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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

They length of time an update is supported isn’t the time from first release, it’s the time from last sale.

If a phone is sold for two years, and I buy that phone at the end up the two years, then “two years of updates” means a day one purchaser will get four years of updates.

So while it’s nice that we can say “almost ten years old”, the reality is probably not more than seven years.

It’s why when you look at android manufacturers making update promises you need to make sure that they’re being honest, and similarly any legislation needs to specifically say that the mandatory update support period starts after the last sale of the device.

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I dunno how things are now, but a few years back duration of updates were certainly linked to first release, not last sale, for at least most major manufacturers.

As an example of this:

In April 2019, I needed to rapidly obtain a device, and purchased a Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) from a major retailer in Australia. I later discovered that this model had already been EOL for over a year when I purchased it. (It was released with 5.1.1, got its last security patch in November 2017, and was actively unsupported no later than March 2018. The handset should very obviously have been updated to Android 6, if not released with it—Android 6 was announced and in beta 7½ months before, and was the stable release 3½ months before, the handset’s January 2016 release.)

That's the choice of the manufacturer.

If a company is selling something and says "X years of support", that means X years of support, not "until date Y" where Y is date of release + X.

If android manufacturers are saying "X years of support" when they mean "supported until [some date]" then they are quite plainly false advertising.

I can find many sites that say that apple commits to 5 years of software support from the date of last sale, but I can't find anything on apple.com that matches that. I've found that they guarantee 5 years of hardware support (repairs, etc) from date of last sale, and then a further 2 years subject to hardware availability (presumably they stop purchasing/manufacturing parts). Note that I'm not talking about warrantee coverage (which varies but seems 1 year is standard?) just the actual ability to do repairs.

Based on this article and various others over the years, and the vast array of spammy infographic laden sites making up the first page of google search results, it seems like claims of ~5 years of major updates and a few more for security only is consistent, but again I can't find anything on apple's site to confirm that explicitly.

Apple has sold devices that they offer zero years of updates for by this metric.

Which certainly seems like a shitty thing to do. It being Apple doesn't magically make it ok.

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