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Comment by jhickok | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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