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Comment by combyn8tor | Hacker News Reader

> the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years

Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:

- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.

- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?

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> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.

This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.

The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).

"You cheated on me last night!"

"This is a weird one to complain about, look at Donnie, he cheated on his girlfriend 3 times last month!"

i don't get it, how long do you think is reasonable?

I tend to look at technology prices in terms of cost per unit time of useful life.

If Apple continues to supply updates for six-year-old phones, iPhone 17 prices range from $11/month (base model iPhone 17) to $28/month (iPhone 17 Pro Max w/2TB storage), meaning it's only about 20% more expensive to store data on a RAID 10 array of iPhone 17 Pro Maxes running current iOS versions than on standard-tier S3 (not a relevant comparison, obviously, but it amuses me).

So I don't know what's reasonable, but Apple's policies certainly appear to be.

I'm still salty that Apple no longer offer battery service on my OG Apple Watch, however, so reason has its limits.

Suppose you always want to be running the latest iOS release, but you want to replace your phone as infrequently as possible. You would "only" have to have purchased 4 iPhones since 2007:

    | Model     | Launch date        | Obsoleted by | Price 
    |-----------|--------------------|--------------|------
    | iPhone    | June 29, 2007      | iOS 4        | $399 (*price cut)
    | iPhone 4  | June 24, 2010      | iOS 8        | $599
    | iPhone 6  | September 19, 2014 | iOS 13       | $649
    | iPhone 11 | September 13, 2019 | -            | $699

Adjusted for inflation, the total for these phones is $3,287 excluding carrier contracts. Assuming the iPhone 11 will be obsoleted by iOS 27 in September 2026, this costs you about $14.29/mo.

I was a long time Android user - but I realised I was getting through 2 or more phones in the time my wife had one. They'd either become obsolete or just die. I reluctantly bought an iPhone on this basis - it's actually going to work out cheaper if I get 5 or 6 years out of it.

However, I find the iPhone keyboard so bad and the settings concept so muddled that I'm going to return to Android when this experiment is over. Probably not for another 4 years though!

If we're talking anecdotes, my wife changes her iPhone every 4 years because it gets worse and worse. Daughter does the same. I change my Galaxy every 4 years because it gets worse and worse as well. Not sure how some people can say their <insert beloved brand> holds forever, unless they don't really use it of course. No brand really keeps up with the requirements, unless all you do is make phone calls - which is why my dad still has a Sony Ericsson.

You know you can sell and replace your phone if you don't like it. Recent Pixels have 7 years of support and they don't die. That's what I'd recommend you get instead. You can even trade in your iPhone for up to $700 when you buy a Pixel. You really don't need to force yourself to use a phone you don't like, leave alone for that long.

Main problem, not just from Apple, is that as phone tech gets standardized and more long-lasting the software support cycles have not gotten longer.

It is abysmal that Android phone makers still need to customize the OS so much for their hardware. Apple has no incentive for longer support cycles if Android does even worse on it.

It has always been like that since CP/M and commercial UNIX days.

Vertical integrations like everyone sell a product, a brand, a whole ecosystem experience.

If all OEMs sold the same CP/M, UNIX, MSX, MS-DOS, Windows software stack, on the what is basically the same hardware with a different name glued on the case, they wouldn't get any brand recognition, aka product differentiation.

Thus OEMs specific customisations get added, back in the day bundled software packages are part of the deal, nowadays preinstalled on the OS image, and so on.

Technically not updates but if you hook up a PowerPC mac with 10.4 Tiger on it you can still get it updated to the latest version released, 10.4.11

I demoed that exact feature (though on 10.5) not so long ago and people didn’t believe me…!

We’re moving away from hardware and into software and longevity in this discussion but wrt “apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates” i would point out that Red Hat is probably more of a beacon / industry leader here as the main promise of RHEL is 10 years of support and updates. But again we don’t ship hardware so I see the narrower sense that you’re making but still would like to push back on the idea that giant companies cannot continue to keep complicated legacy code bases secure and functional about 2x longer in most cases than what Apple has done

The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.

I had the 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. 7TB (going from 1 to 8) would cost me $3,000.

So I bought a 4xM2 PCI card, 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs for $1,100. And as a result got 6.5GBps versus the onboard 1TB's 5GBps.

Same with memory. 160GB (32 to 192GB) from Apple was also around $3K. OWC sold the exact same memory chips, manufacturer, spec, speed, for $1,000 for 192GB.

I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.

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