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Comment by elliotec | Hacker News Reader

I have not had the same experience at all. I have MacBooks and old iPads or phones that are totally bricked and unable to update, but PC towers I built 15 years ago that still run like a champ. Just an anecdote, but I feel like I HAVE to upgrade Apple products, or they simply stop working, while the PCs I've built last the test of time.

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Comparing laptops and tablets to PC towers isn't even.

If the laptop and the ipad had been sitting in a corner of a climate controlled room being rarely handled, they would likely have lasted quite a bit longer.

If I compare my iPad to my mom's Surface, it is MUCH more durable. Same thing when I compare a macbook to a Dell laptop.

That's fair. But I do feel like a Macbook pro workhorse ought to feel like it has similar lifespan as a heavily-used desktop.

Maybe I'm too optimistic, or the wear and tear of portability really has a lot of influence here.

Is that true? I feel like iPhones and iPads receive updates for what seems like an industry-leading amount of time. I view Android tablets as relatively disposable, but my iPad Air from 2018 hasn't missed a beat. The battery is starting to slow down a bit but it easily handles my required tasks.

The problem is apps raising the minimum iOS version. Apple usually doesn’t backport new APIs, so developers are eager to bump it up to use new APIs/frameworks. Similar thing is now happening on macOS. A lot of apps require macOS 11/12, which is pretty crazy compared to how desktop software used to run on much older versions of OSX.

Huh, I don't think I have run into that very often, but I do tend to not go beyond 3 years old for Macs since work replaces them.

Even if apps require macos 14, it looks like it is supported on machines going back to 2018 for the most part:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105113

I suspect that Macs will reach back to M1s for quite a while.

Yea, I've seen apps that required >= the latest OS version available! Totally unacceptable. From a marketing POV alone, why would you just close the door on a significant % of your market before they even look at the product?

When I had a job writing mobile apps, I tried to "fight the good fight" by keeping our minimum version as low as possible, but everyone up the chain from me pressured us to increase it, especially software engineering, because it was "too hard" to maintain backward compatibility with older versions. Even though maintaining compatibility usually just meant a handful of if statements.

This is a huge problem if you use heavily apps and must use the most recent version. I've got a 6+ year old iPad pro that just works...I haven't noticed any apps saying I can't install them, although I guess it is still supported by iOS's latest version.

>I feel like iPhones and iPads receive updates for what seems like an industry-leading amount of time.

If we're talking about OSs alone, Windows wins. MacOS/iOS second. Android dead last on average (but it's much better now on some new phones).

You can easily run Windows on a PC from 2010 (at least on a desktop PC with a good CPU), getting updates well into the 2030s...

That’s an apples to oranges comparison (comparing a desktop PC with devices). Desktops last forever. You should be comparing to a 10 year old Dell laptop running latest Windows or a Samsung Galaxy S3 running the latest android.

Windows PCs tend to slow down. I had a Dell 530s that I used for 10 years but midway Windows got too slow. I switched to Linux and it extended its life for another 5 years. It’s still quite usable under Linux but I moved on.

Apple devices are guaranteed 7 years of support. That’s not bad.

> ...a 10 year old Dell laptop running latest Windows

Not Dell but Lenovo and not Windows but Linux but for the rest the comparison is just fine to me. If it were not for the switch to 64 bits I'd still be using a 19 year old IBM Thinkpad T42p - I have three of them - daily. I still use them but the things are hampered by their 32 bits Pentium M CPUs. The keyboard and screen still beats whatever other notebook I've tried though...

Is anyone here still running a 2005 Apple laptop? That'd be a PowerBook G4?

> ...or a Samsung Galaxy S3 running the latest android.

I'm using one of those, a Galaxy SIIIneo running Android 11 - not the latest but not out of date either. It actually works quite well for a 10 year old phone, the battery easily lasts for a week with occasional use (and it is user-replaceable when the need arrives). Of course it is not running a Samsung Android distribution, those stopped somewhere around Android 4.4 on this model if I'm not mistaken. No, it runs LineageOS 18.1 with OTA updates, the last update was about a month ago.

So yes, Apple does offer longer support for its hardware than many other vendors. They are outclassed though by the longevity of AOSP-derived distributions like LineageOS on mobile and by Linux distributions on PC-type hardware - which includes Apple hardware, I'm typing this on a "late 2009 27" iMac" running Debian. The thing has been out of support by Apple for quite a while with MacOS 10.13 'High Sierra' being the last supported version. I managed to get 10.15 'Catalina' running on it but that is where it stops. It has no problems whatsoever running Debian 'Sid' (the 'unstable' latest version which in practice is not all that unstable, really) and will keep on doing so for the forthcoming years.

BTW, I just checked and found that LineageOS 20.0 - i.e. Android 13 - is also available for the Samsung SIII neo. Since 18.1 - Android 11 - runs fine for me I see no need to update the thing but if I wanted to, I could. It looks like Android 14 (the current version, released last October) will become available as well. I suspect the limited amount of RAM (1.5 GB) in this device will eventually put a stop to supporting newer Android versions but for now the ball is still rolling.

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