It's bizarre that a company like Google doesn't realize that supporting older devices actually helps them in the long term. Apple has the most dedicated customer base in the world who will gladly upgrade all their devices every year or two, yet even 6-8 year old iPhones and iPads regularly get software updates. This increases the value of Apple devices across the board and sustains a very large resale marketplace. This means more people are coming into the Apple ecosystem at the low end and eventually working their way up.
If I know that my $900 purchase is going to be worthless in 2-3 years, why will I even bother?
I dropped my iPhone 11 and the screen got destroyed send it out for repair and picked up my old iPhone SE from 2016. Updated it to iOS 15.2 and it trucked along without problems until the replacement was here. Amazing. (I have to admit I got the battery changed when they had the free battery exchange program running).
Screen? Camera? Speed? Battery? I get that it is enough for you, and that's great, but let's not try to fool anyone that 6yo phone is a little bit old for most users in 2022.
Edit: Apple is dropping support for 2016 SE this year, so let's just not recommend it to anyone right now ;)
I'm still using a first gen SE as well, specifically because every phone available today doesn't have the one feature I'm looking for that the SE has--size. I'm considering keeping it in service, and just removing anything that might be a security risk--like my bank's app.
(Yes I know there are tiny Android phones, but pretty much all of them are from iffy sources where I'm unlikely to get a year of updates, let alone 6 years. Most have aweful screens, or other reasons not to buy. I have come close to trying them, but always found too many potential issues. The closes I came to trying is the Palm phone.)
Another 2016 SE user chiming in. Other than a Battery Swap, everything still works great. I can get on the internet, send texts, make calls, do facetime.
Screen is still in perfect condition, but I'm not hard on screens. Camera is fine, sure others are better, but for snapshots the camera still works great. Speed is a non issue for me, as don't play games on the thing. All the apps I use putt around just fine. Battery... I would love for it to have been easier to replace.
I did recently replace my partners SE with a 13 mini because of the battery. It had been through 4 of them, 3 apple replacements and 1 I did. I believe that it was a hardware issue that was killing the batteries. I'll keep using this phone until the current battery dies or I can no longer use my banking apps due to lack of updates.
Personally I like the size of the device the most, followed the fact apple has kept it up to date for so long.
>* If the screen, camera, and speed were good enough in 2016*
You say it's a rhetorical question but I'm not clear on why or why this sentiment is so persistent. After all, the screen, camera, and speed absolutely WEREN'T good enough in 2016, any more than regular computers were good enough in 1986, 1996, 2006 or 2016. They were simply what could be managed at the time with technology at the time. The only aspect of electronics that is "done" for typical audiences [0] is audio, where we have microphones, recording and reproduction that can (easily) exceed the biological limits of human hearing. In contrast exceeding human visual acuity in capture, storage and reproduction remains a work in progress (though it's conceivable we'll hit it in the next decade or so which will be a very interesting change for our industry). That in turn itself drives some demand for computation, storage and processing, though more fundamentally it's hard to say if there is any real limit on how much computation might be put to use. Storage has been on a fast enough upward curve that I think it might be said it's approaching the point where regular people always have enough merely in the course of normal upgrades, but to handle an entire lifetime.
So yeah, come back in 2032 maybe.
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0: Scientific applications of course are frequently interested in sounds that well exceed human limits, though even there we have the tech for it albeit not in non-specialized devices.
The big difference I see comparing computers from 1986 to today is that our demands for computers today are vastly different. The way we use computers today might have some similarities to 1986 for some, but for the average person its massively different.
However, comparing a computer from 2016 to today, its not nearly as far. A desktop at home I use pretty consistently is running a Core i5 from _2012_ and otherwise works fine. Other than VR gaming there's rarely a task I have that the old computer can't otherwise do, other than run Windows 11 I guess. Everything I do today on a phone, I did the same on a phone in 2016. Messaging, phone calls, email, calendars, apps that are largely interacting with web services to render images and text on a screen, streaming video, etc. All things I do today, all things I did in 2016.
Honestly my phone use cases haven't evolved much since 2010, maybe even several years before then. Things maybe look a little fancier, the cameras are for sure fancier, but the fundamental use of the device _for me_ hasn't changed.
The claim isn't that the phone is competitive on a feature or spec level to new phones, but that those happy with the old feature set can continue to use them.
Of course the battery is a consumable part and you can't expect that to continue functioning well indefinitely.
I mean, considering all most people use their phones for is a web browser and their collection of social media apps I think the ad coverage on both is pretty darn similar.
I switched from an iPhone to Android because I won't carry a phone I can't deploy my own software to, and I stopped buying Macs, so I can't build for iOS anymore now that the last one died.
I don't really see any more or less ads because they're served through whatever app or website you're using.
Interesting. One of the two triggers to investigate iOS in my household (the other was deprecating Hangouts) was noticing that pihole was showing about a third of the DNS requests were blocked, and those were overwhelmingly from mobile devices.
Moving to iOS dropped that to 3%. This is a few years ago, so I'm sure that the adware companies have got harder-to-block mechanisms for their surveillance capitalism. But certainly at that point, it was a very significant difference.
Apple's requirement to be clear about how customer data is being used by third parties has only reinforced the value of that change for me.
This is a very important point. Xiaomi is selling premium phones with unreal amount of ads (like im their Calculator app...), but these phones have amazing support from the communities, both from Lineage and upcoming alternatives like Ubuntu Touch. So for cost-conscious, privacy-oriented people, Xiaomi is a good option. And so are the Pixels, because they also recieve similar community support, and unlocking the bootloader is a single command.
In the end of the day, every company have their own incentives (Google, Xiaomi or Apple), but the users still have power over Android, while that is so not the case for Apple and iOS.
If I know that my $900 purchase is going to be worthless in 2-3 years, why will I even bother?