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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

I'm no fan of Apple, but this is baseless Apple bashing. "Refusing" to update old devices is certainly reasonable. You cannot continue to support 7 year old phones when there is so much (hardware) development, it would either make them unsuitably slow or deprive newer models of features.

iPhone 4 (06-2010) received it's last (?) update in 06-2014, 4 years of support, other devices have had similar durations of support.

Compare that to Google: Nexus One (01-2010) never received 4.0 (10-2011): less than 2 years, Nexus S 11-2010 to 10-2012: 2 years, Nexus S 10-2011 to 07-2013: less than 2 years.

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Actually, iPhone 4 should never have received iOS 7. The update crippled people's phones: the software ran so slow, that in some cases I was unable to answer the call before it timed out! Subsequent updates made the situation slightly more bearable, but still bad.

I would much rather have Apple flat-out refuse to provide updates for devices which are unable to handle the new bloated software.

I'm unable to do that on my iPhone 5c sometimes. The screen just doesn't respond when I try to pick up. And it was made for iOS7.

As an iPhone 5 user, I have experienced the same thing. A reboot fixes it. More than likely the problem is more frequent/pronounced the slower the device is.

iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G and iOS 5 on the first iPad have been the same. They could come out of it looking generous if they would allow us to downgrade our devices again...but all I hear is "your device is practically bricked, where's your credit card?"

>> iOS 5 on the first iPad have been the same

Man, I would pay a small fee to Apple to be able to do that. I bought a maxed out iPad 1 when it was released and it was basically unusable in 24 months. I expected to be able to use it for 3y.

The initial release was pretty bad, but subsequent ones are fine. Safari, for example, is at least as fast as before. More annoying are third party developers testing only on new hardware. A phone that can run "Infinity Blade" should not take two minutes to start "Threes".

>> The initial release was pretty bad, but subsequent ones are fine.

Well, it seems there is some variability on this, so the better response may be "YMMV".

iOS7 on my iPhone 4 (including the latest updates) -- just made it unusable -- and keep in mind, most of what I do are just the core apps, Safari, RSS and Read Later. I basically had the same issues with the last supported iOS versions on the original iPad and iPhone 3G.

The pattern I notice is that Apple tends to offer one OS upgrade too many on older devices, which is basically what led me to leave iOS.

The refreshing pattern I've experienced on Android is that most of the upgrades have featured performance improvements.

Apple can't win here. They don't release the update, and people bash them for not supporting expensive devices. They release the update, and people bash them for some kind of forced-planned-obsolescence.

They could release the update and make sure it actually runs well.

Note that it's not a given that a new OS release must run slower. Mac OS X had many releases that got successively faster. The trend only stopped with 10.7 or so.

It's also not a given that older hardware has the ability to support whatever changes and new features were made in the new OS.

Possible, but that stuff is mostly artificial and performance-targeted. To take another example from the Mac world, Apple's hardware requirements have almost always been artificially inflated, with people having great success in applying gentle tweaks to make them run on older computers.

Anyway, you certainly could build something that really can't run on older stuff, or can't run well. My point is merely that the dilemma you propose is wrong: there are at least three options (don't support old stuff, support old stuff badly, support old stuff well), not just two.

They could just let ios 6 continue to be installed on the iPhone 4, or let you restore from your own back-ups. I think this was actually possible for the first few weeks of ios 7 release, but then they "unsigned" the older versions.

There are reasons for their heavy-handed update policy that have nothing to do with malfeasance. Look at the world distribution of Android OS versions in the world for a case study in what happens when you don't force people to upgrade.

So I guess they have three options:

* Release upgrade, people complain

* Don't release upgrade, people complain

* Allow any random OS release to be installed, people complain

Every single one of these options have their own pros and cons. Apple seems to have just selected the first one.

Apple doesn't force people to upgrade. They just don't allow people to downgrade.

Android's fractured version numbers have nothing to do with forced upgrades or any inability to downgrade. They're simply a result of Android upgrades being the responsibility of individual phone manufacturers, and those manufacturers having little incentive to ship upgrades.

At this point, I'd wager that iOS would see better uptake of new versions if they allowed downgrading. As it stands, if you merely suspect that the new version will make your phone suck, you need to stay with the old version, because once you upgrade there's no going back. If they let people downgrade, then you could try the new version with no worries.

Not directly they don't, but once they stop signing requests for the older releases, the old OS version dies from attrition as full backups can't be restored from that rev anymore.

I don't imagine that rate is even remotely significant. Restores (aside from buying a new phone) are extremely rare from what I see.

...what would you call constant prompts to upgrade coupled with the inability to restore backups if you don't, if not coercive?

I said I doubt it's significant. I said nothing about "coercive."

My iPhone 4 is still on iOS 6.1.3; I only had to upgrade to the 4 when my 3g stopped working after some OS updates. I learned my lesson there and didn't bother to move up to iOS 7 for my current phone; I'll probably get a new one soon just because my phone is now ~4 years old and starting to slow down on its own anyways.

I see same problem on my 3GS with iOS6 (updated from 4 to 5 then to 6). Once every 30 calls or so.

i have an old 3gs that i used for testing and now it's my Pandora client permanently attached to my receiver. i never update it past 6.

when friends with 4 and 4s with ios7 show up i like to ridicule then on how they have a phone worse and 10x shower then the previous generation. oh apple. you're so funny when you try to nickel and dime your customers.

they take some 2min to load the first screen on maps. it's hilarious.

Apple don't help by requiring App Store submissions to be compiled with a current version of Xcode, while removing compiler support for older ARM CPUs. Not suggesting that this is a deliberate ploy (it likely makes very little difference to their bottom line), but it certainly doesn't help...

This year, you're absolutely right: Apple has among the best support for older devices, among smartphone makers, which are a breed apart from more general purpose computing.

For now.

Long term, as things stabilize, I think we all can agree we want more from these gadgets.

So yeah they are better than one of the worst. This doesn't mean they should not try to do even better. Why can my 2008 Vista laptop be upgraded all the way to 8.1 and use software that come out today and my 2008 pocket computer / smartphone cannot do that? Especially that this year, smartphone specs are a little stuck. We should have an OS as independent as possible from the hardware, on any device.

Because smartphones are in the exponential phase of development, much like computers were in the late 90's early 00's. Smartphone silicon has changed dramatically in the last 4 years, laptop silicon has not.

To be fair CPU performance has massively improved since '07, however, it just doesn't matter because everything you wanted to do is fast enough.

If you take an modern game and run it on an '07 PC it will be very slow at max settings.

Back in 06-07 it you needed a 15x15K drives and a controller with 256 MB of cache RAM to hit 800 MB/sec random read/write. Now you can drop in two $200 SSDs

They are still, in comparison to mobile phone SoCs, incremental increases in power. Especially the Core-i series of the last few years. On top of that they still sell computers with dual-core celeron and pentium processors because they're "good enough" and instruction sets haven't changed much. Smartphone SoCs have seen leaps and bounds both in the physical silicon and in stuff like instruction set support, hw codecs and the like.

Because:

1) You pay for Windows, and part of that cost is specifically to ensure backwards compatibility. iOS is free.

2) The performance of smartphones in 2008 vs. smartphones in 2014 is very different than the performance of PCs in 2008 vs. PCs in 2014.

In 2008 smartphones and mobile ARM platforms were in their infancy. The latest smartphones (Android, iOS, or otherwise) are easily 100x faster than those old phones. This is why I'm personally skeptical that these guys can get the iOS7-blur effect on an original iPhone1.

You'd see incompatibilities galore, too, if PCs advanced by a factor of 100 in 6 years. In fact, we did see that in the mid-late 90s when PC performance was exploding - the upgrade cycle back then was way, way shorter than it is today.

1) iOS is not free, it's included in the price of the device. 2) Vista with DX10 support on Core 2 Duo is very different than Windows 8.1 with DX11 support on i7 with SSD instead of HDD.

But it doesn't matter that your argument is flawed. Supporting 4yo hardware is a waste of time from any hardware vendor POV if there were 2 new generations of devices released since. It's not a gaming console with a lifespan of 5-10 years for people to expect support after half a decade.

It's still free. As is Android. Zero-cost OSes driving general purpose computing devices is starting to become the norm, rather than the exception. The only major holdout nowadays is Microsoft.

What about updates? The cost of the device has nothing to do with the 2-4 software updates an average user can expect.

See my reply above about "subscription accounting" - the cost of the device really pays for updates.

I think we're in violent agreement here. However, it's unclear (I'd say to the point of not worth discussing) what the cost of the OS is. As far as the end user is concerned, the OS is free as are the updates. They pay the same amount for the phone regardless if it gets 1 update or if it gets 10 (and you don't know how many in advance).

Phones at full retail price have sat comfortably at the $600ish price point for quite a while.

Litmus test, IMO, is this: would iOS be free if we were able to run it on a device that's not manufactured by Apple? I'd say no, so it's not free. The argument you're making is in fact manufacturer's POV, not consumer's one. Microsoft have made a similar claim about Windows Media Player and several other pieces of software that it was requested to remove from Windows for different markets (EU, Korea, probably others). Being cynical I reject the idea of getting something for free in cases like these. It's not free, it's included in the asking price.

Talking just about one point, iOS is not really free. Neither are iOS updates. They may seem so for many, but both are paid for by the price of the device. According to accounting rules (pushed by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act), Apple even sets aside the revenue from each device to accrue over a period of few years so that it can provide updates. In other words, an initial payment for the device pays for both the current version of iOS and a few years of future versions, fixes and updates - it's treated like a subscription, but not clearly sold as such.

Search for "Apple subscription accounting" for more information.

There's a video called "Chain of fools" where a man updates Dos 5.0 -> Windows 7

In this way: Dos 5.0 Installes windows 1.0 -> windows 2.0 -> windows 3.0 -> windows 3.1 -> windows 95 -> windows 98 -> windows 2000 -> windows xp -> windows vista -> windows 7.

He skipped ME because he couldn't update ME to 2000. All through this he had Doom installed and it ran successfully on vista without modification.

This really isn't as impressive as it sounds and is more akin to saying "i painted my house differed colors and my refrigerator worked the while time".

'Windows 7 is so backwards compatible that you can still run software from 1993'

or alternately

'Windows 7 is so full of old outdated code that you can still run software from 1993.'

> Why can my 2008 Vista laptop be upgraded all the way to 8.1 and use software that come out today and my 2008 pocket computer / smartphone cannot do that?

In 2008 the 2nd gen (3G) iPhone launched. It had the same 400mhz 32-bit processor, 128MB of RAM, and 480x320 px screen as the 1st gen iPhone, so it basically represents the very beginning of what is now a six-year explosion in phone performance. iOS had seen a total of one year's public use. The App Store launched alongside the 3G -- outside of the tiny jailbreak community, no one had ever tried to write and sell apps for iOS before.

The iPhone 5S, released five years later, is roughly 50 times as fast,[1] meaning performance more than doubled each year from that starting point.

Give it another few years and your complaint will make sense. But right now, it would be a tremendous waste of time and potential to limit apps, APIs and OSes to what can run on the first round of iPhone hardware. Especially since, as far as I can tell, that hardware represents somewhere less than 1% of iOS phones in use.

[1] http://gabrieltomescu.com/blog/2013/10/25/how-accurate-is-th...

>> The iPhone 5S, released five years later, is roughly 50 times as fast,[1] meaning performance more than doubled each year from that starting point.

That may be true, but the iPhone 3G when it came out launched and ran the phone app very quickly and reliably. By the time it received its last supported OS update, it could barely even run the phone app.

As a "normal user", my expectation would be that the latest and greatest supported OS for my device lets me run the core apps at a decent speed, and to everything else to be slower. That wasn't really the case during the Forstall era of iOS.

This is happening now too with my 4s with ios7. It acts the same as my old 3GS during the ios5? updates. I fear that my 4s won't be able to handle ios8.

I don't expect Apple to support phones forever, but why does something like texting/inputting into a keyboard get worse and worse as the life of the phone goes? Doesn't seem to make sense.

Then we'll see in a few years :) It seems like phone specs are being more and more stable anyway, the 3 last iPhones all have 1GB of RAM, the iPhone 6 only has a 17% CPU boost over the 5S whereas the 5S had a 92% advantage over the 5! On the android side, flagships still have 2GB of RAM, same as 2 years ago, the CPUs are generally Snapdragon 8XX, with a small improvement over last year's Snapdragon 800.

Also, I guess I'm spoilt by the PC and Android world where you can install new software on old devices.

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