My dream is to have an OpenBSD phone that can be used as both a phone and normal computer. To use it as a "real computer" with an actual keyboard, mouse and screen, you could just plug those peripherals into the phone. Then take it with you and plug in someone else's mouse etc. if necessary when traveling.
I plug a USB-C hub with an HDMI out to use a monitor/TV as display. Mouse, keyboard, flash drive, headphones, even cd drive, all work through USB in the hub.
Not quite as old but my Mum's still using an iPhone 5s from around 2014 which she had from new. She's not into apps so again, works fine for her as she doesn't need to be able to install anything. Thankfully homekit is still working on this and she's able to use it to tell siri to open the garage when she gets home.
Obviously these are very much edge cases, you can't find many apps in the app store still working on these older models.
I myself only upgraded from an iPhone 7 this September when the 14 came out. I'd had the battery replaced by Apple last year as it was a free recall thing which did massively improve its performance but it did eventually become too much of a pain in the arse to keep using.
I've got an old iPhone 5 which I keep for use as an occasional wifi hotspot too.
Eight years would be a bit long, but 6 years certainly isn't (the reason for my upgrade was that the battery wouldn't hold a charge for a full day and the "get a new phone" vs "upgrade the battery" was one I went with the new phone).
One of my coworkers has an iPhone 6.
He’s replaced the battery but it’s still the same phone. They don’t care much for camera upgrades and it works for them.
This is simply wrong.
My wife's still has her IPhone 6S and she absolutely loves it. We are able to take advantage of Apple free battery replacement program a couple of years ago. She doesn't see the need to upgrade to new phones as Whatsapp, Facebook, Insta and Google Maps etc. work just fine on her device.
I, on the other hand, have gone through several Android Flagship products in this period.
For most people the hardware fails after 3 years lol
I have a shitty android smartphone. It costs 14 times less than iphone.
My sister's SG9+ is 4 years old and the screen is broken in two different places, but is only asking for a battery replacement.
Iphones did provide security updates for longer, which is easier when you have few models and a huge userbase.
On an unrelated note, my Google Pixel 7 just hanged up. It didn't happen to me since windows XP I think. It's the worst phone I've ever owned.
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/936268845/apple-agrees-to-pay...
I don't care what Apple's PR said, the court found that the AG complaint of "Many consumers decided that the only way to get improved performance was to purchase a newer-model iPhone from Apple, ... Apple, of course, fully understood such effects on sales." was correct and that Apple had to pay up.
Apple decided to underclock CPUs when the battery had aged to the point where consistent voltage couldn't be applied at maximum power. They did this so users wouldn't complain about their phone randomly crashing. Really, they were damned if they did and damned if they didn't.
What you can criticize is that they did it without informing users or allowing an option — the lawsuit and backlash reversed that course and they now have a setting for it. You can argue they should have had that all along. You can argue they were doing it purposely for planned obsolescence, but the evidence isn't really there to support it.
Apple provides major software upgrades for years longer than most Android devices do. There are some exceptions for Android, but the rule is that you're lucky to get more than two years of software updates for your phone. Apple, on the other hand, supports for 4-6 years. That should earn them kudos compared to most Android manufacturers.
This is not a court of law and I am quite comfortable believing this was planned obsolescence for the simple that behaving in this way was advantageous to their profits. Otherwise it would not have taken lies (they initially denied the existence of the throttling!), outrage and lawsuits to do the right thing.
The alternative explanation is mass ignorance and/or incompetence on a level that would be hard to accept coming from Apple. Am I expected to seriously believe that nobody at Apple tested this throttle down behavior and saw (and likely measured) the impact on day-to-day performance?
One may say it’s the layers of transparency and other services, but I don’t care about those, my Macbook 2013 was the pinnacle of perfection.
Apple is still definitely slowing down Macs with every single little release.
This was true for Intel Macs 2014-2020. I bought a 14' M1 Macbook Pro with 32GB of memory / 1TB storage and it absolutely flies. Best machine I've owned in almost a decade (2014 15' MBP).
We also know that Apple is stubborn (see the removal of the headphone jack), so of course it's going to take a lawsuit for them to reverse course on something like this.
What was braindead was not giving customers information and control over if the slowdown was enabled.
Not an Apple apologist but I think you're leaving out a detail. Apples reasoning was due to older batteries[0]. You can see from the linked tweet the phones speed went back up when the battery was replaced. It may very well still be nefarious on their part.
[0] https://www.techradar.com/news/apple-might-be-slowing-down-y...
One which I think is sensible.
What was happening is that the CPU was, at peak, pulling more power than an older battery was capable of delivering and it was causing a brownout.
Their solution was to restrict CPU performance as battery condition deteriorated to ensure that your phone was always giving you the maximum level of performance available to you.
Batteries are consumables and their performance degrades over time.
The whole thing was spun into "Apple is reducing performance of my old phone to make me buy a new one" - when the narrative could have just as easily been "Apple gets the most possible out a battery at all times." Note that competitors might have just used the lower performance level the whole time.
After the furor they gave you a 'set my performance to 100% at all times and let my phone take a dirt nap if it can't handle it' toggle switch in settings.
I can accept that for removable batteries. But if you have to essentially dismantle the device to replace the battery, it's part of the device and should be treated as such: the battery being a consumable means the entire device is a consumable.
But that doesn't change anything - the point is, they could have just limited the CPU power draw to below the minimum threshold at all times so performance was constant, but low. That would in my opinion be strictly worse.
[edit] To be clear, I also want replaceable batteries but that conversation is totally orthogonal.