iPhone 5s Gets New Software Update 13 Years After Launch | Hacker News Reader

iPhone 5s Gets New Software Update 13 Years After Launch

macrumors.com

157 pointsangott85 comments

I'm not a fan of Apple's walled garden mindset and resistance to inter-operating with other platforms, but this degree of legacy support is a case of Apple doing a good thing and deserves praise. Note: I'm not saying that Google/MSFT et al are much better than Apple, but they're not quite as bad.

I know folks that have 18-month-old flagship Android phones, that can’t get the latest Android releases.

When they ask me what Android phones to get, I always say a Pixel, because they will at least get the latest OS support in a timely fashion.

They are also excellent phones.

"Just jailbreak your phone and install <blank>!" they said.

I did that for a while, depending on some random guy in a forum to maintain a working image for my device. He bought a new phone, and that was the end of the updates.

With Play Integrity / SafetyNet this is also an uphill battle without doing even more work to spoof your Integrity status, if you want mobile banking and finance apps to work.

I bought a brand new flagship phone for $1100, couldn't jailbreak it, then the manufacturer got bored, forced an update that bricked it, then got bored and never published an update again.

Name and shame.

I had a perfectly functional Galaxy A71 this time last year, still had great battery life, etc.

I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.

Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.

After the battery problems that the Pixel 4a, 6a, and 7a have had, I'll stick to the regular Pixel phones (well - who knows far this sideloading clampdown will go).

I know people have had battery problems with non-a Pixel phones, but the number of 'a' phones with battery problems caused Google to publicly respond.

> I always say a Pixel, because they will at least get the latest OS support in a timely fashion.

You can also install e.g. GrapheneOS after Google stops supporting them. https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices

GrapheneOS only updates Pixels for as long as Google does. All their supported devices currently receive the stock OS updates from Google. LineageOS is different in that regard.

I've never had a pixel phone survive through its support period. The hardware always dies first.

Tbf some pixel models have proven reliable, my mom's pixel 4 lasted long enough to be out of support and then it got owned and her bank accounts got taken over.

The downside of reliable HW I guess.

Counterpoint: my Pixel 3 and 5 are both still running fine. The 3 (2018) actually gets better battery life than the 5.

I managed to get 2 pixel devices in a row that have known issues of just dying. My CC company refunded one of them. :/

I also had a Nexus 5 (boot looped of course).

> They are also excellent phones.

I'm glad you had a good experience with it, but I had the Pixel 7 Pro and it was the single worst phone I have ever used. Utterly dogshit, to a point where I swore a blood oath to never purchase another Pixel ever again. I've heard that the later Pixels are better but I guess I'll never know.

It's possible that I had a defective unit, but regardless of the reason it was a laggy mess, that got terrible battery life, and sometimes simply wouldn't finish turning on (it would just stay on a black screen indefinitely). I bought it in July of 2023 and I ended up giving it to a family member and buying a refurb iPhone 13 Pro Max, which I still have and it has been considerably better.

It's not like I'm this huge Apple fanboy (feel free to look at my history complaining about my time working there), but if the Pixel 7 was 2023's flagship Android phone, then I have very little interest in using Android anymore.

Same here with a Pixel 10 Pro. Having seen issues that others have been struggling with, I’m shocked at the poor quality controls. It’s not only hardware, the software breaks every now and then. Looks like every patch introduces some bugs or bricks some Pixels. According to Gemini, it’s all known and has been discussed for a long time. I checked Pixel bug reports, some of them closed with wont-implement states, while users still struggling.

This was the first time in two decades that my smartphone broke, and it could only be replaced.

In the end, to me it’s really too much maintenance with Pixels and Android devices in general. Really don’t get it why people prefer Android. It’s like desktop Linux. Not there yet.

I think desktop Linux is “there” more than Windows is “there” right now, considering that at least shutting down Linux actually works.

Depends on your Linux distribution. Hibernation had also been a long standing issue last I checked, especially on laptops.

Sure, it just annoys me that people seem to have amnesia with all the bullshit associated with desktop Windows, I guess because they’re used to it.

The recent updates breaking Notepad and Calculator and Outlook and the Shutdown feature are rare in that they have gotten press, but there are hundreds of other bits of bullshit associated with Windows, like the fact that Windows Update just routinely breaks your computer and the Windows recovery and repair tools do not work, and as far as I can tell they have never worked for anyone.

Linux has its share of bullshit, but at least the backup and recovery tools actually work.

I haven’t had an issue with hibernate in a few years on the more normy-friendly distros like Mint or Ubuntu or Suse, but I acknowledge that some people still do. I still don’t accept that it’s less ready that desktop Windows.

That is terrible. I’ve been out of the loop with consumer Windows for like 20 years and enterprise Windows for a decade, last time was at a .NET shop. Two years ago or so, after watching a couple Microsoft folks give their talks, I tried one of the Microsoft Surfaces at a store and got quickly frustrated with it.

What you’re describing about Windows is very reminiscent of what Pixel users describe on Reddit.

I’m totally with you, I wouldn’t use Windows voluntarily. I’m not in a position to tell whether it’s more or less ready though, just no recent experience with it.

Yeah, if you’re comparing it to macOS, then I would broadly agree that desktop Linux is less-ready.

I do think it has improved considerably, especially on AMD hardware, and I think it’s better than Windows at this point. macOS is arguably better, but Macs are considerably more pricey, so they can be a bit difficult to recommend to people.

> I always say a Pixel

Given the emergency call issue that has plagued the series for years and are seemingly still unresolved I would think twice about this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714579

I feel like most devices have bugs affecting a tiny subset of users and that it’s not usually a reason to choose or not choose a particular device.

From what I can tell following links on your article, this issue hasn’t been reported on after the Pixel 7, so someone buying a Pixel 10 today probably has no reason to have that as a purchase consideration.

I only posted an older hacker news link to show even people in this community have been affected. There are plenty of recent examples.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/this-wild-bug-is-still-plagu...

> I had this problem when trying to call 999 (the UK equivalent of 911) about a year ago.

> Fortunately I managed to free myself from the situation I was in by breaking (crushing) my finger.

Ouch!

https://www.reddit.com/r/GooglePixel/comments/1oeiqop/pixel_...

And you can do a search for Samsung and get a similar story: https://www.phonearena.com/news/galaxy-s24-failed-to-connect...

Like I said, not to excuse them, but these issues tend to affect an incredibly small amount of people. If you have a double digit number of users on Reddit complaining for a phone that represents 7% of all US smartphone sales, that’s not a widespread bug as a percentage of userbase.

Google currently sells more than half of the smartphone volume of Samsung in the US.

I don’t know why you want to downplay this issue. Google should be held accountable for this. It affects multiple users over multiple models and has caused real world harm.

Imagine it was Apple. Now apply the same outrage.

I’d be saying the same thing. Apple sells tens of millions of phones per year and in this hypothetical scenario a double digit number of Reddit users couldn’t call 911.

This is obviously a big recurring issue which is statistically significant given the number of times that a user might call emergency services in their entire lifetime.

If the reason you want to dismiss it is because you have a pixel then you don’t have to convince me that it’s safe - you need to convince yourself.

I, like most people I know, buy Android devices around the 300 euro limit, use them until they break for whatever reason, which is measured in years.

The only apps that get installed nowadays are the ones that must be for a specific service, or gaming.

Many people even turn updates off due to the way companies get creative changing the application on every update.

In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.

Outside communities like HN, regular people hardly care about updates.

Current one was 150 quid off Ebay, I've also used backmarket.

Last time I had a "flagship" phone it got stolen out my hand.

The screen was also expensive to replace.

If I drop this its no big deal (the back is plastic anyway).

It also comes in a fun colour so its not just another black rectangle.

I'll replace it with the Jolla phone when that arrives.

> In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.

Not quite. The phones I had for the four years before the iPhone came out were Treo devices running PalmOS, which got software updates installable via the host computer without any developer tools.

I don't know about those, given that they were not that relevant in my circles, so I never cared that much about their offerings.

Google have burnt me twice by abandoning phones… first was Nexus 4, next was Pixel 4a

Both were abandoned within two years of me buying… never buying a phone from Google again

As power user, didn't you do your homework before buying the device?

???

Pixels are pretty weak hardware wise in the areas people care about (heavy, relatively slow charging, big, etc.); I'd probably recommend people buy Samsungs which also get long term software updates nowadays.

I'll never argue that updates like this are a bad thing, but arguably the best thing Apple could have done is offered a jailbreak for phones after so many years. If you're still using the same ten year old phone, the risks to you opting into the ability to flash a new OS maintained by someone who cares are pretty small. It's not as though those folks are more than a rounding error in sales numbers anyway. Someone buying a new phone every 20 years instead of 15 isn't going to cause anyone to lose their Christmas bonus.

It doesn't deserve praise because the "degree" is very low, and it's undercut by all the other measures like "forcing" min OS version updates, meaning that your phone won't be able to use apps even when OS is updated.

Performance and hardware longevity has really been solid from Apple.

I busted my wife's old iPhone 8 out when I found it digging for other things ... still runs nice.

My android devices over the year I use for development, most just up and die or performance just degrades over time until it is unusable.

But isn’t this in a way an endorsement to still use devices with outdated operating systems full of well documented security holes?

I ran a 5S that I bought in December 2013 as my primary phone all the way up to around March 2020, just as the pandemic was really winding up.

The battery, after ailing for a little while, had eventually just given up. I'd gone skiing a couple of times, with the last trip being just before lockdown, and I think it was the cold exposure of the second trip that dealt the mortal blow, and it died shortly after I returned.

I liked that phone a lot. It did, at the time, everything I needed, and it was a really nice size, but that period in 2020 was a bad time to try to get a phone repaired. I did attempt to replace the battery myself using the guide on iFixit but, sadly, that did not go well due to some contradictory/out of order instructions, and all I succeeded in doing was damaging the phone, I think, beyond repair.

Really good to see that Apple are still supporting them though.

Just so you know, apparently it's reasonably straightforward to replace the battery of the iPhone 5s, even easier than the iPhone SE (same form factor) for whatever reason.

A few years ago I bought a replacement battery kit that came with everything needed for probably something like $10 from aliexpress. I never actually got around to doing the replacement yet but maybe this update will give me the excuse to dig it up and replace the battery too ha!

Curious - what makes it easier on the 5S? I've replaced the battery and screen on my SE a handful of times and from i can tell from iFixit the process to do the same thing on the 5S looks identical.

Oh maybe I'm wrong then, I felt like I read that the 5S was easier.

Next time, if you try changing your phone’s battery, you should watch a few youtube videos showing how to take it apart, too.

tokyobreakfast is right that this is just a certificate fix, not a real software update. But it's still notable.

Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.

Kind of how Sony pushes a bluetooth DRM update to PS3s every year still.

Wow I didn't know that. That's impressive.

I think you mean blu-ray?

Yeah, blu-ray not bluetooth.

Maybe overlap with the device tree for the last iPod Touches that finally got sold?

It's likely that, the Support Contact Rate (and potentially legal contact rate if the phone gets fully bricked and unable to make basic phone calls) is higher than the cost of just pushing the certificate.

I'd assume the legal hourly costs for handling 10 cases probably equals the cost of pushing this cert, even if the cases can be successfully defended.

Now, let's see if Apple can fix the A5/A6 activation bug.

People complain a lot about planned obsolescence but i'm mildly impressed, even if this update is only to keep the lights on and nothing else.

I remember people complaining that the design of the 5 was already outdated when it was new and they needed to have bigger screens and be thinner to compete with Samsung...

I would love a modern iPhone the size of the 5… or even the 3G.

I wonder if this is because some people keep their iPhone 5s around as a backup phone or for some other reason?

My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.

More likely that, the Support Contact Rate (and potentially legal contact rate if the phone gets fully bricked and unable to make basic phone calls) is higher than the cost of just pushing the certificate.

Anyone using the original iPhone SE or the second SE? I wonder how those are fairing on their final update(s).

Replaced the original iPhone SE battery recently with a higher capacity one. Works perfectly. Many apps require an update or else they refuse tor run, but outside of that, still doing well.

Had an original SE as banking backup. Recently the banking app demanded a newer iOS after being updated. Now that good old little device that was supposed to save me eventually is basically bricked for me.

Me, my wife and my mom are all using the second SE. My mom is the only one who has updated to the newest iOS. I didn't want to because I heard rumors it was slow. But I tried my mom's phone and it seems as snappy as my phone (more or less, not the fastest phone to begin with, but not slow either). So I'm going to update too.

I've got an iPhone 7 I use as a secondary phone. It had a new battery about four years ago. It's still going strong.

Still using it, it’s fine performance wise, maybe needs another new battery in a year or so. Apple Pay, authenticators and messaging apps are working.

Was hoping for the new iPhone Fold (with Touch ID even) to be small but looks like it’s going to be a really weird ratio when folded.

Of course there are caveats: - Spotify not getting app updates anymore (but still playing fine)

- some websites do not support the Safari version, e.g. GitHub

- most banking apps are not supported

I'm still on the 2nd generation. Apparently working as a normal iPhone, and Apple even sends notification for me to update to iOS26.

I'm on my 8th year of using my original iPhone SE, have replaced the battery a few times and the screen a couple of times. It's still doing what I need it to do on iOS 15, but I noticed a few big names apps have stopped supporting iOS 15 in the past year so the installed versions are the last compatible versions (e.g. the installed versions of Uber and Netflix are > 6 months old).

Performance-wise, it can stutter a bit on modern websites and sometimes in some apps, but otherwise works reasonably well. A few weeks ago I noticed it was struggling more than usual and chewing up more battery, but then I cleared up some disk space and it's been running fine.

The minimum supported iOS version for some of my must-have apps (e.g. WhatsApp, my banking app) is currently iOS 15, so I imagine when that changes I'll need to finally upgrade my phone. Feels like its days are numbered.

That's impressive, thanks for sharing! I miss my original SE, the size was perfect. And I felt iOS 15 and 16 were really solid updates.

I think the battery on my SE2 gave up the ghost… or the charging port, because the battery wouldnt charge all the time by the end.

Maybe the update was a final death call, those users finally need to upgrade.

I love it when companies keep their old hardware updated.

Instills great confidence.

AMD drops support as soon as it possibly can for "old" GPUs.

Not AMD doing the work, but 14 year old GCN 1 / 1.1 has been getting a bunch of modernization & other improvements. R9 290, HD 7970, many more old chips. https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMDGPU-SI-Power-Management https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GCN-1.1-Driver-Default-Pro...

AMD might not be doing the work, but they set the world up to be able to support their chips. I'd take that over crossing my fingers for ok Windows driver support to hold out any day.

Top range of these cards had (only 8GB) of 0.3TB/s memory, which is what a modern 9060xt can do. Double that for the 9070xt, but still not bad. 4->~48 (fp32) TFLOPS though, wow! Especially with a modern driver stack. With the accelerators all using much older architectures I wonder if they stand to get any benefit, not that they're getting used for graphics much.

Thus can never be viable. Instead, the companies should open-source obsolete products allowing community support.

I am locked out of my older iOS devices. I cannot login to my Apple account on these devices because "the OS is too old", and I cannot update iOS without logging into my Apple account. They bricked those devices just by flipping a switch remotely. One of those is an iPhone 6S Plus, for instance.

happy about this since I still daily an iphone se 2016 (same form factor as the 5s but 6s internals) and about to change it's tiny battery and maybe get yet another iphone og se just in case this one stops working. abysmal battery life and tiny screen makes for the perfect dumb smartphone. aside from google search, the phone is virtually ai free (most of the ai and majroity of the social apps do require at least ios16 o 17), i do have to have an older android to use 'institutional' apps (meaning that there's a phone always at home with my banking and govt id apps). sent from the tiny screen of the SE

> Apple also released new versions of iOS 18 and iOS 16.

Has anyone gotten hold of a newer ios 18 for phones more recent than 5s?

Any hope for ipad 1,2 or ipod touch?

i would NOT install this update

TLDR it replaces an expired certificate, no software is being "updated" here.

Wake me when old versions of OS X can access the App Store again.

Cant you technically access the old jailbreak app stores on a 5? I would assume these phones were jailbroken far more commonly than modern iPhones. I feel like I dont hear about anyone jailbreaking them anymore.

Yeah a lot of the features people jailbroke for are generally available these days.

What versions can't access the App Store anymore? I've tried Catalina recently, and that still worked fine, but it only stopped getting security updates in 2022, so it's only been a few years.

Also, I've barely ever used the OSX/MacOS app store anyway, and from what little I've heard from other people, it's not really all that great nor popular a place to get your software from.

10.12 appears to have issues

Yeah, I just had to re-pave an M1 MBP with Monterey. That was an adventure. Got the installer. Ran through part one, "This is no longer supported, click here to run in reduced security mode, or cancel the install?" Reduced security mode. "The installation of reduced security mode failed." Cool.

My journey to figure it out found me a Monterey IPSW image. Try to install it via DFU and a second Mac. "Nah, you can't do that, I won't even let you try."

ChatGPT hinted that I needed to do it from a similar vintage OS. "Even an Intel Mac running Ventura could work for this." As luck would have it, my partner still had her old MBP Core i5 running Ventura!

Alright, install Apple Configurator on the Ventura Mac.

"Nah. You need a Mac running 15.7 to install Apple Configurator."

Chicken and egg.

I mean, this OS (Monterey) only came out FOUR YEARS AGO. Ventura was three.

I got lucky with a Reddit post where someone asked for and got a zip file of an old version of Configurator.

I was then able to DFU re-image the M1 Mac with Monterey.

(Why do I need Monterey on it? Because someone else abandoned their software.)

So this Kafkaesque process to even get a four year old OS on a four year old Mac laptop means we shouldn't just be slobberingly praising Apple.

(I realize you, personally, weren't. Just when you said 10.12, I got flashbacks.)

> Also, I've barely ever used the OSX/MacOS app store anyway, and from what little I've heard from other people

Thanks for the advice.

There's a problem with older Macbooks on older MacOS/factory reset where they can't access the App Store, so they can't directly download newer MacOS, you gotta go sidecar it

Of course this is completely opaque to people who have to do this, it just ends up prompting you to login and things like that.

I think newer MacOS avoids this stuff by not having OS updates be linked to the App Store

I’m honestly surprised how they kept track that the certificate for an old version of the OS and deprecated hardware was expiring in the first place AND the executives approved cutting a release to roll it.

I cannot remember ever installing something from the App Store onto a Mac. What software do people install that way?

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