It won’t get ios 16, but apple has started supporting older devices with security updates. Ios 12.5.6 supports devices from 2013 that can’t use ios 15.
https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT201222
Apple makes some of the longest supported hardware in the business, and they’ve been lengthening their support. Their incentive is to get more services revenue so they want the largest userbase possible. I expect new devices will have at least ten years support.
I get that in some ways tech is different (my rice cookers still going, 60yrs) but in other ways it's not. My 2014 MBP really has zero reason to become obsolete (they stopped supporting it a year ago). It still functions just fine. It's still plenty fast. There are no features of the 2021 MBP missing from them 2014 MBP except at most USB-C ports.
Honestly hoping for 12/20/30+ years of patches sounds super nice but unreasonable.
My MacPlus from 1986 works fine, but I don't expect Apple to provide MacOS7 patches.
Or do you expect Apple to support a 20 year old Mac?
Or do you expect Apple to support a 1992 era Mac LCII with a 68030-16Mhz processor that came with at most a 10MB RAM and a 80MB hard drive?
Personally I think all of these examples should either legally have to be supported, or companies should be obligated to give away all source code & systems required for the user community/world to continue ongoing support & fixes.
I have moved on to a great 2-in-1 from 2017 that is quite similar, newer specs, much lighter at 7.4mm and 1.6lbs, OLED screen... this isn't geek pride. This is a fantastic brilliant light machine that until very recently would knock the socks off any iPad or Android Tablet, and has been available New Old Stock for under $400 for years now. It's far more machine than the flagship tablets until very recently.
The low end iPad is definitely an enviable marvel but it's also far less of an advance than I think we really understand. Part of why it looks so good though is because so many machines are poorly built, are compromised heavily. The whole 2-in-1 thing has gotten segmented into expensive fancy Surface competitors & ultra-low-end machines (which honestly with slightly better builds and much much better screens would be stunning devices), with unreasonable uncompromising top or bottom of market positioning. It's been sad. But some places out there are some really great 2-in-1 pc competitors, that have long put to shame Android & iPad offerings (until Apples very recent speedy but oh-so-limited oh-so-walled-garden oh-so-controlled shorter-lifed iPads).
There's absolutely a lot of people who just swear by Lenovo T420's forever & seemingly always will. I'm not at all of that ilk.
The Dell is slower than 2012 era iPhone 5
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/PhoneTablet14/937
> The whole 2-in-1 thing has gotten segmented into expensive fancy Surface competitors & ultra-low-end machines (which honestly with slightly better builds and much much better screens would be stunning devices)
“Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?”
> until Apples very recent speedy but oh-so-limited oh-so-walled-garden oh-so-controlled shorter-lifed iPads).
As of right now, the iPad Air 2 from 2014 supports the latest OS. Apple just released a security patch for the iPhone 5s from 2013 in June.
The Venue 11 Pro is not on any of these benchmarks. You are comparing the lowest power Atom to mobile cores, not the Venue 11 Pro's Haswell. Try again.
Generally I'd like it if you'd tone down the snark. I'm trying to have some conversation/discourse here, & it feels indecorous to take my 2-in-1 market segmentation woes into such ungraceful territory.
> As of right now, the iPad Air 2 from 2014 supports the latest OS.
In the United States and Turkey and nowhere else. Regarded as a Vintage model. iPad 5 from March 2017 is the last "current" model with international support. Still not bad, beats Android by far. But my (previous 2013 era) device is significantly faster[1], about twice as old, and continues to run regular, well supported OSes with good security status.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/16785932?baseli...
I’m sure they have discipline, they’ve just maximized for certain dimensions that don’t matter very much to consumers. Like novelty over longevity. Profit over longevity.
As for the battery glued in - again, what did you switch into, and how did it go? Aside from a few mishaps, Apple has the most long lasting laptops on the market.
So to answer some of the other questions that my post generated, I basically stopped using tablets. The kitchen tablet was replaced with a cheap Chromebook. My travel tablet was replaced with a MacBook Air 11 2015 that I got on eBay, and installed Linux Mint on it. I believe the 2015 MacBook Air model is one of the last MacBooks with a replaceable battery, and it is still one of the best 11" laptops ever made.
My other laptops are a bunch of Dell Latitude 7000 series and Dell Precision series laptops, running Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint. All of those have replaceable battery, upgradable RAM slots, and replaceable SSD or NVMe slots. I cannot bring myself to buy a laptop with a glued-in battery.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/27/macbook-pro-battery-pul...
As a side note though - how often do you replace batteries in notebooks? I think the only one time I ever did it was in 2008. I think most of my Macbooks survived over seven years each, and were passed on to my family - the batteries were never an issue - neither for me not for others who got my laptops.
I get almost all my laptops from eBay, so I often replace the batteries soon after purchase, then maybe every 3-5 years (?) after that. I replaced the battery on my 2014 MBA in 2020. I get the impression that I use my laptops longer than average. My Windows 10 laptop is a 2011 model with an Intel i7-2620M processor whose batteries have been replaced twice.
Chromebooks get eight years of security updates from Google, similar to iPads. Is the attraction that you can install a Linux distro on it after support ends?
I am not sure about this. I have a ThinkPad from ten years ago that still runs up-to-date Linux.
You can always recycle them with Apple if you are worried about the waste footprint.
It doesn't perform great, but it gets the job done for watching videos.
It works great and still has plenty of power but I can’t seem to upgrade the OS. And one by one the apps I use stop supporting my OS.
Really feels like such a waste and makes me wonder if I really own it at all.
According to Wikipedia, macOS Monterey has support for everything that dates back to 2016. The only exception I see would be if you bought the 2015 model of MacBook in 2016?
In any case, it still runs Big Sur. What apps don't run on Big Sur...? Desktop software often (usually?) supports a few years' worth of previous macOS versions.
If you're just running into an installation bug for Big Sur, you can always just install it clean rather than upgrading.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_Monterey#Supported_hardw...
And while the interface has become quite sluggish once you open a book or play a video it runs great and the screen is still absolutely amazing.
I don’t think a decade old iPad is necessarily trash, but I will concede that a decade old Linux desktop loses fewer of its use cases.
Presumably precisely because a lot of people keep using 10-year-old iPads as a dedicated video player.
I could also download Apple’s iWork suite and download purchased iTunes music and movies and play them.
You can use recovery mode to reset them: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212787
Or if that doesn’t work, you can factory-reset them using DFU Restore (google for it). If you don’t have a Mac but a PC, you can use iMazing.
In other worlds, doing what PCs managed to do during more than three decades ?
I don’t care that Apple stops to support my iPad after X years. We can’t blame them for stopping to support old enough hardware.
But we can blame them for making this hardware locked in such a way that you cannot run what you want on a device you fully own and that they unilaterally decided isn’t worth using anymore.
I'm not using a PC from 1992 because I consider them to be too old, not because some company unilaterally decided that it's now to old and that it is now junk.
My PC have parts from 2012 and is still working fine (I'm using Linux but tbh, even under windows, it works pretty well). Good luck running up to date apps on a 2012 iPad. My 2012 PC is up to date.
Most 10 to 20 years old PCs can run some light (and up to date !) linux distrib and can serve many purposes ranging from lightweight terminals to educational material in third world countries. Heck, with the right software setup, most are still really decent office computers. We are not in the 90-2000s anymore where every year your new computer was vastly faster than the previous one.
An out of date iPad is just electronic junk. Not because it is not fast (it's even as fast as when you bought it) but because it's not yours anymore.
I don't think so.
The only way they're using it is the same way they're using a Commodore 64, as an antique.
A 486 running Windows 3.1 with Cubase 1.0 exclusively for MIDI running in Standard Mode is far superior to any modern machine with respect to timing. Also, MIDI software hasn't evolved that much over the past couple decades.
Perhaps it even rivals an Atari ST
DOS/Windows 3.1 is still good for timing sensitive applications.
Nowadays MIDI interfaces are usually USB. But an ISA card or a parallel port will yield better results.
On modern computers, MIDI generally feels slightly off, and not as musical, but for the most part 'good enough' for the vast majority.
But the oldest iPad from 2010 will still be able to get the “last supported version” of apps from the App Store, still works with old versions of iWork, streaming video apps, Spotify (at least it did a couple of years ago), you can send video from it to any device that supports AirPlay and print to any AirPrint printer.
But to respond to your second point, I believe that Apple has REMOVED apps from the App Store that were previously available to download. For example, I was not able to download on my old iPhone 4 the latest working GarageBand for that device, because it was deleted. This is not the only app that I have not been able to download, because it was REMOVED FROM THE APP STORE.
But I think the point you are missing is that if Apple decides that these devices are obsolete and they will not support them, they should be willing to at least release documentation that allows people to write/install whatever software they want on those devices.
It might still be getting some updates, for now, but it can't be updated to the latest version of Windows. I guess you could install Linux on it.
My Surface Go can't upgrade to Windows 11 but is still getting Windows 10 updates. By the tine those stop, it will pretty much be trash. As it stands today, using it is painfully slow and it's portability is really about the only thing going for it. 4GB of RAM and a grossly underclocked CPU will do that.
I don't feel the need to buy an iPad.