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Comment by squarefoot | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still amazed that Apple invests so much into every other bit of hardware on a high end phone, yet always gives you the bare minimum amount of RAM they can get away with.

Advanced hardware makes bullet points on advertising to sell the device; giving the bare minimum of RAM accelerates the device planned obsolescence, so that user will be forced to upgrade sooner to the next model.

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I personally don't buy that it's planned obsolescence. I think most people just don't need that much ram. IOS is really good at loading/unloading stuff as needed, outside of HN I'm not sure most consumers care about the exact amount of ram.

Apple still does security updates for IOS - last was 12.5.7 - 23 Jan 2023 - that's back to the iPhone 5S

They've literally provided security updates for a 10 year old device, has any competitor even come close to that?

You should try using a 10 year old device. None of the apps support the older OS given Apple's dictatorial app approval process. And you can't get away with upgrading to iOS 14 given how slow it will run, and you really have no choice for other OS on the architecture

Functionally they're useless

How is that an iPhone 7 is completely current vs give me a branded Android from the same year of release that has even security updates, not even features.

The problem with iPhones is once updates stop there's nothing you can do. The iPhone 7 isn't current, it's stuck on iOS 15 while the newest is 16. And while the pixel 2 (which is only a month younger than the iPhone 7) only got official support up to Android 11; you actually own the device and can easily unlock the boot-loader to upgrade to Android 13.

Apple still does security updates for IOS - last was 12.5.7 - 23 Jan 2023 - that's back to the iPhone 5S.

Feature updates with the current IOS 16 goes back to the iPhone 8

Yeah you do lose feature updates and slowly app support after the latest version drops support, but it's not like they're dropping support after 2 years, and you can stay on it for years later if you'd like.

I'm not saying it couldn't be better but they're clearly far above the vast majority of their competition.

I wish that were the case with all android manufacturers - Verizon versions of Samsung phones have locked bootloader's and (afaik) there aren't working bootloader unlocks for all of them

Also, old versions of android are very functional. Nearly every app will run fine even on ancient android.

Old versions of iOS quickly stop working as apps demand updates, and the updates require a new iOS version.

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