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Comment by riley_dog | Hacker News Reader

I can't decide if I'd be a fool to buy an Apple Watch right now. I'm ready for an upgrade, but I fear what happens long term if hardware changes are necessary.

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Apple has increasingly moved towards a disposable tech paradigm. They seem to want, expect, and maybe even contrive a reason for you to throw away your device and buy a new one every year.

They tend to support their old devices for 5-10 years

Exactly. I don't know where people get this about Apple. There are so many things that one could criticize Apple about, but older hardware support is not one of them

My custom built desktop that runs Linux/Windows is going on 24 years old. I don't think 10 year old electronics are anything worth writing home about.

Apple also writes horrible software and breaks perfectly fine APIs with every OS release to eventually force you into hardware upgrades.

Somehow I don’t believe your Pentium 3 (1999) or your Pentium 4 (2000) processor is still your main computer.

Windows and Ubuntu have dropped support for 32 bit processors.

Yeah an Apple Watch would have orders of magnitude more computing power :|

Oh I don't disagree with that! I should have specified that, at least in the mobile world, Apple is much better about supporting their hardware for the average person than the alternatives

Saying that it's physically possible to build and service a desktop that lasts a quarter century has no relationship to the length of support a consumer electronics company should offer.

I can still boot my white clamshell Macbook from almost 20-years ago. It didn't disintegrate at the 5-year or 10-year mark.

That doesn't mean Apple must continue to support it.

Apple does a better job than most at supporting older devices.

Given how long they support their devices, your comment calls for a big ol' [citation needed].

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