Apple Says iPhone 6 Plus Now 'Obsolete' and iPad Mini 4 Now 'Vintage'
macrumors.com
macrumors.com
We need to do better.
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C6DVYXQH/ref=ppx_yo_dt...
It's not hard at all to find a wide range of parts for 20-30 year old vehicles - though quite a bit of this is due to the OEM not being able to lock down physical parts. I expect it will be far harder to maintain current cars in 30 years than a 1990s car today, due to exactly this issue: "Well, we don't build parts, but you also can't replace a door handle with one that doesn't support VIN-pairing, and you can't use a used one because it's VIN-pared to that other car so... would you like a loyalty discount on a new one?"
Your phone has all your personal information and has the ability to record conversations or take video. All of which is secured on the assumption that you can’t just replace a component with a compromised one. And we do know that sophisticated state actors do exist and are willing to go after journalists, dissidents even protestors.
We need a way for these devices to be repaired or supported longer but allowing any random component is not the answer.
Leave that up to the owners of the device, they know better what they want than you do. Will there be scam attempts? Sure there will, like there are already. Inform about that risk - without exaggerating for monetary purposes - and let the customer decide. Not you, not the manufacturer, not the government.
And we have decades of experience that the majority of people simply do not care enough to learn about the intricacies of their products and would prefer vendors do that on their behalf.
Some will, some won't. They don't need you or some other individual or company or institution to decide for them they are too ignorant to decide for themselves where to go for replacement parts. If you're so worried over these problems just take the thing to Apple to have it repaired but leave open the option for others to get their own parts and repair it themselves or have someone repair it for them. The same goes for anyone else, it is not as if the option to use 'authorised' repair services will disappear.
But it still has an impact on "cost of paying someone to do it." If you can only take your car to the dealer, it's a lot more expensive than independent shops.
Also, have you worked on electronics much? Very rarely is the problem something that requires BGA rework.
Dell doesn't support thirty year old OptiPlex PCs, Intel doesn't support thirty year old CPUs. These don't have any serial pairings, they're just old and long out of production.
Ford isn't going to support a thirty year old Mustang either. Part manufacturers might still make compatible parts but that's more about sub-components being shared among many years of product models. You could find a power supply for an old OptiPlex because it uses an ATX connector on the motherboard. You might find a NOS battery for a 3360 but that's only because a battery conformed to a spec shared among many models.
Out of support smartphones will see their certificate roots expire making using the Internet not practical. This is true of Android and iOS. I don't know why ten years of active support for a very complicated device somehow isn't good enough.
Honesty as non mobile gamer, it would still work fine for basically all the apps I use on my newer iphone pro (except for the camera).
My main point is using devices which do not receive security updates is not safe. This goes for the iPhone, Android phones, Windows PCs (this is why using Windows 7 on a machine connected to a network is a horrible idea), MacOS, Linux, etc.
No security updates = do not connect the device to ANY network.
But keeping it stopped being tenable rather sooner than I expected. Shortly after Apple released the first version of iOS that couldn't be installed on it, app developers started shipping versions that required that new version, and shortly after that they started killswitching older versions of their apps. I was able to say "good riddance" the first few times that happened, but once it started happening to apps I consider indispensable, I ended up deciding that I didn't actually want to live in a parallel universe where Steve Jobs won the fight to not have 3rd-party apps on iOS.
RMS has a point about how you don't really own any software or devices that depend on a closed-source cloud service to function.
Not the ones I use.
I use a 2008 iPhone 3 (15 years old) as an iPod daily with no problems, and a launch day iPad (2010 - 14 years ago) for reading e-mail with no problems. Plus a couple of shuffles I listen to in bed.
All sync with the latest version of macOS and Apple's Music program with no problems.
There are millions of bricked Apple devices out there though because they are iCloud locked. If someone loses their iPhone or donates it or sells it without removing their Apple ID, then it is literally impossible right now on newer devices to break into them. The parts can't be sold as they all have IDs burned into their ICs that stop them being reused.
A friend last year who owned a bar gave me a huge box of lost iPhones for which the owners could not be found/reached. I could only get into one of them. Rest were expensive doorstops.
Allowing you to profit from someone’s lost iPhone invites criminal behaviour and potentially allows you to access private information that is still on the phone. No one at a bar asked for that.
I totally understand the motivation with setting the phones up like this. In theory it should stop theft if there is literally no incentive to steal someone's phone because nothing can be re-used. I just wanted to flash them back to factory and use one of them because I was homeless and needed a phone.
I would have happily returned them to Apple for recycling (have you seen their iPhone recycling machine?!), but someone set fire to the building where I'd stored them and so they all went up in flames...
I think people just assume it's required because when Microsoft implemented their shittier version of it they made it required.
And even if not required, you will get continuous nags to connect to one.
With the upcoming sideloading and app store changes, that might change and these devices will remain useful for longer.
SoundCloud made an update last year, and something broke. I emailed the support line at SoundCloud and it was shortly fixed. Can’t say they ‘support’ iPhone 5’s, but they didn’t balk.