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Comment by augustl | Hacker News Reader

Apparently, the reason Apple dropped support for iPhone 7 is performance on the new lock screen. Pretty lame if that's the case, Apple has usually been good with supporting all devices as long as the hardware allows it (for example, hardware level secure enclave was required at a certain version of iOS)

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It is a extremely hard to maintain differential software features across hardware product lines. What ‘sounds lame’ may translate into significantly added complexity to the maintenance process.

I think with all of their resources, Apple of all companies could dig deep and stretch a little bit to make that happen.

You can blame their competition for not beating them out at longterm support on that front. Apple is already leading the market supporting iOS this long. I used my last iPhone for 7 years, unfathomable on any other platform than iOS.

I hope their competitors step it up and beat Apple out on grade A support. I'm seeing them fall further behind in every metric. My iPhone 12 mini that I bought on launch day "just works".

How did you manage 7 years. I struggle at the 5 year mark. I have an iPhone X bought dec 2017 that is now ready for replacement. Sometimes it completely drops the cell connection and I have to take out the SIM. Also video calls make it go very hot.

It was closer to six years if I crunch the numbers. It was the original iPhone SE. It was getting a little loose towards the end. But those models weren’t built quite as well as the 5S was. I had both.

I am pretty careful with my stuff. Going as far as to only putting my phone in my left pocket because there’s no metal rivet on that side of most jeans. I also probably only dropped the phone three or four times over that six year span. I don’t use the case, I’m just very careful. I won’t even pull it out if I feel I’m in a risky situation where I could drop it.

Even five years is a lot longer than any of my android phones lasted with daily use. I had the Motorola Droid, the HTC Thunderbolt, and the Samsung GS3, among others. I think you would be lucky to get 2 to 3 years out of those. I’m not sure what would go first, your OS support, or the cheaper hardware that they use in general. I had the best experience with Samsung in the Android market.

They quite literally already are. Find me a manufacturer that comes anywhere close to supporting devices for as long as Apple does.

Why throw money away?

Apple does, with all of their resources, dig much deeper and provide OS updates to much older device models than any mobile device manufacturer I know of.

Yes but why can't they dig infinitely deep??

It would make their product worse.

As someone that has worked on this very problem for 20 years, I can say with somewhat confidence Apples choice is the right one.

It would cost more or less infinite money to do this because of mythical man month issues.

E waste, no no don’t throw it out. You can use 99% of the apps even without ios16. It’s only when individual app developers phase out support for ios15 typically 2-3 years after. Facebook, YouTube etc still supports even iOS 12

OK. I'm convinced. I really don't use any 3rd party apps other than Brave and my banking app, so as long as those work and I keep getting security updates, my cheap ass is good to go.

I have passed on all my iPhones and I must have averaged like 8+ years for all of them. Really old phones get regulated to non critical things like a spare phone for travel or just a backup.

Actually, you can download the newer version of an app on a newer iphone and then download a version that works on the old iphone from the Purchased page.

Apple makes it difficult but keeping my iPhone 5S is still going years after iOS 12 is no longer "cool"

Why would you be keeping an 5S "still going" when you can buy an 8, SE, or an X/Xs/Xr, for a song and get vastly better performance, battery life, wifi and cellular?

The A7 is dogshit slow - I have an iPad with the A7 (or maybe it's the A9) and it's unusably slow for even simple things like apps from newspapers and library e-reader apps; you can watch the page assemble. Even waking the iPad with the home button is slow. On my A11-powered phone these apps run smooth as butter.

A 5S supports 11 of the LTE bands versus 24 bands of the 8. That alone is worth the upgrade, for the greater chance of being able to make or receive an important call.

How much time are you wasting on silly work-arounds just to be a retro-tech hipster pretending it's cool to use a completely outdated and inferior-in-every-way piece of hardware for absolutely no reason?

I stuck with an iPhone SE of the first generation until I really needed multi-sim this year. The form factor is great, no other phone is that small. Battery life was ok, too. Why not stick with hardware that does the job? If it works for him, great. Better for the environment, too. Cheaper as well.

What makes you think I don't own an iPhone XR? I have a lot of phones that I use for random projects and testing and sometimes I just need something I can strap to the side of a car with a suction cup to capture gyro data. If it falls off, it falls off.

By the way, I wasn't the one telling me "this is the greatest iPhone yet" at the yearly capitalism conference.

I'm impressed by how long you kept it going! My iPhone 5 and 6 were still going until last year.

Apparently, the reason Apple dropped support for iPhone 7 is performance on the new lock screen.

It’s more likely the fact the iPhone 7 only has 2GB of RAM and two cores, not to mention missing the Neural Engine, the image processor and other features on Apple’s latest SoCs that iOS 16 requires for some of its features.

Most of major features of iOS 16 would have to be removed to run on an iPhone 7.

I was looking at that, the iPhone 8 (supported) has a 6-core CPU, 4 high efficiency cores, but also 2GB of RAM in the plain iPhone 8, 3GB in the Plus. So if it's anything, it'll be in the GPU or the 2 extra cores, that marks the critical differentiator for performance.

But even the iPhone 8 doesn’t support all of the features of iOS 16:

* Live Text

* can’t send emojis in iMessage using Siri

* can’t ask Siri about apps

* offline Siri support for HomeKit, Intercom, Voicemail

* being able to smoothly switch between voice and typing when using dictation

* adding medications using the camera

* Door Detection in Magnifier

* Image search in more apps

Notably iPhone7 uses A10 that is last gen using PowerVR GPU

Ah, thanks, that's useful! I didn't know the iPhone 8 was such a large jump in hardware specs.

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