily replaced module.
The "slowdown" was specifically to increase the amount of time before the phone's battery would have to be replaced. Other manufacturers have done the same.
How strange that this anti-repair anti-consumer company's OS releases support their phones far longer than any other phone manufacturer...
> You have absolutely no evidence to support this statement.
Correct. That’s why I said “seemingly” and “anecdotally”.
> Apple is under no obligation to disclose every practice or behavior, especially one which is completely innocuous and benefits the customer with zero downside.
I didn’t say they did, I just said I didn’t like it.
Apple’s CPUs are very bursty, and that causes them to suddenly draw a large current from the battery. Older batteries cannot handle this so the CPU doesn’t get enough power and reboots. What Apple did was to stop the CPU from suddenly ramping up speed, which means the battery doesn’t have to deal with a sudden spike in power demand and can keep up even if it’s degraded.
This does, of course, slow the phone down as it can’t ramp up as aggressively.
Maybe if Apple refused to support new features on old hardware it would solve this issue, but then you just anger users who are forced to buy new hardware to get a new feature...
Every major iOS update adds more functionality that
consumes more CPU cycles even in the background.
The larger issue, in any case, is that Apple prohibits reverting an iPhone to a prior version of iOS.
This inexorably leads users of old devices to one day install that final update that turns their device into a turkey.
At that point the customer buys a new phone, a year or two before they intended, and the old phone, which is too slow to be useful as a back-up device or hand-me-down, goes into a landfill.
However, it’s not exactly the latest and greatest!
There is a very long list of features not supported on the older phones!
So whilst the 6S to X may support iOS 15, it’s little more than a version number and PR realise for those phones!
Apple get free PR and credit for keeping old phones alive, when in reality the features are stripped out and not supported on older devices!
What do iOS version numbers even mean at this point!
Oh, and the S9 comes with so much preinstalled, unremovable shit that it's not even funny. It's a shame, because the phone itself is really nice, and the Samsung custom UI and apps can be awesome at times. The problem is that Samsung sells a premium phone at prices similar to Apple's (if you buy brand new at release time), but this doesn't translate into a premium experience. This also happen with other Samsung products such as TVs.
I had like 3 Android phones in a row who's GPS would start acting up after 1.5-2 years. My Apple devices are fantastic.
Overall, the largest benefit of Apple devices is that they just work. I can buy them and not have to worry about them.
Apple continues to support OS updates on the iPhone 6s, a device released almost 6 years ago
And how is the condition of that 15 year old Thinkpad's battery, keyboard and fans?
Apple's days as a head-and-shoulders above clear winner are over.
Exact same result.
The method that Apple is describing is going to cause more harm than good. Look how faulty their methodology is - even they agree it needs to be fixed.