The six-year-old iPhone 6S will get iOS 15(theverge.com) |
The six-year-old iPhone 6S will get iOS 15(theverge.com) |
It works still fine: performance is ok (maps is the only app that is a little laggy), the battery still last a full day.
But now the version of android on that phone is no longer supported by one of the app I use (banking app), so I'm forced to change it. I would have wanted it to last a few more years, but 9 years is still a long run.
I hope my new phone will last as long, and I choose it with that goal in mind (modern processor, 5G so I have it if I need, no samsung galaxy flagship that will be deprecated in a year, the possibility to install a custom OS instead of android if I need to, ...)
Switched to iPhone after being on android all this time (with a brief dalliance with Microsoft phone on the lumia 910, which I think is still one of the best smartphone UIs) for the same reason as parent.
I am thinking about switching to iPhones. I just hope the anti-trust case forces Apple to allow other App stores or side-loading. That and the back button is what keeps me on Android, and I am sure I could accustomed to whatever gesture means "back" on iOS.
Swipe right from the left edge of the screen.
Also the EU isn’t in Apple’s top 3 priority markets, so we’ll see.
And it is a real problem because a lot of fine functioning computers can't be officially upgraded to newer versions of macOS, rendering them essentially useless.
I’m running a 2008 MacBook which works just fine for its purpose (digital audio) and isn’t on the latest OS.
They’re still releasing security updates for High Sierra, which supports hardware back to 2009/10.
Which Macs that are six years old are being dropped?
Looks like they were still being manufactured and sold in some regions until at least August 2019.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/10/apples-new-repair-pr...
iPad mini 4 is A8 with 2GB of RAM and remains supported. iPad Air 2 is A8X (with 2GB of RAM) too and remains supported. Other devices to remain supported are Apple TV HD (A8 with 2GB of RAM) and HomePod (A8 + 1GB RAM, but no big UI to deal with).
Unsupported A8 devices:
iPod Touch 6, iPhone 6/6 Plus, both because of RAM size
Put a case on it and it should last a long time.
The closest guarantee you get from Apple is that "iPhones on the latest iOS release are supported". The latest iOS list of supported devices is at [1], and Wikipedia[2] also considers that as the "list of supported devices", because Apple refuses to provide clear guarantees.
The Apple guarantees are on service[3], and only seem to apply for Hardware issues[4]. If someone has a better citation for iPhone 5s being officially under security support, I'd love to update https://endoflife.date/iphone accordingly.
[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212257
[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-in/guide/iphone/iphe3fa5df43/io...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_iOS_and_iPadOS_devices...
[3]: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201624
[4]: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/370530/is-ios-12-s...
But I do care about security updates.
I would say that's the one place where Android got it right, you can keep having updated system apps for a long time after the OS itself is abandoned (which is shamefuly quickly).
"There is no non-evil reason"
The reason is that someone needs to sit down, open up Xcode, and compile it for the old hardware, fix all the compilation issues that crop up, and then that OS needs to be tested on every variation of that hardware that was ever released anywhere in the world.
If you don't want to do that because the userbase is dwindling and you aren't running a charity and/or open source project.....how is that evil??? Cheap, maybe even greedy - but evil??
So, you’ll have to choose between cutting some features and releasing underperforming software (likely severely underperforming, for older devices)
Hacking on the code for months or even years may alleviate that somewhat (look at what the hacker scene can get out of computers from the 1980’s), but that isn’t a certainty and if you do that, you either have to release later, or release later for so devices.
Either way, your users won’t be happy. They’ll get less, get it later, and/or it won’t perform.
That creates test and QA work on Apple's part. They also have a pretty good breakdown how many devices of which build type are still out in the wild - and at some point, it simply becomes uneconomical to still support a given device version.
You aren't wrong to point out that incentives are wrong since we don't pay for the Android/iOS version, so the manufacturer makes more money retiring support early, but IMO Apple is doing a pretty good job here, esp. considering how much smartphones have evolved during that time.
It would be a much better analogy if you were to say you'd installed the latest Ubuntu on a machine from twenty years ago (though even that may be generous, given that the iPhone was only 4 years old 10 years ago, while the Intel PC was roughly 20 years old 20 years ago)—and I'd expect it to work about as well as iOS 15 would on an iPhone 4.
You are right though that Apple retires support after 6-7y. That surely could be longer considering how desktop/mobile CPUs have stagnated over the last 5-10y.
It's just unlikely to change given Apple makes no money supporting old computers apart from repairs.
An iPhone is not safe to use when it no longer gets updates because Safari doesn’t get updates.
On Android pressing "back" will take you to the last screen you were on; importantly this might be in the same app or a different one. It'll also do things like dismiss popups and hide the keyboard, since that's also moving back to a previous state.
The back-swipe on iOS is the equivalent of the Android "up" button, in that it's specific to the current app. It's also only going to work if the current app is deliberately supporting it, of course -- they might have their own UI chrome that doesn't respond to a swipe.
The other half of the "back" button behavior on iOS is that you can swipe left/right across the bottom of the screen to cycle between apps. (Or there's a special back-button in the toolbar if you've just followed a link that took you between apps.) So it does need more intentional-knowledge about what you mean to achieve.
But YMMV of course, this is going to be largely dependent on your own usage patterns, app choices, etc.
Honestly, having used both, I prefer the iOS separation of concerns. I've seen a lot of non-technical people get confused about what Android's "back" is going to do, so a button that'll do something different based on the context of how your reached the current screen apparently doesn't map well to many people's mental models of their phones.
Sad that the article is so extremely anti-EU instead of pro-consumer.
So no security updates for starters, software slowly starts to leave behind old versions too.
edit: ok, I see how it could be seen as sarcasm.
Conventionally, most iOS apps seem to do it like Apple does with the native apps. E.g. when I click a link in an iMessage, it opens up the page in Safari and at the top left of the screen there is a little "< Messages" button that will take me back exactly where I was.
Honestly, it seems just like a Windows vs MacOS vs Linux thing. There are analogs for almost every behavior that is even a tiny bit popular, you just have to get comfortable with how to use it.