None of them turned out to matter, at all. What does matter is a solid feel and solid construction and the flash and batteries lasting the lifetime of the product. I'd rather have that than replaceable.
Most iPhones are still very useful devices by the time their batteries have deteriorated below 70% original capacity.
The devices start glitching and/or won't run newer apps as well as they should long before the battery goes on them
If the hardware is failing then I guess fair enough (it shouldn't be, that's a design defect), but inflated hardware demands to compensate for increasingly sloppy code isn't a reasonable justification to demand dropping another $500+ on a device that works fine.
I recently gifted a used iPhone X to a relative. It's still an exceptional device on which the hardware works as well as it ever did, minus the reduced battery life. I would have been happy to keep using it if I could replace the battery simply and it was still getting O/S updates.
(As it is, the device still receives security updates, which I can't really grump at Apple for after almost six years - but only because they're better than the rest of the industry. It's still a poor situation).
Yes - in general, the apps I am running are doing more and are better than they were when I first got a given model phone :)
I went from the 4S to the 6S Plus to the 11 and am waiting on my backordered 15 Pro currently
I still have the 6S Plus in a drawer in my utility room - it "works" for lite tasks like web browsing, but will not run most of the productivity apps I need/want for work or the educational apps my kids need/want for school. So, for me, it is a "useless" device (so the kids get to play with it - and nobody cares what happens because it is 8 years old)
My 11 still "works", too - but it is getting very long in the tooth
I am continually astonished at folks who expect OS and/or security updates past a few years (this is not a slight against you, just an observation on my part)
A lot of folk like to gripe about "planned obsolescence" or similar because eventually their device is no longer supported
Yet the fact that manufacturers support equipment as long as they do is ... kind of astonishing
The higher the volume of production, the shorter you would expect a manufacturer to support it (a 747 is worlds different from a pickup truck which is worlds different from a phone or laptop)
The cost-benefit analysis of continuing to support/update a given device has to be taken into account ... and - for most phones (since that is what we are talking about in this thread) for most people, that means that between 3 and 4 years after release, it makes [nearly] no economic sense to keep supporting them
That Apple does for so long speaks volumes about their commitment to their customers (even though, of course, they would like you to get a new phone every year, I am sure)
iOS 17 may not be technically able to run on the A11 chip in the iPhone X, but only on the basis that it's been designed not to do so. Any features that genuinely needed extra neural cores (or whatever limitation there might be) were clearly designed that way with the intention of forcing a new purchase - the software could have in all likelihood run just fine on the A11 if they wanted it to. OCLP kind of proves this on macOS, which should (in theory) be even harder to maintain support for than iOS, as there are many more binary driver blobs that Apple doesn't control the source code for and therefore can't stand over/patch if the original vendor has stopped doing so.
How many is “a few” to you?
Many people finance their phones through carrier deals that last three years. It should at least be supported that long.
And why not expect longer? To an outsider looking in, the software isn’t changing that much. I still have a messaging app, a browser, a camera app - that all basically haven’t changed their core functionality in the time I’ve had my device.
Just like computers, I think there is a correlation between price and expected support. If I’m paying $1,500 for an iPhone 15 Pro, I am doing so with the expectation that in 5 years it will be supported. If I am paying $100 for a cheap Android, my expectations are lower.