If they want to use an old phone, they can just stop updating their apps and not installing new apps.
I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things. I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort so that I can run their apps on my old device.
It is not just the overhead of supporting multiple different OS versions with different technologies, it is also that this support takes a lot of time while there's a tiny fraction of people that, like the author, use an old phone.
I've worked on apps with +1Mio users, and we did have users who were on very old devices using apps which were severely outdated. Those were maybe 1000-2000 of the one million. Adding a constant additional workload of up to 30% (you also have to run CI and everything on older devices) for 1000-2000 users is just not feasible.
If you want to continue to use older hardware, just accept that you also have to use older software.
I also don't expect to be able to run VSCode on a 1996 Pentium 60. I'd run Emacs instead, or Vim, or whatever else was en vogue in 1996
Apple does not give you the freedom to use old versions of software. You can't downgrade your iOS version. You can only upgrade apps, and iOS only lets you download the latest available version of an app for your version of iOS.
Need to do a device reset? If you have managed to keep any apps on old versions, you'll get upgraded now. And you can't even save APKs and sideload because of Apple's developer signatured and certs.
Old versions of iOS get some, but certainly not all security updates.
And most importantly... so, so, so many apps, from banking to navigation to music, insist on checking your app version and blocking usage with a massive dialog box if you're a couple of weeks out of date. It's incredibly obnoxious, especially when some of these apps update 2-3 times a week and each update is >100MB. I try to use those services from a web browser these days, but Safari is so limiting you can't even reliably block ironic "download the app" banners.
And that's to say nothing of actual cellular advancements, like new LTE bands and 5G and voLTE, which older phones understandably can't get... but which certain phone providers use to kick old phones off the network. For instance, AT&T no longer allows any activations for phones not on their (very limited) voLTE whitelist, since they shut down 3G.
Like OP, really wish I could just use the 2016 SE for the next 10 years. But even though the hardware is capable the software industry has pushed it into the "legacy" bin.
You can install any version using AppStore++ which is available when you jailbreak. The older the phone, the easier the jailbreak.
You can always download the app version that works for your phone using the Purchased section... the only real phone I have yet to be able to do this for is the iPhone 4 which did not have 64-bit apps.
My iPhone 5S and beyond all have access to every app that is available for 64-bit OS. It's often an older version of the app but that's kinda the Apple burden.
This is out of the question for any normal user and is also not reliable at all. When you install a Jailbreak you are by default giving up on a plethora of apps which do proper checks and they won't work at all even if you try to bypass them (banking especially).
Older iOS versions have other problems as well. Safari is not an app that you can update, it's part of the OS. A lot of websites will simply stop working for you if your version is too old.
You have to run a version of iOS compatible with jailbreaking, and know how to jailbreak. And then you have to maintain your likely tethered jailbreak that doesn't persist through reboots. And accept that you'll never get any security updates, even for major vulnerabilities.
Sounds like a lot of hoop jumping and a lot of caveats. Even I, a pretty tech-savvy individual, wouldn't want to bother with that on my primary phone. Let alone ask a non-technical friend or family member to do so.
You clearly haven’t tried it. My kids still use an 11 year old gen four iPad every day. It’s absolutely incredible for the $500 or so that we paid for it. We’ve gotten 11 years of entertainment out of it.
The old apps still install just fine and we’ve never had to make any effort to maintain it, or fiddle with operating systems or software or anything.
It’s hard to imagine a better value from a device like this, especially when you take into account the amount of time you would have to spend managing something that had more software freedom to it.
1. If it requires you to enter a code from another device on an older iPad, it tells you to enter your password + MFA code in the password field.
2. You can manually go in and download “the last compatible version”
3. Netflix is usually good about supporting old devices. Amazon disabled an older auth protocol. Apple TV+ videos can be accessed via the web (tv.apple.com). While Safari seems to always redirect you to the app, Chrome for iOS doesn’t.
1.) The iPad 2 only accepts four digit codes, but Apple is now using more digits.
2.) This doesn't work when the app has been removed from the app store.
As an aside, I threw away my 1st gen Apple TV over a year ago because Apple bricked it. It needed MFA to sign in (because it timed out?) and only accepted four digits.
It seems the other way around: you haven't tried it for the regular use, only as an entertainment platform for kids
No, old apps don't work just fine, for example, one of the most popular messaging apps in the world drops support for old devices
This ship has sailed when people accepted that everything lives in the cloud and companies can dictate what you can, can't and must do with your own property.
The last thing they cannot take away and cannot control is offline physical goods, like books for example.
See my other comment about the ability for any iOS device back to the original iPad to be able to download “the last compatible version”.
But to your point, even on a 1st gen iPad - at least the last time I tried a couple of years ago - you can still play music you bought from Apple using the Music app. As far as I know, iTunes still supports every iPod and iOS device ever made.
I purchased a used iPad for reading sheet music and it turns out it's so old none of the apps on the appstore will install and most web pages won't even load because it doesn't recognize the SSL certificates.
You don't need to downgrade iOS if you never update it. I agree with some apps becoming unusable because vendors force updating. This is similar to all other industries though (albeit faster-paced): I can't play PS5 games on my PS4, it is hard to get replacement parts for my 10 year old vacuum.
As I said, I'm still sporting a 11 year old iPad and using it for what it can do. It works for me. But I'm not expecting to use it like a modern iPad with modern software.
I agree with the device reset, that sucks. I never had to do that so I hadn't thought about this.
> Apple does not give you the freedom to use old versions of software
This is not true and hasn’t been true since around the time that iOS 7 came out.
About two years ago, I dusted off an old first gen iPad (circa 2010). I reset it and I was able to download “the last compatible version”. It’s option given to you by the App Store. I was able to use Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Spotify, Google Drive to read PDFs.
It's an option given to you if the app is already in your purchase history for your AppleID. If not, then you have to find a newer device, sign in to it with your AppleID, download the app and then return to the old device and hope that a compatible older version is a) available and b) still functional and that the devs haven't turned off any server-side stuff that the older versions relied on.
You can still “buy” iOS apps on older (still available for download) versions of iTunes using the same Apple ID and then downloading an older version on your device.
> Apple does not give you the freedom to use old versions of software.
Not only can you use old versions of software, you can download them again if you reset your device.
Visit the purchased tab in the App Store and select the app you wish to download again, and you will receive the last compatible version for that particular device.
The distinction here is choosing which version you want, not "the latest / maximum version the developer allows to be used for my device".
For example I just got an update to an app I've been using for a while. The update will sunset the app despite there being no online component to it. I'd kinda like to downgrade now, but the latest version compatible with my phone would be his sunsetted one.
There’s also apps like Cooking Fever (the original is a great game to play with kids)
The latest version tacks on so many ads and “free to play” IAPs that it’s an entirely different game (and tbh one that’s no longer usable). It’s good enough and holds enough nostalgia for me that I would pay $2-5/yr to keep it clean but that’s not an option any more.
Thankfully I have been keeping backups over the years (iMazing) and so I was able to spend some time going through old versions to find a good one, but that is only a solution if you’re planning ahead or if you have a time machine.
Those versions don't stick around forever, unfortunately. A couple months back I reset my iPhone and it wasn't possible to download the Pebble app any more. My watch still works fine, especially with Rebble cloud services, but the app was just unavailable on the app store. That was the nail in the coffin that got me to switch to Android.
Again, you have to look in the purchased tab of the App Store. This allows you to continue to download apps you downloaded in the past that are no longer available as a new purchase.
You forgot the tiny universe of all the new apps you might want to try on an older device, what you describe only works for the apps you've already purchased
> new apps you might want to try on an older device
In that case, you borrow a newer device, sign in with your Apple ID, and download the app onto that device. Now that app will be in your purchase history and you can download the last compatible version for your older device.
All you have to do is get the app into your user account's purchase history. You can do that on a borrowed device and immediately hand that device back to the owner.
Apple keeps the OS current on it's devices for twice as many years as most Android device makers. Are we pretending that the sort of person who keeps the same device for up around ten years is the sort of person who constantly loads new apps?
5G isn't an actual advancement however. For most of where I live, in a major US city the effective bandwidth is either 0 kbps or 0.1 kbps. Why would anyone choose a technology that doesn't have any actual function?
If I use LTE at least I have some usable bandwidth.
Agreed, but as carriers phase out 3G and replace it with 5G your older phone will develop dead zones where it can't use the only service available: 5G.
Not enough of a problem for me to start using 5G yet. But eventually it'll force my hand.
Really? My ipad became e-waste because HBO, Hulu, and Netflix all released new versions of their apps for the new version of iOS, and then decided to cut the old versions off from their services. The old versions all show an error telling me to upgrade to a new version, which I can't do. The sole purpose of this ipad was for media consumption.
I then thought I would use my ipad as a Shopify POS terminal for my side business when I do pop-ups. I obviously didn't want any of my personal information on _that_, so I reset it and created a new apple id. Except, you can't download any apps! Apple only allows you to download the latest support version of an app IF you had already downloaded it.
This meant first installing on a device with the latest version of iOS. So I began backing up my iPhone 12, resetting it, signing in with the new business apple id, downloading the apps I needed, resetting it, and restoring it with my personal account.
THEN I was allowed to download the latest supported app on my ipad. Success!! Well, no, because the latest supported version of the Shopify POS says I have to upgrade to a new version to use it, which my ipad doesn't support...
So, back to e-waste...
The article is right. Blame us developers for:
1. Requiring the latest OS instead of lastest-2.
2. Cutting off older versions of our software from our services.
I wish it was that simple. I use a 4th gen iPod touch, every day, only to listen to music while commuting. Just this week I needed an interval timer, and thought that I could just install one on my iPod.
Nope - AppStore showed about 12 results for "interval timer", but none of them were installable on iOS 6. I thought then I will look for an online interval timer, and use it through wifi. After clicking through the first 3 pages of Google results, Safari could not make any of the pages usable. Either loaded a blank screen, or the interface didn't react to the touches - I guess some "fancy" new features that are too modern for the old Safari.
I could rant about loading 10MB JS on a typical lightweight site that has the same visuals and functionality as 15 years ago, but now it makes Chrome cry on a modern machine... but I won't do that.
Anyway this is how I gave up having an interval timer on my iPod. Maybe my plan was too grandiose to begin with. Neither new software, nor old software.
It could definitely do more than what it currently can, but I don’t think it is reasonable to expect such a long support period, especially that mobile hardware underwent a complete metamorphosis in the meanwhile.
It is reasonable to expect an iphone 14 to be usable as a general purpose device until the next major breakthrough, because year-to-year upgrades are mostly incremental nowadays, but say the first iphone is incomparable on the hardware front to a modern smartphone.
Support? It doesn't need any action to let a 13 years old timer run on it. But removing the applications from the AppStore, it does need action, and investment of money and time. Keeping the support would be easier for Apple... but they don't want.
Frankly, there hasn't been a revolutionary breakthrough in the field of interval timers' technical design in the past decade that would warrant such a ridiculous obsolescence. We are literally talking about "hello world" level applications, that can't run on the device - not because the hardware or software isn't capable.
At the same time, speaking beyond Apple, how long is too long to keep various code, infrastructure, etc around and supported?
Apple dropped support for 32-bit apps being published awhile back because they dropped 32-bit executable support from the OS. Should they keep the binaries around and available forever?
Eventually the old stuff becomes something you have to engineer around. And eventually that becomes too costly to justify.
Again, I agree with you, but businesses have to justify their spend [insert quippy VC jokes here].
I’d like to see a non-commercial approach to solve issues like this very broadly. For example you could legislate that device manufacturers over a certain size retain device software and firmware, and that it all be open sourced after a certain duration. If you go out of business, you transfer it to a trust setup to maintain access to such things. (I admit this is a simplistic example, but it’s not intended to be a full solution.)
The AppStore is a glorified FTP server, with a slow html frontend. It's not exactly the marvel of engineering, and not an awful lot to keep around. Jailbreak community keeps online respositories for free (minus a handful of ads)... but Apple, the world's most cash-padded company, can't afford to keep a RPi4 running in the corner, serving old iOS apps? Give me a break.
(I do work on complex embedded operating systems, with decades long support contracts. We are far from Apple size, I must admit, but I do know what this work involves. Keeping the lights on for such systems is not such a huge expense as everyone pretends it to be. RPi4 is an exaggeration, but not a huge one.)
I don't expect new stuff to work on old systems, I'm not crazy.
I remember, many years ago, someone complained Steve Jobs via email about some iOS update, that he didn't like. And Steve's response was along the lines of "Does the system still do everything what it did when you bought it? Yes? Then have a nice day."
Apple does not give such responses anymore. They avoid answering these. With a reason.
But don't get me completely wrong. I bought my iPod 11 or 12 years ago (I don't even remember), and this is literally my oldest tech that I still use every day. This tells a lot. But my blood boils when I think about how much better it used to be, and how much better it could be... only if Apple wanted it to be.
My time in large-scale systems taught me that it is seldom the financial price that drives that kind of decision making. At least not directly. Usually it is some kind of “what’s the effort versus payoff?” in terms beyond just Akamai invoices.
For the App Store specifically, that very mentality works against keeping apps available. From Apple’s (or for that matter Google’s) perspective, a production App Store has the front end, sure. Also the CDN, the entitlements, DRM, and code signing, payments and IAPs, interfaces to developer tooling/upload/analytics, scanning for the use of private APIs, and so on.
To make such a system function more like FTP for old apps, they’d have to build that in or at least build paths that serve to exempt classes of apps from some or all of that.
I can absolutely understand why their perspective is that if they’re spending effort to remove or deprecate old apps or features, it would appear crazy to introduce new features or services simply to serve up the old. Even if they could do it at cost, that’s developer time at least, and “why spend that on old stuff?” Apple is the company that razed its own corporate museum under Jobs because he thought the past was irrelevant or would hold them back.
I would LOVE if they did that though. They see the dollar signs involved in preservation, not the value. Sadly, the day may come when App Stores share the fate if the game stores like the Wii U storefront, and entire generations of software will be lost.
That is just not always a possibility especially if you use apps that connect to online services, this is something that has quite recent come up again as Steam is ending support for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 in nine months which have caused some uproar in that community. I am surprised that the post about that have not gained any traction on here [0] since to touches the same topic as this one
Windows 7 and 8 are both EOL by Microsoft. I don't think it's unreasonable of valve to drop support for OS's that Microsoft aren't maintaining, and the hardware requirements for 7 and 10 are the same today according to MS [0][1]. For a while you could officially upgrade to win10 for free, and it seems that even now, it still works 5 years after they stopped offering upgrades, and 3 years after win7's end of life.
I'm not sure what your gripe is here specifically, if you want to continue to run steam, you can upgrade your OS once a decade, or you can install steam for Linux if your device doesn't meet the requirements. That's about as good a set of options as I could imagine.
>Windows 7 and 8 are both EOL by Microsoft. I don't think it's unreasonable of valve to drop support for OS's that Microsoft aren't maintaining
it's not unreasonable until you realize that Valve offers no other method for audiences that may be stuck with older machines to play the games that they purchased, which at the time of purchase they had completely met all of the system requirements.
A basic game should not have a set of rolling requirements that are ever-increasing. Valve decided that they wanted to hold the keys to the kingdom with regards to the games that they sold; thus it's a bit more unreasonable when they decide to nix a part of the audience without any recourse available to them other than "download what you need now, and unplug.".
Leisure Suit Larry required a 286 and CGA graphics -- isn't it a bit ridiculous that a Steam purchased 'Leisure Suit Larry' is going to soon require an OS greater than Windows 8.1? Yeah; I get that it's only by virtue of requiring their portal to download the thing , but they offer no alternative to this .
I haven’t been keeping up, but how many games on Steam still require Windows? I wonder if SteamOS (or another Linux distro) would be a reasonable option for people on older machines?
I tried to see if this info was available in SteamDB (and it probably is somewhere — I’m just not finding it in an easily-accessible way), but my feeling is that most games on Steam are still Windows-only.
Your feeling is wrong. Here[1] are all the LSL games as supported on Linux via Proton, they are all playable (yes, even the red/borked one as that's actually Linux native). Most games are usually pretty well supported by Proton[2], for example all the big releases from Playstation games (God of War, Spideman, etc.) have had day 1 support as well as a lot of other big games Cyberpubnk 2077 had day 1 support as well. The main exception being multiplayer games with anticheat is the biggest roadblock right now. Though progress is being made with all the big AC engines (EAC, Battleye, etc.) working in Proton but needs to be enabled by each individual developer.
> it's not unreasonable until you realize that Valve offers no other method for audiences that may be stuck with older machines to play the games that they purchased, which at the time of purchase they had completely met all of the system requirements.
They do - update to windows 10, for free, or install Ubuntu.
> A basic game should not have a set of rolling requirements that are ever-increasing.
They don't, but the platform that delivers those games can.
Can SteamCMD be used to download games? Or is it a hardcoded list of server side software?
At any rate, most of these users would be far better off moving to a linux distro than staying on a decaying OS, that's how I've kept most of my old laptops and such alive.
> I don't think it's unreasonable of valve to drop support for OS's that Microsoft aren't maintaining
I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste. I don't expect anybody to put effort into continued support for old stuff, but I do expect them to not break stuff that used to work. With Valve/Steam specifically you also run into paradoxical situations where they sell you old games on Steam, but those old games only run on old Windows version on which Steam itself does no longer runs.
That said, Valve is among the least problematic offender here, they put a ton of effort into Linux support for Windows games, they allow developers to keep selected older versions of games available and they have forums that make it easy to find workarounds. So most of the time, there is some way to get things to work, even if it's a bit more labor intensive than it should be.
But generally speaking, the whole software industry needs to get their shit together and figure out how to keep old stuff around and working. If I buy something digital, it should be at least available for as long as the company that sold to me exists. That's really not too much to expect. It's embarrassing how billion dollar companies are unable to just move their digital goods into a permanent archive once they lost interest in actively working on it.
> I don't see anything reasonable in turning perfectly good hardware into e-waste.
Nobody's doing that. There's a free upgrade from both Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10, and the hardware specs from MS are the same for all three OS's. For anyone who doesn't want to install Windows 10 on their devices, Steam is officially supported on Ubuntu. If you want to continue to play games on your windows 7 device, you have the option to download those games right now, and archive them in whatever way you see fit to continue to play them on your device.
> If I buy something digital, it should be available for as long as the company that sold to me exists.
Hard disagree here. You spending $20 on something doesn't entitle you to a perpetual access to a version of something under your terms. You have the option to access the game still on your hardware.
> I am surprised that the post about that have not gained any traction on here
Unfortunately which posts get traction is very much a game of luck on HN. Some good samaritans have to hang out on the 'New' page and upvote interesting stories for them to have a chance to come on the front page. Once on the front page, the interesting stories get voted rapidly but coming to the front page itself is 90% of the battle.
I like the Lobsters model here where every new post remains on the front page for sometime and then drops off if it does not get enough votes. Due to the volume of posts HN receives, naturally such a system won't work here! So it is all down to the good samaritans hanging out on the New tab.
Twitter doesn't work. Their app now shows _maybe_ 5% of tweets that my logged in user does. Safari is slow as crap on the website.
Google voice still rings and shows notifications, but can't function because no updates are available and something in the api is broken.
A non-zero number of sites show no-css warnings or just crash because it's an old JS interpreter. (HN though -- it's still rocking the 2000 era web design)
Apps that access the network are slowly dying. Though kindle and mail still work, and that's about all I use it for now.
This was a $300 device 8 years ago, and probably has my best $/usage of any tech I've ever had. The replacement is an 800eur ipad (edit: mini, with cell), because it's (the mini) now effectively a pro model rather than the cheap one, and I'm not sure I can justify that.
That's because it isn't true, the replacement is the $599 iPad Mini 6 which is in a completely different class of tablet. Even the $300 iPad would outclass it by a mile.
Mini 6 has regularly been on sale for $499 as well since it is now long in the tooth already.
If I want a mini with cell, it's 800 eur, which might be 600 moneys where you live, but VAT is included here.
Actually, 64GB mini with Wifi+Cellular is 869 eur in Ireland, just checked there. When I bought my original mini, it was the cheapest new iOS device with a cell radio.
The original iPad mini 2 with cellular was $529 when introduced ten years ago, not $300. The current iPad mini with cellular was $649 when introduced one and a half years ago. Both of those numbers are the actual US Dollar prices for both products. Your pricing information is not correct.
I am an android / windows user. After several years I splurged for an expensive brand new iPad specifically to run music apps such as behringer deepmind (which integrates with their synth).
Couple of weeks later iPad silently installed some os update. Half my apps stopped working! They were apparently incompatible with the current OS and I needed to "contact app developer for an update". Which as you point out isn't going to happen.
This is extreme user-unfriendly BS, but apparently par for the course in Apple Land. Eventually I gave the now-useless iPad to my wife. Lesson learned, though not sure what lesson it was. It's hard to run apps?
They might have enabled it without understanding what could (and did) happen. Victim-blaming isn't the answer here -- that was a genuine clusterfuck that hosed a lot of working installations for no good reason.
There was no reason to think you'd be effectively cut off from half your apps if you enabled automatic upgrades. Or that many of the apps you could still use would be forcibly "upgraded" to subscription models, as iTeleport tried to pull.
I'm not an iOS expert; I've talked to my colleagues who have iPhones and iPads and they indicated "it happens". Quick Google search indicates my experience is hardly unique. Different people with different apps may have different experience and I don't know what the median experience is.
To be fair, it also obviously happens on Android, and every other platform, though for me on Android it was far more common that device itself stops getting new OS updates and new devices might not run old apps. I was caught by surprise that what seemed to me a small OS security patch or whatever, had an unanticipated and immediate effect on already installed apps.
I have no idea if "Automatic OS updates" was the default setting or if I clicked it at some point when I got the new iPad. I will take the responsibility for that choice, obviously, but my point was that "You can run old apps indefinitely on existing hardware" is not perfect advice.
The problem is that in current app stores, there are no easy way to find apps that match your hardware requirements. If I want a fitness app that I didn't think of installing when I got the device 5 years ago, I can't easily look for one designed for 5 year old phones on the App Store. Or an app that developers forgot to update/bloat for the last 5 years.
Also, sometimes you don't have the choice. The app for the public transportation in my city is quite heavy but there is no alternatives except queuing for a paper tickets. And I would bet that most users would be absolutely fine with a leaner/faster app.
So sure, you have to keep up with the time but to me, it feels more and more like a wasteful flight forward anyway.
It's one thing if you already have the app and just stop updating it.
My experience with the iOS App Store has been that if you only just now heard of the app and your phone's too old, you can't even download the version that works for your phone.
That is what ends up forcing an upgrade. That people's phones can't run the newest version of an app, and aren't allowed to get an old version as a substitute.
We have a Ring with the app installed on an old phone that we use as the "household" phone. I was going to "upgrade" the household phone to be an old tablet which while newer and running a later version of Android, is still old. Can't install the Ring app on the newer tablet because it is too old. So we are stuck with the even older phone unless we buy something new.
Can you download and save the .apk file of the older app perhaps? This obviously would require you to know ahead of time what you were going to potentially use the device for in the future, which is ridiculous.
Of course it's a viable solution only for an archivist/advanced users, not so for common users who just wish to keep their old device running smoothly.
Apple has every incentive to make sure old devices become unusable. It pushes people to buy new devices.
The effect may be indirect - someone in a poor country with a 6 year old iDevice finds it becomes unusable, so they want to buy a 3 year old iDevice... And they're buying that from someone who has a 3 year old iDevice who sees that for not a lot of extra money they can buy the newest one.
It's not just an issue of poverty, as if only poor countries have to contend with old phones. In rich countries, there's still an issue of valuation. I have money, but I don't value phones that highly. Just like I could buy a $100 ice cream if I wanted to, but I don't value ice cream that highly.
I so wish this was true. I'm a happy Android phone user with OS vintage 2016, but now all my banking apps are no longer working because they refuse to support my OS version. Many other apps from airline check-in apps to chat apps that used to work perfectly fine all refuse to work because upon running they say "This app no longer supported" and forces an OS upgrade, which is not possible on this version phone.
where were you/what were you doing? That line didn’t sell well until it was reintroduced, IIRC. you’re right though, I may be off by a couple years but correct for most I suspect
> I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things. I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort so that I can run their apps on my old device.
The fact that "it still works" isn't the only consideration though - it's the security posture. There's plenty of remotely-exploitable flaws in that software stack from 2013.
It was true. This was mostly because Windows XP had several open ports by default, and before SP2 (released in 2004) did not have a firewall. So when a vulnerable service in the default install was found behind a default-open port it would spread and replicate extremely quickly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_(computer_worm)
It was true (well perhaps more like 10 minutes). You had to connect your machine straight to the internet (ie. through a dialup modem), not via a router.
Also, some ISP's blocked ports which protected you somewhat.
It was certainly quick enough that there was no way to get the updates installed before the machine would bluescreen (many of these exploiters didn't care much for the stability of your machine...)
What's a good site to read postmortems on hacks carried out against consumer banking apps using iOS versions with obsolete "security posture?" I haven't run across any such reports but can't say they don't exist.
Nowadays, most security features and upgrades are designed to protect the device against its owner.
> Those were maybe 1000-2000 of the one million. Adding a constant additional workload of up to 30% (you also have to run CI and everything on older devices) for 1000-2000 users is just not feasible.
This mentality is one of the reasons why there's only such much people with older phones.
> If you want to continue to use older hardware, just accept that you also have to use older software.
I don't think we should accept that easily, because after all there are physical (somewhat finite) resources and external costs such as green house gas emissions involved when new hardware gets produced.
Many apps connect to backends maintained by the developer. The developer usually doesn’t care about backward compatibility (they only support the latest version of their app), so your old version of the app will, at some point, stop working because it’s not compatible with the current release of the backend API.
Fun fact: as iPad batteries are glued[0], when requested Apple won't renew the battery alone and do full machine exchanges (but charge for the price of the battery only). So if you ever update your iPad 3 battery you'll probably need to do local backups to keep your apps if they got removed from the Store or you need a specific version.
> Adding a constant additional workload of up to 30% (you also have to run CI and everything on older devices) for 1000-2000 users is just not feasible.
How old is very old here? If you're talking about devices that are under ten years old adding 30% to your workload, I would argue that something is wrong on the operating system end of the deal. Part of the reason why we have operating systems is to provide a layer of abstraction so that software is not tied to particular hardware.
> I also don't expect to be able to run VSCode on a 1996 Pentium 60. I'd run Emacs instead, or Vim, or whatever else was en vogue in 1996
I think that most people would agree that expecting support 25+ year old hardware is not reasonable. When you're talking about hardware that is less than 10 years old, people's opinions are going to vary. Those who feel as though they are upgrading without seeing tangible improvements in functionality are likely to be more adamant about longer support periods.
For what it's worth, I have run recent versions of VSCode on my 10+ year old PC. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it's performance of the editor itself, or the associated extensions. I would imagine that it supports much older hardware than what I have simply on the merit that the operating system supports much older hardware.
> If you want to continue to use older hardware, just accept that you also have to use older software.
This sounds like making an excuse for completely unnecessarily obsoleting hardware and ignorantly continuing to make hardware that is completely fine spec-wise obsolete. It all be damned, as long as we can make software how we want. No need to see beyond one's own nose, as long as the rare earths can be mined. The planet be damned.
If at least we kept supporting older client side software, I guess people could live with that, but without a doubt, software businesses are a driving force behind the need felt by many people to have a new phone every 1-2 years. Another driving force are manufacturers that try to convince us, that we need their newest ever more dystopian products.
I personally keep using my now more than 12y old phone as a music player and my phone with broken display (not worth the repair costs) which is approximately 8 years old. Some software like Signal or Syncthing can still be installed (some from Fdroid) and I am not using iPhones, but older Android phones. Some day I might have to look into rooting them and install another OS, because I dread the day, when they will stop working and I have the choice of buying an even more dystopian spyware device.
But you know what I could not install, or even find in the app store? The Covid warn app! So these idiots made the app only for newer phones, creating a huge incentive for people to get newer phones and again wasting perfectly fine hardware. All that of course without proper justification. Even my old phones have WLAN and bluetooth and whatever. So I ended up not being able to use the Covid warn app at all, just because I do not like to trash perfectly fine hardware or unnecessarily buy a new phone every year. Great. Just great.
>If they want to use an old phone, they can just stop updating their apps and not installing new apps.
And if the app developer has updated the app and sunsetted certain functions of the old version such that the old app no longer works right despite being installed?
I've had banking apps, which I haven't updated, completely lock me out until I moved to the newer version.
> "I still own a iPad 3 with the same, old, software stack from 2013. It still works, I can do things."
I've got an iPad 2 which I purchased on the day of release! It's still in great shape and runs well. The original battery still holds a good charge. Still connects fine to modern WiFi networks and my Bluetooth devices.
I still use it for classic iPad gaming, but besides that unfortunately it increasingly struggles to "do things" because the ancient Safari is losing its ability to load/render modern websites properly. If only there was a way to get a more modern web browser on it (maybe there is, with jailbreaking?) then it'd be way more useful.
Side note: I like my iPad 2 but I've long since vowed to never buy another iPad until Apple supports multiple user accounts in iPadOS.
> I just don't expect todays developers to make a herculean effort
that isn't supposed to be a herculean effort -- if it is then you should question those that provide the software stack, and question why you're beholden to those decision-makers.
This mindset is what the author is addressing. This strategy may have been acceptable in the 80's, 90's and 00's when advances in computing power were coming in leaps in bounds, but the 10's and 20's have seen a much slower advance in computing power. I mean, good grief! I was running Garage Band on my original iPhone SE using an audio interface for my guitar and several Audio Unit effects chained together. The phone handled it just fine. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to run the overwhelming majority of today's apps on these "old" platforms.
This. You can live without basic apps or updates. Even without twitter, in non-pathological cases. But services like taxi, banking, e-stores, delivery apps just stop working due to API changes on their side, together with OS requirements. And there may be no useful alternative (e.g. a website doesn’t cut it).
Hard agree. I was happy running old iOS. Until my banking app required me to upgrade my phone. If it wasn't for this, I'd still be running with my iPhone 7.
I also used my Samsung S2 way beyond reasonable terms, think maybe 6 years I have used that one and it was still perfectly usable when I switched to iPhone. It's my festival phone now.
They're referring to developers updating application servers, meaning the client software is no longer able to operate correctly. If your client software doesn't require internet access for example it's probably fine. For all the other apps it's a problem.
Most of the apologetics in this reply are unintentional workarounds which either don’t function in a number of cases, or else are unlikely to work in the future as Apple updates their practices. (ie, they will not preserve functionality which was never originally intended.)
You could totally run them on an early 90’s PC. Just don’t try to use autocomplete plugins or anything else that needs to hook into every character insertion event. Also I would imagine git (and hence magit) would run pretty slow on an old PC due to all the hashing, but I think it would still be usable.
Also you’d want to avoid loading too many plugins all at once, due to limited RAM, but that should be obvious as well.
Vanilla Vim and Emacs are pretty small by today standards. They can run everywhere. Emacs was born text only, BTW. If you start turning on language servers, that becomes the larger part of the editor and the actual editor is just a small fraction of the total.
I run phone repair shops and the app starting up slowness is often caused by a failing battery.
In fact, at our shops, on older iPhones, I can test the battery state by opening the camera app. If it takes 10-20 seconds to open, it’s usually the battery causing it. (The other cause is storage being close to full.)
This won’t help the app resetting issue, which the author correctly identifies as a RAM problem (that I also encounter on my personal iPhone 13 Pro. Apple is horribly stingy with RAM even on the Pro models.)
In general, if you use your phone daily, I recommend getting the battery replaced every 2-2.5 years.
Remember how people laughed at Windows users and the Windows OS? That you have to reboot daily or else it slows down?
Well, these days, my Samsung flagship actually pops up a notification every once in a while, reminding me to please reboot the phone to ensure smooth operation. There's even an option you can turn on to make it automatically reboot every night!
(I imagine that option doesn't automagically skip the SIM card lock and the Android security lock, so IMHO running it is insane, as it would make the phone unreachable until you wake up and unlock it properly.)
> You decided that you wanted to use some framework/feature/API and save developer time. Which is odd. Because consider how much time you spend trying to not harm the environment in your free time: shopping for sustainable products, bringing your reusable cup, recycling. And then think of the minutes you save with new programming stuff compared to the number of iPhones discarded because of that.
Me too, and I was disappointed to see this comment section mostly full of people either blaming the author or explaining why their experience actually makes sense.
It's like a positive feedback-loop (though I guess morally negative) between manufacturers, developers, and users, all three dragging/pushing on the other to roll down the hill of faster hardware and heavier apps, none of them really in control or able to stop, and therefore also not directly to blame. The upgrade-train to Waste City has no breaks. Still, it seems to me at least that the manufacturers are the only ones strictly happy about the situation.
Interestingly, I felt the opposite reading that. Probably in the author’s country (I’m assuming the Netherlands, given the name and the prices in EUR) this is a general sentiment, but in America where most of the apps the author is using were written the average programmer probably does not care about this as much as the author thinks they do. This is not saying this for better or worse, just acknowledging the reality of the situation.
These days, everything eventually gets sacrificed at the altar of "developer comfort". Backward compatibility gets thrown under the bus so code can be "cleaned up" and to reduce the testing scope. Software performance gets thrown under the bust so we can all program in Javascript. Platform-specific features get thrown under the bus in favor of a cross-platform framework so we only have to target one API. Download sizes get thrown under the bus so we can ship containers because it's hard to get programs to work on other people's computers. Less-frequently used features get thrown under the bus because it's hard to maintain all that old code.
C’mon, he’s still using a phone from 2016 (which was the low-end model even in 2016), and by his own admission it’s still pretty usable for most things.
I think that’s a pretty good run.
All the Android users I know have been through at least 3 or 4 phones in that period. And so have some of the iPhone users who obsessively upgrade every 2 years even though they don’t need to!
You wouldn’t argue that a hammer “had a pretty good run” and needed to be replaced if the head detached.
Nor a car with a flat tire.
Nor a road when a pothole appears.
The point I’m making is that when the devices are made there are future issue that are both known and reasonable (battery will wear out, network-based security vulnerabilities will be uncovered, etc), but we all recognize that those can be solved (user-replaceable battery, the ability to selectively block network access, etc).
What’s particularly frustrating are the “unreasonable problems”. For example: running photo recognition in the background on a device that does not have the resources to do it without affecting the user. Or gatekeeping old (perfectly functional) applications. Or any of the other cases that are outlined in these threads. In those cases it’s companies intentionally choosing to restrict our ability to use “their” devices and typically because there’s more profit in pushing “their users” to update.
> "You wouldn’t argue that a hammer “had a pretty good run” and needed to be replaced if the head detached."
If I'd used that hammer every day for many years and it had finally given out? If re-attaching the head wasn't going to give as good result as buying a new hammer? Sure I would.
> "For example: running photo recognition in the background on a device that does not have the resources to do it without affecting the user"
Yeah. Apple shouldn't have enabled that by default on older devices, but it can be turned off (Settings -> Siri & Search -> Photos).
> If re-attaching the head wasn't going to give as good result as buying a new hammer?
The way hammers have been made in the past, you could almost trivially make a new wooden handle and attach the head to it bringing it to just as good as new or even better (if you sourced stronger wood).
The hardware is still working. I think it's reasonable that the software should continue to work until the hardware is physically incapable of booting. An entire industry deciding that hardware "should" only last 6 years is shameful.
The problem here is that software appears to be "wearing out" faster than the hardware it's running on, which is utterly ridiculous. Bits don't wear out. Removing backward compatibility is a deliberate decision being made by developers to make their own jobs more comfortable.
My 486 hardware still boots fine. However developers have moved away from it and the manufacturer no longer supports it. I can run community supported software on it.
How is this any different to the phone in question?
Apple doesn’t do a wide spectrum of ends, but SE is a low end, both price and hw-wise. It just doesn’t suck as much as 10%-priced devices android industry can offer, and most downgrades go to cameras, borders, etc. Which is nice, since not everyone is a selfie type.
It is the cheapest of the phones they offer. It is literally the low end of the range. It has the same chip, but older everything else. It's OK for something to be the low end - it has a market and a purpose. It isn't a slam against the device.
My friend recently was forced to upgrade his phone by ... our local rail company Transport for Wales. Their smart ticketing app dropped support for his old handset with their latest update. The app is essential if you want a flexible season ticket (a substantial saving over the regular fares) so upgrading was an obvious choice for him ... so much for sustainable transport though :(
Is it not still possible to print out the e-ticket (QR code ticket) in advance via the Web? That appears to be an option for all National Rail tickets sold in England at least.
I think the blame can be put on the closed ecosystems of phones. On laptops and desktops, with the possibility to install any OS, it's more often possible to meet the requirements of up-to-date frameworks using the same hardware. My laptop is from 2010 and is still running everything I want, it's up to date and responsive. With the current hardware of phones, and even their hardware of 6 years ago, I don't see any reason why they should be changed, other than being closed platforms where one cannot control the OS.
On a similar note, I have a Motorola G8+, Android 10. It has 4GB of RAM, plenty of free space in storage, and the CPU isn't actually that bad still. The battery is in good condition. A brand new phone doesn't necessarily have any better stats.
For some reason, it is slow. As in, it will still usually run apps at full speed, the framerate in a flight sim is just as high as before etc, but then it will just freeze up for seconds at a time, or suddenly do something really slowly for a while. Sometimes it will fail to respond to the power button short-press to turn the screen on, but if I try again a minute later it will be fine.
I have experienced this with multiple Androids over time. My previous phone got so bad that it sometimes wouldn't actually respond quickly enough to be able to answer a phone call, which is when I got the new one.
What causes this? Is there some build-up of junk lying around in the system that I could press a magic button and clear out, without having to reinstall all my stuff from scratch?
I could buy a new phone. But given a new one wouldn't have much more resources than my current one, it very much feels like the wrong workaround for a problem that shouldn't exist.
This is caused by the emmc storage inside getting slower due to wearing out. emmc firmwares are universally crap at wear levelling, so after a few years use a card that could read/write data at 200 Mbytes/sec before might now be as low as 2 Mbytes per second for reading the most read/written sectors.
The effect is compounded by the fact that modern apps are larger, taking up more RAM and flash storage. That in turn means the emmc has to work much harder - since there will be less free RAM for caching, there will be far more random reads.
The overall effect is a huge storage slowdown that makes the device unusable.
Is there an app that can tell me the wear stats from the storage device? A bit of googling tells me that a service called storaged processes them, but I can't immediately find an app that does this.
I don't think either android or iOS expose this info to apps.
You might be able to get it from a rooted device - although if it is emmc based storage, then there isn't even a standard way for the OS to know - it depends on the manufacturer of the device using proprietary calls (if it collects stats at all).
The underlying “now” test seems reasonable: load a bunch of data off the storage and see how long it takes. You could even theoretically read all data and uncover slow sections (if there is such a thing).
I just benchmarked the storage on my phone, and it seems fine. But I'm guessing the benchmark doesn't touch the most heavily-worn parts of the storage.
Funny. I'm still on a OnePlus 6 and I see similar bizarre freezes as OP when I open the photo gallery. Or just when starting the camera often I have to wait 15-20s before the phone realizes that I have pictures. Sometimes when swiping through the gallery it will become excessively slow and stop reacting to panning / swiping / zooming.
It's what is driving me close to grabbing a new phone at some point this year.
OnePlus 6T here and finally thinking it's time to step up. My previous phone was the OnePlus 2T so seems right to go up to the 10T now and do every 4 versions.
I've not had anything quite that drastic, but there are definitely a few small niggles I think I'll notice once they're not there. Main reason I think I'll upgrade is the usb port is becoming quite sensitive, it's 50/50 if it likes a particular cable now
No. The OnePlus 6 was my first phone where I really didn't feel like bothering with the hassle of custom ROMs. Back in the HTC Desire and HTC OneX days, while fun, it was always such a gamble what feature might not be working on each ROM. I just wanted to not have to worry about working camera, bluetooth or GPS any longer.
I'm not sure, but does the OnePlus 6 even have good LineageOS support nowadays?
edit: Apparently yes it seems. Wow, maybe I'll give that a try one of these days and see what it's like.
The common theme in all the comments below yours, including mine, is those with much beyond a minimal number of Google Apps report "All's good on my device". That's why I started using OSM and the web version of Google Maps on my previous handset: Google apps and services framework get heavier every year by a decent amount. Without them, my current Pixel 2 is fast, responsive, and the battery lasts 2 days (after replacing it six months ago).
More actionable though: Settings > Developer Options > Running Services on your device likely has lots of things running, all with their own interrupts. Worse, unless you keep a close eye on what else is allowed to run all the time, and *especially accessibility services*, the exact type of power-user apps people here are likely to install are the most likely to kill performance due to system hooks - though I will always blame Google Services first.
> Feel free to skip this aside, unless you’re stingy like me. [...] If I’d buy a new phone today, I’d consider these options:
It goes on to list only Apple devices. That's a bit dubious when being self-proclaimed stingy.
One might recommend an off-brand device for a fifth of the price that will last half as long, or a competing brand for half the price that lasts just as long. Perhaps longer if you're interested in doing the upgrades yourself, something which isn't possible on a device that you don't actually get access to from the manufacturer.
Sadly vendor lock it's a hard pill to swallow by design, making the switch harder. Most people already have a lot of apps purchased, exclusive messaging apps, or workflows that are too embedded into a platform.
Also they don’t list the 2022 iPhone SE with the lowest storage space (64GB) in that table. they’re “stingy”, but not stingy enough to consider the entry level model?
With how much storage everything takes up nowadays, I wouldn't buy a phone with 64GB either. My current phone is 64GB, and it feels like I'm always teetering the line of being full.
It's not just phones. Yesterday I tried to dust off a MacBook Air from 2012 so that the kids could play some games. It was used regularly up until 3 years ago, but now pretty much all software is broken, and it won't let me upgrade anything. Hopefully there's a Linux distro that will work on it.
Manjaro runs great on my MBP 2012. Or you can turn your MacBook Air into a "hackintosh" and install the latest macos on it using OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. Just be aware that recent version of macos relies heavily on hardware acceleration (video playback, cryptography, etc) and will fallback to CPU on older unsupported hardware, which is slow and deplete your battery fast.
I'm currently running KDE Neon on a MBP 2012, and I've installed linux on a few apple devices from that era. The nvidia drivers can be a struggle, and wifi drivers have to be configured manually.
I've mentioned this on here before, but my otherwise perfectly functional Pixel 3A has been out of security-patch support for nearly a year.
It's disgusting honestly, my only options are to try to find some open source project keeping patches up to date, have my most important information on an unpatched device, or throw it in the trash.
Honestly my best bet is to never buy an android again, which is what I will likely be doing.
(I know the original article I'm commenting on _is about iPhones_, but their phone is from 2016, and mine is from 2019, which from the perspective of losing support in 2022 is basically twice as good)
Huh. I've been using a Pixel 2 for a long time (got it early after release), and for some reason it's never occurred to me to worry. My battery life is still awesome, so I figured I'd just use this thing until it dies.
If you do switch to OSS, let me know how it goes -- I've considered switching to Replicant or PureOS for freedom/privacy reasons, but haven't had a good enough reason to put in the effort yet.
Edit: looking at the release date, it looks like I've had my phone for ~5.5 years, and luckily I've had zero of the problems of the person who wrote the original article. All my apps still work as expected, and I've never noticed issues with new apps I download. I'm not saying their problems aren't real, just that they're not usiversal.
I'd like to see "right to downgrade" put in to law, if I buy a product I should have the option to have it run older firmware, or play an older version of a game I bought.
So should we force product owners to support multiple older versions of clients, even though the backend is progressed? Who will pay for this extra cost, the users who don't upgrade their devices? I don't think so.
Do every rule has to be written, or does writing them into law makes it logical every time? App owners can add "we only support client versions which is max 6 months older than current stable version" to their EULA and it is also fine (while being worse than current situation) then?
We should force product owners to stop designing their products as thin clients of server-side APIs. Then there won't be any support costs for older devices.
How does that work for a lot of the apps described in the article? Railroad tickets get purchased without web access how? Would all map data for the map applications mentioned in the article be downloaded with the app?
Force the release of all code that product was sold with in its factory state to users along with code for all updates applied to that factory state during its company supported lifetime. Firmware blobs the lot.
Corporate profits aren't an acceptable excuse for negligent business practices that push a forced culture of wasteful consumption. Apple needs to pull their head in along with many others in the tech world.
Just like anything physical, you could simply have a “go ahead and do it, but you get no help from us” policy. When the ecosystem is open enough there is a community of people who learn what they need to. For reference see: car racing.
I was recently surprised to learn the Google app repository browser doesn't let you do that. If you use apps that are also on f-droid, it might be better to install from there to avoid being locked into a new version that you don't like. Or make backups so you have the old apk and can restore the data directory as well (iirc it doesn't let you keep that upon downgrading).
For system images, it's a bit harder. I don't really have a good solution that would downgrade the OS without also restoring an old app state.
Yes, it should be possible to revert a device to the state you bought it in. Sure, software support was also included in the price, but there's a reason it's called support and not enforcement.
That's another benefit, if I buy a smart TV with the express intent of sideloading software on to it and then they remove the ability to do that later on than the product I've purchased has fundamentally changed. Most EULA's allow them to make arbitrary modifications like that.
I consider being able to exploit security issues in older firmware revisions an absolute win for software freedom.
I don't think anyone is stopping you from using an older version of a game or older firmware, given you can obtain them (legally) and you're ok with the limitations this might impose. For example, if you're not on the latest version of a multiplayer game, you might not be allowed to play. On older firmwares you might not get full access to the application store. Etc. The point is, you don't need a law, but it might not be easy to get an older version running.
Hell, tons of software-driven things don't allow you to downgrade, it's not just phones. And often for good reason, a software upgrade on a modern "thing" often contains firmware or patches for various chipsets in the device, not just some OS or app-level features and fixes. Orchestrating a downgrade, and ensuring it doesn't accidentally brick something, would be a major testing headache across the matrix of all potential FROM and TO versions of software that could be involved. All so that some super edge case user can be accommodated.
Just get the battery replaced. You wrote this entire article without trying the cheap repair service they offer that normally restores it to 100% speed.
Try it then come back to us. 99% of the time its only slow because of battery throttling.
> Now you may think that it’s slow as mud in a pond. But, contrary to my experience with previous models, the iPhone SE actually got faster with iOS updates!
...
> Starting some apps takes really long, like 10–20 seconds.
...
> Some apps get slow and unresponsive Resetting my phone helped, but then within a week or two, the same apps are slow again.
I don't think it's necessarily contradictory. Apps could get slower with their own updates (more bloat, less efficiency due to testing on newer devices) while the OS itself gets more efficient.
How do you even tell that some apps got faster. Apple probably just put in faster animations and the user thinks the app is fast because things move quicker while they wait for the app do to something.
The analysis of phone lifetimes based on software support is dubious. Apple generally supports groups of devices together that are similar hardware. Given iPhones 12-14 are virtually identical I’d expect these will all lose support around the same time.
Generally, this article is apple hate on steroids!! Apple is still releasing security updates for a 7-year-old device; name a mainstream android phone that’s doing that.
The author should get a refurbished 12 mini. $350 right now and will probably get 5+ years of updates.
I was trying to find an answer to your question and found a great website I thought I should share, documenting when Samsung EOL their devices. Oldest mobile device (not including smart watches) to have security updates is the Galaxy C7 from 2017. Genuine device support only extends as far back as 2019 to the Samsung S10 though. I found Apple's list also, which I'll share below.
5+ years is only good in the context of the poor Android support model. We’re throwing away hardware which is still perfectly good because a company cannot profitably support the older models. It’s a major problem, and a huge waste of resources.
I don’t think you read the article fully. The gripe is more about what mobile app developers do with respect to long-term support for older hardware/OS versions and much less about what Apple does.
Apple and Google now both require that you keep your app up to date with the new SDKs, even if your app works perfectly fine on the old version. As you upgrade to fix changes for that, it gets harder and hard to maintain support for older OSes. I'm not at all surprised that most app developers don't spend the time to ensure that their app continues to work on older devices, especially those that have a tiny marketshare now.
You can blame it on the developer for not supporting that, but it's in response to things that Apple and Google are doing, and I'd argue that they're really the ones at fault.
Those 12-14 minis are amazing phones. My girlfriend has one and the form factor is perfect for her and it was affordable. Feels high quality in your hand, reminded me of a modern iPhone 4.
I used to buy these phones. There is a value in not having to deal with some garbage build of Android in day to day usage. Just because you are fine with this compromise does not mean the majority of the Apple user base will be.
And the SE is half the phone the most expensive iPhone is. About the same phone I have. So there's then no reason at all to buy it over a $29 phone. At least not from my point of view
If your point is that they would have experienced better software longevity with an Android device I have a bridge to sell you. The slow software issues experienced by older phones is universal across the industry. And buying cheap disposable Android phones means you’re trading off quality in hardware. My mom’s android phone went from really slow to completely unusable within 3yrs after an OS update.
This might be a good opportunity to mention oldversion.com. It helped me out of a jam a couple of times. And I haven't verified it, but it seems to me like oldversion was around way before everything was being uploaded to archive.org. If you're into vintage software or older versions of current programs, check it out.
Yeah I have an iPad Mini 2(from 2014!) Which works absolutely fine - it even still receives security updates from apple. I thought it would be a great tablet for my kid to watch cartoons on, but nope, even though you can download the latest version of Netflix and Disney+ both apps just crash after 5-10 minutes of playback. And I'm guessing there's no one at either company interested in fixing this. I've restored the tablet to factory settings and the same thing still happens. So I ended up buying the cheapest Amazon Fire tablet for like £50 which is probably the slowest computing device I've ever owned but it runs all streaming services without any trouble. I'd much rather use the iPad.
For a while the problem with older iDevices was the rapid ram increases across generations. Which leads to random crashes or crashes after some time on older devices because the devs tested on the latest and greatest.
I think the ram growth has stagnated now? I kinda stopped caring.
I have old tablets that are barely able to show a clock app, which is essentially the last thing they can be used for. Every single thing you try to do with it is slow as molasses.
I used to think this way but over the years I came to realize that iPhone progress comes at a price and the benefits greatly outweigh the cost. Notably:
- iPhones improve over time (Face ID was somewhat slow on 10 but is really fast on 12)
- Replacing allows Apple to fund next generations
If no one upgraded, progress would not be as fast.
My next wish is for Siri to be faster (no latency please) and smarter. With LLMs become mainstream, I can finally see a day this may happen. I'm more that happy to upgrade my phone every 2 or 3 generations to fund improvements of Apple silicon.
it's because of stuff like this, and the absurd security/surveillance model, that I simply refuse to install any apps
every app is an added dependency and a possible headache if you incorporate it in your workflow
perhaps paradoxically, if only superficially, the only apps that make sense to install are games and simple tools with immediate replacement in your computer or web - and even that comes with caveats regarding security and privacy preservation
Welcome to the sum of all the local incentives. There are precious few who will serve a market for little or no profit, leaving most actors chasing the next sale/upgrade/market and rounding off the long tail of consumers who have little or no revenue potential. Face it, you are essentially worthless to the entire chain, except advertisers, so you'll be getting...uh bupkiss.
> 2. Some apps get reset when I’m trying to multitask
This is an issue I've been having too (iphone XR), since this didn't use to be the case and the apps I use aren't significantly different from the ones I used a few years ago, it makes me think this is some kind of forced obsolescence or an OS bug. It also highlights that many apps don't implement a suspend very well.
I have an iPhone 6s. I’m in the same boat. Yesterday the capital one app warned me to update as my iOS version is no longer supported. Well, I can’t.
I really don’t want to get a new phone. I’m considering just going with a feature phone to cut down on screen time…but I’ll need something that supports Authenticator or MFA one time code gen.
I’m in the denial phase of the 6 stages of grief with this thing.
To keep an app on the app store, the dev has to pay the yearly fee, and keep up to date with Apple’s requirements (which they legally agree to do through agreeing to the updated TOS).
To keep up to date with Apple’s requirements they must (sometimes) make a minor edit to their code and upload the new version.
To upload the new version they must use the latest version of XCode.
To use the latest version of XCode they must also be running the latest version of macOS (and sometimes must update their dev device(s) to the latest version of iOS).
If they use the latest version of XCode their code must compile on it.
To compile their code they must (most times) use Apple’s new internal APIs and remove references to old Apple APIs.
Apple treats devs like consumers. The ever-advancing wall of “progress” pushes devs forward just like it pushes users forward. No one has the choice to stay behind peacefully.
This is all true, and the interesting thing to me is that I don't think it's intentional. That is, it seems to be the natural result of steady innovation without special effort being made to keep things stable for those who want to avoid innovation.
Should they make that extra effort? Sure, arguably they should. Apple's philosophy has always been to look forward, not back, though, and things like supporting 32-bit code on 64-bit architectures require a lot of effort for little perceived gain.
Then again, that effort means people can jump off of the circular treadmill, so maybe it's worth it.
You might be right about it not being intentional (putting aside the argument that lack of choice is itself a choice), but I would argue that putting in the effort is their responsibility as a part of the larger goal of sustainability.
In this case Apple says they want their products to be completely sustainable, and yet they are choosing profit over sustainability by putting fences on either side of the circular treadmill.
I largely agree. I guess I would just say that every decision comes at a cost, and maintaining compatibility usually comes with a small performance cost, exactly the sort of cost Apple least wants to pay on their new devices.
I wonder if the SE just was released with too little memory.
I bought a iPhone SE 2020 and swapped it out a little over a year later for an iPhone 14Pro because of the app reset issue (granted I bought the phone when it already had been on the market for a while). Before that I had my iPhone 6S for over 5 years and had expected to keep the SE for much longer as well. I now also wish memory numbers were more of a focus when Apple releases a new phone. We keep hearing about storage, cameras neutral processors and yet lack of memory makes the device a pain to use shortly after release. I only now looked up memory for these devices on Wikipedia and the 2020 SE has only 2Gb of memory, just like the iPhone 6SE had! I'm honestly shocked that the SE still had the same memory as a phone 5 years earlier and also by how low the absolute numbers are.
The flash chips in the SSD in my actual computer don't seem to have done this, and they're older and have had higher write traffic. If this is a thing, does this just indicate the phone manufacturers are saving a few pence on each unit at our expense?
>If this is a thing, does this just indicate the phone manufacturers are saving a few pence on each unit at our expense?
Would this surprise you? If, before I bought a phone, I would have some insight into how long the storage chips will last that would definitely factor into my purchasing decision. This is not something reviews cover, or are even able to cover.
Yeah, this is definitely something I would factor into my purchasing decisions. My phone is showing trouble after just 3.5 years of use, which is unacceptable in my view. It isn't even as if I have used it heavily.
Certainly true in Europe, but remember that the Euro has declined in value significantly relative to the USD in the past few years. If you convert the € prices back into USD at the time of introduction, I bet they haven’t increased any faster than inflation.
I feel your pain. I also had to give up my 2017 iPhone SE, too bad. The good thing is that I managed to change the battery myself at least 3 or 4 times, effectively extending its lease. I have since then picked up an iPhone 12 mini, which is only slightly larger and I love it.
I held onto my 2016 SE until last month, through 3 battery changes as well.
It's no longer receiving updates to the latest iOS, and only gets limited security update backports. Sadly, it won't be long before certain crappy-but-necessary-apps like banking and 2FA auth insist on you installing an update that doesn't exist on iOS 15.
Apps increasingly don't bother testing for the 4" screen dimensions, and if you report that a button or something renders off screen, app devs dismiss your device as "legacy".
I finally got fed up jumping through hoops to make Safari bearable.
I ultimately ended up upgrading to an Xperia XZ1 Compact running Lineage 20. It's the last small android phone with a headphone jack andna flagship processor. Runs beautifully and it's actually a bit smaller than the iPhone 12/13 Minis.
A related problem: I started to notice an increasing number of websites or apps where there is some interactive element at the bottom that keeps getting hidden by navigation unless I actively keep dragging up. The Search bar here on HN is an example of this. It didn't happen till a year or so ago. Happens on my 14Pro and when on my wife's 14 Plus. Does anyone know what's up with that?
Personally I sort that under "miscellaneous Safari awfulness" since the Safari browser causes all sorts of seemingly random problems on all kinds of sites. Even more randomness when you add in Safari Extensions, which also randomly break on random sites at random (non-reproducible) times, in my experience.
Alternative browsers on iOS can't come soon enough.
>You decided that if less than 1% of your users use a certain old device, it’s no longer relevant. Which is odd, because to many businesses, 1% of users can make the difference between profit or loss.
If that 1% of customers are as stingy as you are, they are probably right on ignoring you
It certainly hasn't for mundane tasks like browsing the web or playing simple games. I recently bought a 10 year old 21,5 inch iMac for my kids for around the price that a same sized, also full hd, brand new screen would cost. Only that screen doesn't come with built-in i5 CPU, SSD, Gigabit and AC networking. It replaces a 2011 Macbook Pro only because I want something stationary for them and not something they get tempted to lug around and drop on the floor. Apple doesn't allow the latest OS's to be installed (though there are ways around that[0]) but I haven't felt the need for it.
So unless you need raw performance or extreme power savings because you run your device 24/7 there should be no need to get the latest and "greatest".
The majority of phone users use zero features - with the possible exception of the camera sensor - that where not also available at very high quality in 2013.
For phones, I currently see zero reason for further hardware upgrades.
Maybe one day there will be AI-optimized "emulation" apps that work on older hardware, but emulate newer hardware, making intelligent code path optimizations / branch prediction, etc with the help of AI-generated bytecode that lets you not have to upgrade your hardware, you just upgrade the emulator you use to run apps supposedly only supported on newer hardware.
Also, whenever I hear "you're making me"--I instantly think of those Hollywood action/thriller movies, where in the climax, the villain often says, "You're making me do this" or something to that effect--and instantly distrust the speaker!
Well, you can already do things like this, eg emulating x86 on some microcontroller. But the problem tends to be that the emulation runs magnitudes slower than the new hardware, so it is impractical for almost every use case beside Doom ports to exotic hardware.
When it comes to phones, I tend to stick to lower-mid range ones that I know allow custom ROMs and have a certain community behind it and somewhat well supported. For instance I am running Android 12 on a 2016 ZUK Z2 shipped with 7, and if we ignore battery life and decreased performance it's still like having a new phone now. Same thing for my Redmi note 7 with Android 13. I cannot say the same for my iPad Air 2 from 2015, stuck on iOS 12 since I don't even know when, and can barely use it for anything apart from youtube and (supported) websites.
at least apple ships security updates for older devices. last i looked, they go back at least 7 years.
before the pixel 6, qualcomm pixels capped out at 3 years.
it should be a legal requirement to unlock bootloaders and possibly even open source the software when a company chooses to stop providing security updates for embedded computers. either that or there should be a fine for every device for every year it is unsupported in the first ten years after manufacture.
"For no apparent reason, Safari acts like there’s no internet connection. Rebooting solves that until a week later."
My iPhone 13 Pro does this all the time when I'm not on Wifi. Time to visit the Apple store and make them give me a free phone. Is it actually a phone problem? Doubtful. But they should pay. Oh yes, they will pay (by providing a replacement under their silly-expensive replacement plan).
Says it's a perfectly functioning phone and then lists how it's not because it's old and got worn out. apps requiring later versions is an issue but the % of people on old iOS versions is really quite small. It makes no sense to waste development time on implementing something for <1% of customers on iOS 14, when you could use a newer API in one line of code.
It’s not just apps requiring later versions, it’s apps using more and more memory due to the use of ever-more bloated frameworks and the like.
The vast majority of these apps would’ve run fine on a computer from the 1980’s running at a handful of MHz in mere kilobytes of RAM, if they were optimized. But they use the trendiest frameworks and require gigabytes of RAM and gigahertz of clock cycles to run their todo-list (or whatever it is they do).
Apps don't support older OS versions -> Nobody uses old OS -> No point supporting old OS as nobody uses those -> Apps don't support older OS versions -> ...
With AI enabled programming coming in etc, I expect many apps will start getting faster as code gets refactored to not use bloated thirdparty frameworks etc. Older devices, and electronic waste should reduce with the possible optimizations of apps. I maintain my devices well and have pristine devices I still use from 2010, but the apps make it run like molasses.
I was quite satisfied with my iPhone 7 (2016) and didn't experience any problems with it, unlike the article author. However, iOS 16 doesn't support iPhone 7, so I had to buy a new iPhone SE (2022), which was the cheapest model available. The 2 phones are mostly identical, and indeed it's difficult to distinguish them if set side by side.
I found when I got an iPad (I never had a laptop at home), that I stopped using my phone much but when I do use it, I still need all the main features of a smartphone, like a decent camera, apps to manage everything (maps, public transport tickets, apps to order food/drinks etc), sadly everything is in a very app world these days.
I wish there would be more effort put into making more basic smartphones, less running full blown OS and just have a few basic functions, like a decent camera, internet access, messaging and maps, but because they are mini computers they are bloated as hell.
I tried doing that a couple years ago. The problem with dumb phones (or at least the problem when I researched this several years ago) is that it’s a niche market with high enough demand that all of the products are low-effort, low quality and exorbitantly priced for what you get.
I won't argue low effort, but I just went to my carrier's site (Verizon), and I can get a "basic" flip phone for $80 unsubsidized. The high end of the range, a ruggedized Kyocera, was $240. I don't think this is unreasonable for a range of devices that have much lower market desire than they did 15 years ago. At $80, I'd call that a disposable travel phone.
I would not mind more permanent (subsets of) standards on all platforms. The only stable environments that seem to exist are accidental, being emulators for dead platforms like Dosbox or UAE. Software for a modern, non-dead, platform is almost guaranteed to run at best for a few years before it, as they say, rots.
Apple is making you use a new phone by dropping support for it in their OS updates.
The fact that this happens at all anywhere at any time at any place for any reason, and can't just install an update yourself should be unacceptable and legislated against
Apple supports the phones for 7 years, the current proposals floating around the EU are to mandate 4 years. They also don’t break anything, the apple services all continue to work forever, it’s 3rd party devs who drop support for older api versions. Nothing makes them do this.
I'm not talking about a mandate for operating system support, I'm talking about a mandate to allow the user to install operating systems if they want to.
It's not third party devs fault that the perfectly good hardware and an old iPhone is denied the ability to operate to a version of the operating system with the latest API support.
You don't see this on Windows. You see it on Android, and it shouldn't happen there either.
This wasn't a thing until mobile phones became a thing, and companies to seized the opportunity to be able to force all their hardware to be obsolete.
I seriously doubt this will make any difference to the average consumer. Every iPhone that has been dropped from api updates is so old that people have worked out how to completely bypass the security on them. You can install full Linux on most of these old iPhones. But absolutely no one has time to maintain an alternate OS for 7+ year old phones.
And even if they did, no commercial apps would be ported to it. I'm all for mandating ability to flash custom firmware and OSs, but I'm under no delusion that some free labor will spring up and an alternate mobile ecosystem will flourish based on users with 7+ year old iphones.
Android also has this issue but there are so many android phones that no one is really paying attention. Try using a 7+ year old Android and you'll notice many apps don't show up in the Play store. Sometimes it's because they only target the newer Android API versions, sometimes it's because your SoC doesn't have some instruction available, etc.
Windows is probably the worst offender of the lot. My brand new gaming desktop is currently flagged as not supported by Windows 11. Apple does 7 years support while Microsoft does as little as 0.
Lol. I’ve had Samsung and Pixel phones that never received updates to newer Android versions, not even to the next version that came out while the phone was still being sold.
Rumor mill says that the next iPhone won't have a physical "silent" switch. This will be a dealbreaker for me and I suspect many other people. Not sure what to do when my current phone becomes unusable.
I was forced to give up my beloved OnePlus 6 when AT&T started only accepting whitelisted handsets. Being able to use any GSM phone was the whole reason I moved my family from Verizon two years earlier.
Apple is to blame, honestly. Android at least releases support libraries to allow older devices to receive more patches as well as some newer platform features. This is unheard of on Apple's platforms. If Apple changes any code, then they simply push out a new version - if a framework has bugs since iOS 12 and they've fixed it, the fix will only rollout for iOS 16+ users and leave everyone else behind. Security updates are the one exception, but Apple is capable of much more. The company continues to step away from being a steward of good technology.
This is what you get when you get trapped in the apple ecosystem. I'd consider getting a pixel 6a - I purchased mine for 150$ with a trade in of a pixel 2 and it will get 5 years of software support.
If you were using Android I would suggest just go for some mainstream model from Samsung (S series), Xiaomi (Mi X) or Pixel (basically any model) with pretty much guaranteed long term unofficial ROM updates even after official support cease if your problem were depreciated new app versions, but since you are voluntarily locked yourself to closed iOS, I have no suggestion other than stop updating apps and use the apps which were fine before. Btw. multitasking doesn't really work even on brand new iPhones.
For the record I am running gapps free Lineage with Android 8.1 on my phone from 2018 without any issues, I can hardly find app which would not run on 5 years old Android 8.1, if something (rarely) doesn't work it's because of relying on gapps.
>Because consider how much time you spend trying to not harm the environment in your free time: shopping for sustainable products, bringing your reusable cup, recycling.
That's saying that people should share your views on politics, which is not rational.
For some reason auto scroll (middle mouse scroll) just breaks on this site which is rather annoying, it just seems to always want to scroll horizontally. Does anyone have an idea why this happens?
Edit: After having a look it seems to be because of the use of `overflow: auto` which seems to default to `overflow: scroll` on Firefox.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34686094