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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Apple phones are quite repairable (just not DIY-able), no one is dropping 1000 dollars on a new phone because their current one has a cracked back glass.

Watching their live feed, one of Apple's selling points on such an expensive phone is that it will last a long time and have a higher re-sale value than other phones. It's not a case of planned obsolescence.

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There are absolutely cases where they have artificially gated features to new devices, even when the hardware is capable (I'm thinking around Handoff/Continuity, etc.). Where the initial reaction is "maybe it's a new BT chip or ..." but it can be shown that the functionality is perfect when some trickery is done to fool the OS its running on more modern hardware.

This is a consequence of Apple’s deeply ingrained (and hugely successful) product design culture.

When you’re trying to develop a vertically integrated feature across a synchronized release requiring potentially new silicon, a new device, new OS frameworks, new app code… you have to express your requirements precisely. Either the M1 is being designed to support three displays or it’s being designed to support two. Not “as much display support as we can squeeze in where performance is still OK end-to-end”. By the time you know if end-to-end looks good for all the features you built up depending on lower layers in the stack, it’s too late.

You’re also likely not to trust “hey, seems like our tolerances were excessive and it works great on older hardware”. And building up that trust is time-consuming and difficult, so they rarely go back to do it without a strong market justification. Stage Manager being the most recent—somewhat odd—example.

What do you mean about stage manager?

They originally claimed it was going to be supported only on the most recent SoC’s, then backtracked.

Which is weird because who really cared about stage manager? I guess they decided the media kerfuffle was making owners of unsupported recent hardware feel put down.

There was also that instance where Siri was gated from the iPhone 4. It was later shown that it was possible to install the Siri interface on the iPhone 4 through a Jailbreak - the only thing that prevented full functionality was a device serial number embedded in the request to the Siri server.

Not even just iPhones - I ran Siri on a 3rd gen iPod Touch. Anything that could run iOS 5 could use Siri with a jailbreak.

iPhone 4 was first generation of iPhone to have a second microphone used for noise cancellation.

So whilst Siri could technically run on older devices the experience was unacceptably poor.

Siri! What a blast from the past. I wonder if there are people still using it nowadays, now that the novelty is long gone.

There are cases, but credit where its due, I think they are generally very generous in bringing new features to older devices, compared to plenty other companies that basically forget about they ever released another device the moment a new one drops.

E.g. the apple watches really “inherited” a good chunk of all the new features to the point that there are several versions that are basically identical. Like, I have the 6, and besides the on-screen keyboard (for which I guess the screen was too small based on their testings) and temperature-sensor reliant features, it does almost everything the new 10 will be able to do.

Eh, sometimes. Other times, a newer piece of internal hardware has no new “feature” but just works better and has fewer failures. This is particularly true with every kind of wireless networking, including Bluetooth. It may work, but not have hit the quality bar.

Exactly.

Almost anything can kinda work on older devices. But lots of little details make the difference between a good experience and a poor one. Which simd instructions did it support. What’s the battery impact on that BT chipset. Did the ANE support NN layer style X?

Apple has a great track record of brining new features to old hardware. I don’t see example here or elsewhere that I think were purely greed and not quality driven.

True, sure. But someone mentioned the canonical example I was thinking of: Stage Manager. That is a 100% software feature that was arbitrarily gated.

Unless I'm mistaken, stage manager requires running 5 apps simultaneously when iPads were previously limited to 1 or 2? That includes 5 render pipelines (way more pixels to push than exist on the physical display). There would be hardware load on pretty much every key piece of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory, caches, disk), and by a non trivial factor.

So why gate it on macOS?

Same reason. Rendering more apps at full screen in real time takes a ton of GPU. Adds ~5x the pixels, and 5x screen scale transforms+effect. All the optimizations for “that’s hidden”/“that’s background” go out the door.

Apple also has to develop technology at their own pace. I used to get an iPhone every year. Eventually it stopped making sense and I just now had to check to see which one I had .(14 Pro)I remember noticing a big difference when I bought this iPhone with the camera.

I know whenever I upgrade it will always be to a current state of Apple”s art because of these incremental consistent upgrades.

I”m very tempted to buy a new one. The last time I waited till it broke to upgrade.

Absolutely disagree.

Having replaced the screen, battery and home button on my 1st gen iPhone SE myself I can confidently say that Apple do not make these easy to repair yourself, and arguably make it more difficult to drive business for their own repair service. Lots of tiny screws requiring particular tools of different lengths that can't be mixed up, lest you permanently damage the phone. Glue that needs to be carefully removed or you risk dangerously damaging the battery. Just look at their repairability scores on iFixit: https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/smartphone-repairabilit... .

Repairability was bad but has gone up a lot, they did a big internals redesign for iPhone 15 to make it easier to swap batteries and replace screens. Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved. Most people struggle fixing big things, let alone sub-mm precision things. But this helps the 3rd party repair shops a lot.

> Still not something they want user serviceable, I imagine mostly because it creates headaches for everyone involved.

User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.

How much battery capacity, physical size, weight, or waterproofing are you willing to sacrifice? Because for me, it’s straight up zero

> How much battery capacity

Batteries used to last a lot longer

> physical size, weight

Phones used to be a lot smaller as well

Phone batteries used to be a lot smaller, phones used to draw a lot less current and have smaller screens and be a lot stupider.

And at the time they were comparable to a flashlight in terms of complexity, not running AAA games with raytracing and a camera pipeline of untold complexity. It’s almost like having anything this complex working requires insane engineering and miniaturization, this is not due to “planned obsolescence”, especially if you take a look at the second hand market. No other brand has even remotely similar resell value.

Gaming laptops have user replaceable batteries.

> User replaceable cell phone batteries used to be the norm, not the exception.

Few enough people want them that no one makes them anymore

(That’s what people mean when they say no one wanted them)

<Jack Sparrow voice> but you have repaired it </>

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