iPhone 6S getting iOS 14 is like the Galaxy S6 getting Android 11

https://www.androidauthority.com/ios-14-iphone-6s-android-1131739/

by finphil • 6 years ago

325 281 6 years ago

samename• 6 years ago

It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early. Now, they're still supporting the iPhone 6S, a phone from 5 years ago. Did Apple change their policy due to criticism, or have they honed their tech to improve support for older devices?

Infinitesimus• 6 years ago

Apple beats Android in the smartphone space but Windows has a much stronger desktop support record

mschuster912• 6 years ago

Apple wants to meet environmental aims and paint themselves green - something I fully support for that matter - and they have at least for consumers the expectation of quality and craftsmanship, not "crap that's obsolete in two years".

Windows has a different reason why they're so focused on desktop BC: lock-in. Had Windows not taken care of BC over decades and a provable track record of that from the beginning of the DOS era, enterprises with tens of thousands of licenses would have fled the ship (and funded WINE with ludicrous amounts of money, probably). On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable.

Angostura• 6 years ago

I think that's fair. Big Sur support is limited to 2014 iMacs and later, which is a shame because my late 2012 iMac is absolutely fine for home and business use still.

harpratap5• 6 years ago

It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early

When exactly did that happen? The first iPhone received 3 major updates, more than most Android phones even today.

gridlockd• 6 years ago

It's not that Apple is particularly good at supporting older devices, it's that Android vendors are catastrophically bad across the board.

Apple tends to drop support when some hardware feature or limitation doesn't play well with the new OS. For instance, the iPhone 6 only has 1GB of RAM.

foepys• 6 years ago

My Nokia 6 from 2017 is still receiving security updates. The update cycle switched from 1 month to every 3 months after the device reached the 3 year update guarantee but it's still acknowledgedby the manufacturer.

Nokia phones are in my opinion way too underrepresented on the market for the support they give.

coder1001• 6 years ago

Apple makes money from services, more devices supporting the latest features == more potential money.

s3r3nity• 6 years ago

I think it's the latter, but it is also an under-reported aspect of Tim Cook's regime: a focus on sustainability. They have a whole page on their site about their efforts [1], including how they had to invent new materials and processes to achieve some environmentalist goals.

[1]https://www.apple.com/environment/

selykg3• 6 years ago

This is just a theory, but I think a fair bit changed with this as their custom A series chips improved. It was easier to support devices further back because they started to have such a commanding lead in performance, which gives some extra room to keep improving the OS without it slowing down like it used to do.

OldHand20183• 6 years ago

It's not likely to be a pure "performance" thing. The 6S, according to wikipedia [1], is the oldest phone containing an A9 chip, which has an image processing unit, a coprocessor that can handle Siri voice commands, and an NVMe storage controller. It is also the minimum requirement for ARKit.

I doubt very much that Apple is being arbitrary in their support cutoff for phones. If it's capable of the features they build into the OS, it gets support. If I had to make a guess, the next cutoff point (iOS 15?) is going to be a chip having the Bionic Neural Engine, which would make the iPhone 8 the oldest supported phone.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A9

skywhopper2• 6 years ago

I don't think you have your history right on this one. At least not if it's about support for older iPhones. Apple has always exceeded typical industry practice in how long it supported old mobile hardware.

fiddlerwoaroof• 6 years ago

Yeah, my experience across their device lines is that, for build quality reasons alone, their products outlive any competitors: I have a ‘08 MacBook Pro that still basically works, except it can’t connect to my WiFi network and 2GB of memory is basically useless today.

basch• 6 years ago

Or hardware improvements have become more incremental and less cataclysmic.

From a software and developer side, it makes sense to drop 32 bit support early. It's less radically different architectures to target. It means they can guarantee the performance of the os and apps. But as processors got good enough to handle most things, the need to drop the slow ones, and the slow ones holding back the software evolution is minimized.

ComputerGuru2• 6 years ago

It’s crazy to think supporting a five year old device is now considered ground-breaking. Windows did (does?) officially support devices fifteen years old. Desktop developers are only now starting to release apps that don’t support Windows XP, released twenty years ago.

From a consumer perspective, it’s crazy how often we’re expected to replace mobile devices (even though the story now isn’t as crazy as it was five years ago) and how much we shell out for them (even putting aside the monthly bills associated with them). Not to mention a PC was shared by the family and now every kid needs their own phone. Great for the economy but oh so wasteful.

nly• 6 years ago

Visual Studio 2019 still comes with the option to install build tools and SDKs to target Windows XP.

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

I know you can still target iOS 9 with Xcode 12.

Wowfunhappy8• 6 years ago

Also, the tasks we're accomplishing on our phones have not fundamentally changed over the past five years. (The five years before that, sure, but things have slowed down.) If my phone is performing the same actions as when I bought it, why should I have to buy a new one to get security updates? If nothing else, it's clearly bad for the planet.

And, for that matter—and this is where iPhones do miss the mark—why does my phone not perform those actions as well as it did when new? That we have even faster chips nowadays shouldn't make the old ones slower.

core-questions2• 6 years ago

why should I have to buy a new one to get security updates?

Who is writing those security updates? How do they get paid?

baddox• 6 years ago

Your old phone is slower because its battery can no longer hold as much charge.

Causality1• 6 years ago

Indeed. People like me care when a new phone has 20% more performance because that might mean the difference between being able to emulate a particular game console or not. I can't see why anyone else would care.

dzhiurgis2• 6 years ago

Did your phone 5 years ago was able to edit 4k60 videos in seconds?

As far as I know most current laptops fail to do that.

skywhopper2• 6 years ago

Windows 10 can install on a typical 2005 PC? I'd be surprised if that's the case.

Anyway, the point of the article isn't that five years is all that long, it's that Android's two-year policy is despairingly short.

mister_hn• 6 years ago

If it has enough free ram and a good graphic card, probably yes

ComputerGuru2• 6 years ago

I believe so. The 32-bit variant, at least doesn’t even use SSE2 acceleration, iirc.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica...

1 GHz CPU, 1GB ram, 800x600 display, 32GB drive. Those are not 2005 specs, those were easily around in 2000.

core-questions2• 6 years ago

Sure. I installed the 32-bit version on a "tablet" Lenovo that came with Windows XP, a dual core Centrino, and 2GB RAM originally. Works fine, it's not quite as fast as XP was but no issues. All the pen features work perfectly. If I got the upgrade card to switch it to an SATA SSD and added more memory it would probably be a fully usable machine, thanks mostly to being dual core.

discreditable• 6 years ago

I've installed Windows 10 on HP EliteBook 2730p from 2008, and Toshiba Protege M400 from 2006. For the most part if the machine ran Windows Vista acceptably it will run Windows 10. Disk access is pretty slow. Windows 10 really needs an SSD.

vmception• 6 years ago

No, but it could install on flagship hardware for a 2005 PC

which is what we are comparing here.

muststopmyths2• 6 years ago

Windows 10 can install on a typical 2005 PC? I'd be surprised if that's the case.

I had it on a 2006 Sony VIAO laptop until last year. It ran better than Windows 8 with 2GB of RAM. Slow without an SSD, but tolerable as downloader/media server.

Some of the OEM drivers (bluetooth, fingerprint scanner etc.) had stopped working in Windows 8 (it was an XP laptop that I upgrade to 7 onward) because Sony stopped supporting them.

The hilarious thing was that in Windows 10 those started working again with builtin drivers from Windows.

I could probably have kept the laptop around longer, but I went on an ecycling binge last year and got rid of a lot of tech crap that was just lying around.

wenc6• 6 years ago

Windows 10 can install on a typical 2005 PC? I'd be surprised if that's the case.

I have Windows 10 running dual boot on my Dell Inspiron 530s from 2005. It's a Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz. I don't run Windows 10 full time because it's a little sluggish, but it works ok.

(I did upgrade to an SSD + 8GB RAM + Nvidia GT 610 but everything else is 2005).

On the same note, I also have Kubuntu 18.04 on the same machine. Now this is my daily driver. Runs Chrome, plays Youtube etc. and everything else just fine. Things are extremely responsive. It's almost inconceivable to think I'm using a 15 year old computer in 2020 as my main machine but here we are.

ac292• 6 years ago

I dont know that "Android" has a two-year policy - certainly all of Google's recent devices were updated longer than that.

Pixel 1: Release Date October 2016, Last Update Dec 2019 (3 years, 2 months)

Pixel 2: Release Date October 2017, still current (2 years, 8 months and counting). Android 11 beta also available. If it is kept updated throughout the 11.0 cycle, that will be ~4 years or so.

Pixel 3, 3a, and 4 are newer but also still current.

Android 8.0 (released August 2017) was updated this month: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/build/+/refs/tags/...

Jtsummers13• 6 years ago

Mobile devices are typically underpowered compared to desktop systems. They've caught up to PCs in terms of power (as evidenced by the iPad Pro hardware being used as the basis for the new dev kit by Apple). But the early years, in particular, saw massive annual increases in performance, Moore's Law had stalled on PCs but was alive and well for mobile platforms at that time.

You have to track the actual hardware changes in that time and compare it more to the PC market.

PCs pre-2006 had almost universally 32-bit processors, fixed pipeline GPUs, and maybe 4GB of RAM, probably 2GB. Post 2006, more GPUs got hardware shaders, 4GB of RAM became the baseline, as did 64-bit CPUs (usually with 2 or more cores). Those have all aged reasonably well and can still run most modern software outside of the graphics intensive ones (and even those sometimes if you turn most of the settings down).

The iPhone 3GS (2009) was the first one to have hardware shaders. That right there knocks out the two prior generations from being able to keep up.

The iPhone 5S (2013) was the first 64-bit processor, creating another boundary line for long-term support.

The iPhone 6S (2015) was the first to have > 1GB of RAM (upped it to 2GB), which created another boundary line.

So it's not too surprising that the higher RAM, 64-bit processor, with hardware shader support is the oldest supported iPhone (from this year forward).

Post-2015, the iPhone has improved (obviously if you've switched from a 6S to the 11 like I did) in performance and capabilities, but it's also stabilized in many ways. I haven't dug into the post-2015 phones yet to see if there are any other natural boundaries that will show up as devices drop out over the next 2-3 years, but I'm sure they exist there somewhere. Eventually the OS and the applications will be dependent on specific hardware features that cannot be easily (or efficiently) recreated on old, lower clocked processors.

gruez2• 6 years ago

Moore's Law had stalled on PCs but was alive and well for mobile platforms at that time.

That's not a very convincing argument. Moore's law was alive and well two decades ago for PCs, but Windows XP (initially released 2001, supported til 2014) was able to run on hardware from 1995 (according to https://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini_en.htm).

wenc6• 6 years ago

With most technologies, there's a saturation point after which improvements are mostly incremental. For iPhones the saturation point was the 6S. For iPads it was the iPad Air 2.

The 6S is the lowest model that contact tracing apps will run on, and of course the oldest phone the latest iOS will support.

I switched from the 6S to 11 last Christmas, and most of the improvements I noticed were largely incremental -- apart from a handful of things like FaceID and the camera which were significantly better. Ok, the battery is a lot better too. But the 6S didn't feel obsolete at all -- it felt like a current generation phone -- because it was running current generation software.

My iPad Air 2 runs the latest iPadOS and still works great -- not sure when I'll make the jump to a newer iPad.

p.s. the only thing the iPad Air 2 lacks support for is Apple Pencil. But now that I'm into fountain pens and high quality notepads, I don't really miss it. Also if I need to create Martin Kleppmann-esque hand-drawn architecture diagrams -- which I do occasionally -- I just use any number of rubber-tipped styluses (many inexpensive options on Amazon) with the Sketches app. Gets the job done.

Kleppmann himself uses Fifty Three and Maglus styluses I believe. I'm way cheaper -- I just use the styluses that I get as swag from tech conferences.

chooseaname• 6 years ago

The 6S is the point when a phone got "fast enough". It was fast enough to be useful as a mobile phone without being frustrating to use. Everything since has been gravy, but the 6S is still surprisingly useful as a mobile device.

wolfgke2• 6 years ago

Mobile devices are typically underpowered compared to desktop systems.

Early PCs/home computers were also underpowered compared to workstations. The difference is: buyers expected them to be supported for a much longer time and expected developers to (if somehow possible) to write sufficiently fast code that also runs decently on "outdated" computers.

katmannthree• 6 years ago

A _substantial_ portion of the desktop PC market was running on 512MB of RAM in 2006[0]. Even today a significant portion of budget computers people buy have 4GB which is just barely on the edge of enough to run Windows 10 and a couple modern websites.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/YiMobdC.png

dwaite• 6 years ago

I haven't dug into the post-2015 phones yet to see if there are any other natural boundaries that will show up ...

I suspect TouchID will be the next one we hit, but that is going to be at least four years off because iPhone SE #2.

The neural engine may be a feature cut-off after that, where there are just too many features and services being run on device which can't be done on older hardware.

Other than that, I suspect Apple will still institute a vintage/obsolete lifecycle for phones - just choosing to drop support for phones where the hardware hasn't been sold in a certain amount of time (say five years), official replacement parts like batteries are no longer being made, etc.

lowmemcpu• 6 years ago

It's not that surprising to me -- Apple was selling this 5y old device about ~16 months ago, so they should still be supporting it

pseudosavant• 6 years ago

+1 on Windows doing this for forever. I regularly use devices that are 10+ years old: printer (10), scanner (11), webcam (10), professional audio interface (12). I can stil install old music software to work with old songs I've recorded/produced.

Every Windows machine but 1 in my house is >5 years old. The 1 that is newer was just built this year to replace a machine with an >11 year old motherboard (CPU/RAM had been upgraded since). It does help that I went 100% SSD and touch (for laptops) when Windows 8 came out.

I don't think there will ever be another OS that has the same level of backwards compatibility that Windows does. It is just too hard. Support longer than iOS on an ecosystem more diverse than Android. Windows users expect it though.

Joeri• 6 years ago

And every new release of windows things break for some group of users, people complain about how quality control at microsoft has really gone downhill lately, and microsoft rolls out a bunch of fixes over time for all those users.

Windows users are an ungrateful bunch.

nvarsj• 6 years ago

The last android device I bought was a Samsung tablet. It was sort of near the end of its sale life, and I got a good deal. However it received only one update after that - 6 months later. It was basically supported for only 6 months. The final straw was the last update rendered the tablet almost unusable - it added several seconds of latency to almost every operation. I'll never buy a Samsung device again.

Note that the Google branded hardware does seem to be supported for much longer. My old Nexus 7 got updates for many years - but the hardware itself was terrible and I couldn't even charge it after the third replacement's micro usb port failed - another typical Android experience, I'm afraid.

willtim• 6 years ago

Google are not much better. They supported my Pixel C for 2 years after I bought it (2017-19); and it was more expensive than a Samsung. I basically got scammed. Never again. I've given up on disposable tablets.

wiremine• 6 years ago

It’s crazy to think supporting a five year old device is now considered ground-breaking.

I wonder if this is slowing down, or speeding up? At some point it feels like we'll find a equilibrium for phones, similar to what we have for general purpose computers...

SllX• 6 years ago

You could buy a 6s and 6s Plus new at the Apple Store just two years ago.

scarface745• 6 years ago

I have an 11 year old computer that I used as my Plex server until earlier this year. It is a Dell E6500 - introduced in October 2008.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Latitude-E6500.12268.0.ht...

It was my work computer. It had 8GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive, a beautiful 1920x1200 display (as opposed to the 1920x1080 display that became the norm shortly thereafter), gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n (?) wireless. It has a Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz processor

It’s running Windows 10. Besides the processor and spinning hard drive, those are still decent specs for modern computers.

An iPhone from that era had a single core 400Mhz processor and 128MB of RAM with a 480x320 display. A modern iPhone has a 2436x1125 display, 4GB of RAM, 6 core processor - 2 at 2.66Ghz, 4 at 1.82Ghz.

That’s not to mention that the 2008 iPhone doesn’t support 4G.

Now let’s go back further. A PC from 1996 wouldn’t support an operating system released in 2008.

kohtatsu• 6 years ago

The iPhone 5s (the first 64-bit phone, first iPhone with a secure enclave) is still receiving security updates. It received iOS 12.4.7 on May 20th.

It was released September 2013 (6.5yr), discontinued September 2014 for the 64GB version (5.5yr), March 2016 for the 16, 32GB versions (4yr).

TMWNN2• 6 years ago

I bought my iPhone 5S used in December 2013, and sold it in mid-2017, in part because I expected that iOS 11 that year would drop support. Nope; both it and iOS 12 supported the 5S, meaning that it could run the newest iOS until September 2019. As mentioned elsewhere, iOS 12 still gets security updates today.

(Based on the difference between the purchase and sale prices I ended up paying about $10 a month to use the 5S for 3.5 years. I sold it after replacing it with an SE that I made money on at purchase because of an insane promotion at Best Buy.)

fzzzy• 6 years ago

You can still install DOS 6 on a modern pc.

dzhiurgis2• 6 years ago

No one uses 20 year old desktop hardware, unless it's somehow miraculously managed to survive (in a cupboard, ran once a month to do accounting) or it's absolute must control system for a nuclear ship (where actual hardware is replaced every 2 years, but with same old version).

Everyone else who runs XP installs it on new hardware.

the_rara_avis• 6 years ago

I'm unsure whether I'll ever forgive Google/Verizon for only offering 2 years of support for the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. After all the promises of "this is our flagship phone and we'll absolutely support it!" and then... only 2 years?

I've my issues with Apple like anyone else, but at least my phone is supported for a reasonable amount of time - 5 years or so?

DrBazza• 6 years ago

Companies don't backwardly support old phones so they can ship new ones. Planned obsolescence.

However, Apple rightly foster "brand loyalty" (awful phrase), by doing exactly the opposite. And with the knowledge that people sell phones second hand, thus increasing Apple's market share, and future customers.

It sounds like Samsung could learn a lesson or two.

A phone does have a shelf life though (4g, 5g...), but it's not as short as these companies would like you to believe.

rescbr2• 6 years ago

UMTS (3G) is still up and running in many locations, sometimes HSDPA (3.5G) is faster than congested/low signal LTE and it still is totally adequate even for video streaming.

Those are early 2000's technologies which telcos are upgrading from to increase subscriber density, but on the customer optics, they are mostly equivalent to 4G.

dehrmann• 6 years ago

It's still not even close to the oldest PC Windows 10 supports. I've found Windows 10 to be happy on ~any PC with more than one core, 4+ GB of RAM, and, most important, an SSD.

jokoon2• 6 years ago

I still think the SSD requirement doesn't make sense.

RAM is cheap, and XP/win7 worked well without HDD, so I don't understand why SSD matters.

Jtsummers13• 6 years ago

Hard drive speed is one of the slowest parts of your computer (after accessing remote systems over the network). It usually becomes the bottleneck after increasing RAM for most users, in my experience. The bus that transfers data from your hard drive to the CPU is much faster than what many spinning disks can actually manage. Address that, and many performance issues go away and you approach the essential limit of your system (bus speeds).

Of course, I say this primarily from the perspective of a developer, where hard drive access is frequent when building systems. But a lot of workloads are similarly HDD dependent, but maybe not to the same extreme.

JohnTHaller6• 6 years ago

If you bought an iPhone 6S Plus 128GB at launch, it cost you $949. $189.80 per supported year so far.

If you bought a Pixel 1 128GB at launch, it cost you $749. $249.67 per supported year over 3 years.

(The iPhone 6S Plus has same 1080p resolution as the standard size Pixel phone, which is why I use them as the base, but for folks wondering...)

If you bought a Pixel 1 XL 128GB at launch with the higher resolution screen, it cost you $849. $283 per supported year over 3 years.

huzaif2• 6 years ago

I like that the updates are offered. I wonder how usable these older devices are after updates.

I have an iPhone 8 which hasn't been usable since the last update. Most functions work but the performance has taken a nose dive. Some apps crash randomly.

I would not use that device as my daily phone.

snazz• 6 years ago

I'm guessing the iPhone 8 has some other issue (full storage?). Mine has had great performance and no app crashes since I bought it.

laken• 6 years ago

I've still been using an iPhone 8 Plus as a daily driver since launch. Right after updates, or after not being used for a bit, there's some indexing that slows down the phone a little, but that recovers pretty quickly with some additional use.

I'm even running the iOS 14 Developer beta on my 8 Plus right now and it still runs like a dream.

TheSpiceIsLife2• 6 years ago

My near-new iPhone 7 is snappy with latest iOS.

Check battery health?

throwaway20148• 6 years ago

I had a 6S Plus until earlier this year when the port went on the fritz and car play started acting erratically. That was pretty much my sole reason for upgrading.

Performance wasn’t great for a while but after the whole battery kerfuffle last year I took it into the store to get the battery replaced for $30 and it felt like a brand new phone after that.

vladvasiliu2• 6 years ago

Like the siblings say, you may have some other problem. I have an iphone 7 that I always keep up to the date. I didn't notice any performace problem, and my battery is supposedly degraded (the settings page says I should change it).

JohnTHaller6• 6 years ago

I have an iPhone 7 I bought for $110 recently on Swappa to mess around with iOS development. It runs the current iOS 13 version quite well.

I'd suggest checking your battery health and maybe doing a reset.

spideymans• 6 years ago

I have an iPhone 8 Plus. Still runs like its brand new. Perhaps a battery replacement or system restore would remedy your issues.

unix_fan2• 6 years ago

I have the original SE. Same chip as the 6s. It's smooth as hell, even on the beta.

hysan• 6 years ago

I’ve had the 6S since shortly after launch and it still runs smooth. The only issue is the battery which I can probably get replaced if I wanted to ditch my portable battery. Prior to this, I had an iPhone 4 for many years. While it wasn’t apparent at the start, switching to the Apple ecosystem for my mobile devices has ultimately saved me a lot more money compared to my friends and family that use Android phones.

silverlake• 6 years ago

I’m reading your comment on my iPhone 8. It runs as well as the day I got it.

neuronic2• 6 years ago

My iPhone 8 has been my daily driver for 3 years now and runs like fresh out of the box. Battery degradation is the only issue but that's just natural wear and tear.

harpratap5• 6 years ago

The update cycle on Android is not so straightforward. For instance RCS messaging, a newly added feature, is also available on Pixel 1 and older devices because such updates are directly sent via playstore to all the phones. So you don't really need full OS updates like in iOS.

Also, you are forgetting that Android phones drop in price almost immediately, so it's not fair to compare launch prices. For instance my Pixel 4 was essentially 74000JPY just 2 months after launch compared to 120000JPY iPhone 11 Pro year round.

JohnTHaller6• 6 years ago

You lose major OS updates after 2 years and security updates after 3. You really shouldn't be using a phone that's no longer getting security updates even if the apps themselves are getting updates.

Even at those prices, the iPhone is still a bit less expensive per supported year.

chinesempire5• 6 years ago

Yeah, but I can install one of the many unofficial Android builds over and old Android phone.

My mom still uses my old Galaxy S2, which probably costed 50 euros/year over almost 10 years and supports Android 10 thanks to LineageOS.

An iPhone's faith is to become a doorstop no matter what.

akmarinov2• 6 years ago

You can jailbreak it and mess with it however you want. Unofficially of course.

JohnTHaller6• 6 years ago

Most Android phones don't have a 'supported' version of LineageOS. It's very hit or miss, usually miss. Hence why my Nexus 6 and my girlfriend's Pixel have supported versions but none of the other Nexus or Pixel phones do. Or the HTC One m8 has a supported build but no other HTC phones do.

chewz2• 6 years ago

I have got my Android phone with twice the resolution of iPhone 6S for $100. And recently updated (after long delay) to Android 10. Another year to go or more.

So it is more like 25$ per year for Android.

Not a perfect phone but good enough.

mahesh_rm• 6 years ago

What phone is it. I seem to average to ~200usd per year on Android as well, in order to have a functional device.

x2f10• 6 years ago

It's not reasonable to compare on resolution alone. Not to mention, the iPhone 6S and Pixel were both flagship devices in the period OP is discussing.

neuronic2• 6 years ago

Better resolution yet takes 5 seconds to open and paint the app drawer... great.

arcticfox• 6 years ago

I think a key (deceptively absent) point of that comparison is that the premium price on Android is coming from replacing it after 3 years. So basically from years 3-5 you are using a 2018 Pixel 3 as opposed to a 2015 iPhone 6S Plus.

zepto2• 6 years ago

Performance of the cheapest iPhone available today is greater than the most expensive android phone, so this is a moot point. You need to upgrade the Android hardware just to maintain parity.

Twisell• 6 years ago

But that's totally the opposite of the common (and maybe false) narrative that Apple is pushing users to upgrade faster than their counterparts.

GeekyBear6• 6 years ago

The iPhone 5s got six years of OS and security updates.

The six got cut off after "only" five years because it didn't have enough RAM to run the current version of iOS.

Now the original SE and 6s will also receive that sixth year of support.

If you bought that original iPhone SE, that works out to $67 per supported year.

jdofaz2• 6 years ago

The screen on the Pixel is 0.5 inch smaller than the 6s plus

nisten• 6 years ago

Not only that but it's pentile amoled, meaning total subpixel count is only 2/3 of the iphones lcd screen.

JohnTHaller6• 6 years ago

Correct and updated my original post. My point still stands about resolution, though. The 6s has a 4.7" 750p screen, so doesn't exactly compare to the 5" 1080p Pixel screen. But even with that screen size difference, the iPhone wins. Handily.

Eric_WVGG• 6 years ago

If you bought an iPhone SE 64gb at launch, it cost you $499. $120 per support year so far.

best. smartphone. ever.

(I actually just dug mine out to give it another go, but the battery is nuked from sitting untouched for eighteen months :\ )

youeseh• 6 years ago

I can't wait for the iPhone 12 announcement. Rumor has it that we'll finally be able to upgrade to a newer small iPhone.

mobilio• 6 years ago

You're not alone!

I'm die hard fan of SE (SE ONE of course!) and form factor is perfect for me.

dangson• 6 years ago

Try doing a battery replacement. I bought one off Amazon for $20 and it came with all the necessary tools. The process was pretty easy if you watch a few guides on YouTube beforehand.

TMWNN2• 6 years ago

If you bought an iPhone SE 64gb at launch, it cost you $499. $120 per support year so far.

I was paid to buy my SE (https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/6lyjyl/cheap_pr...)!

devxpy• 6 years ago

You're completely ignoring the flagship killer market here.

You can buy a poco f1 (Snapdragon 835) for 250$ that will perform just as well as any pixel.

For that price you can buy a new flagship killer every year.

compiler-guy• 6 years ago

The thing that holds most android manufacturers back is that their chipset vendors don't update their drivers for newer kernels.

So the next version of android comes along and requires a newer kernel, and the phones built around these chipsets can't be updated.

The chipset folks see no new revenue for forward-porting their hacked up kernels and drivers, and therefore aren't interested in updating.

That is the problem the Android ecosystem needs to solve.

Because Apple controls the full stack, they have no problem forward porting any custom changes that they need. It's all the same codebase.

zozbot2342• 6 years ago

The postmarketOS project is trying to port these old Android devices to run on a mainline kernel, wherever feasible. It's non-trivial work, especially if you expect to submit patches upstream - I can see OEM SoC manufacturers running into issues with that. The whole Device Tree arrangement was intended to simplify this work, but a lot of hardware still comes with plenty of weird, one-off, entirely undocumented hacks. Sometimes it's a wonder how these devices can even boot at all!

on_and_off• 6 years ago

Another problem is that most users don't know what Android is and even less what version they are using.

If anything, a new update changing anything in the UX might be met with negativity.

So OEMs have even less reasons to care sadly.

aequitas• 6 years ago

Wasn't Project Treble created a few years back to solve this problem? I'm wondering what the current state of it is, because I haven't seen the effects of it yet.

robotnikman2• 6 years ago

It made it easier for manufacturers to create updates. Doesn't mean that they will release update for longer and take advantage of it though

phire• 6 years ago

This might be a contributing issue, but it seems this is far from the only reason why Android has such shit upgrade lifetimes.

Android itself doesn't have a strict requirement for an updated kernel. It will typically run fine on the original kernel tree the SoC launched with.

OnePlus occasionally does this, they are currently rolling out Android 10 for the OnePlus 5 and 5T, based on the original kernel tree. That's a 3 year old device (and I hate that I'm using a 3 year old device as my best example)

It seems like most Android vendors simply choose not to offer extended updates.

dstaley• 6 years ago

Android device manufacturers make their money when you buy a new device. Apple, on the other hand, makes money when you buy apps (in addition to making money on device sales I'm sure). They have an incentive to make sure that the latest OS runs on as many devices as possible, so that developers can release their apps to a wider audience, and so that Apple can make more money. Google wants apps to run on as many devices as possible, so that's why they bend over backwards to support older devices with their SDK. Samsung doesn't have any incentive to update the Galaxy S6 since that won't bring them any additional revenue.

arrozconcosas• 6 years ago

I have no ability to contribute to this technical analysis, other than to say Apple would never expect an average user to know what a "kernel" is or why it has anything to do with their phone being out of date. I'm sure 100% valid issue here but this is like telling a customer about your back office problems while ignoring their needs. Phones and computers are nice when they're as simple to use as a toaster.

omnicognate• 6 years ago

Google doesn't expect an average user to know that either. The difference from such a user's perspectice is just that Android devices become unable to run the most recent software more quickly than iOS ones. The post above is discussing the underlying causes of that. You are on a website called "Hacker News".

lostgame2• 6 years ago

Yeaaaaaah, I don’t buy that as the thing that holds most manufacturers back. It’s absolutely gotta be upgrade incentive.

robotnikman2• 6 years ago

Kinda explains why Nvidia was probably the best when it came to Android updates from my experience. They made the SOC themselves and had access to the drivers

AdmiralAsshat• 6 years ago

I'd sure appreciate it if Android phones got five years of support. Right now my GS8+ is relegated to quarterly security updates only, and even that is a pretty big achievement in the Android world.

It's probably time that I upgraded it, but nothing new even appeals to me anymore due to nearly all phones ditching the headphone jack, even the phablets. The "newest" phone I can find that ticks all the boxes I want (wireless charging, headphone jack, expandable memory slot) would have to be a regular S10, which is over a year old at this point.

tibbydudeza2• 6 years ago

Sigh .... as an Android user this really hurts.

evanlivingston3• 6 years ago

Does it though? Most android users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most Apple users I know don't care how recent their OS is. Most people I know don't update their OS because then they have to update a bunch of other stuff too.

t-writescode• 6 years ago

The defining reason for my original switch back to iOS from Android was lack of confirmation that a security update would be released to my phone.

It absolutely impacts the reasoning for some iPhone and Android users.

edit: added words to the last sentence

Tepix5• 6 years ago

In my family we have both iOS and Android devices. All Android devices are Android One devices receiving updates. I wouldn't want unpatched old devices on my network.

Android One is quite successful from what I can tell. This is the reason.

philshem• 6 years ago

iPhone SE (1st gen) will get iOS 14, too. “Be still, my heart.”

jeffbee• 6 years ago

What's interesting is the iPadOS supports A8-based iPads like the Air 2 and the Mini 4, while the new iOS does not support any A8-generation devices like the 6/6+.

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

I believe the iOS 13 cutoff was mostly a function of onboard RAM. (iPhone 6/6+ had a fairly anemic amount for what was being expected of them.)

at_a_remove• 6 years ago

This is lovely news. I am rather new to the smartphone world, I hardly use my iPhone SE, which was about discontinued when I first bought it. I like the smallness of it, primarily.

tibbydudeza2• 6 years ago

The worst part of Android which Apple said screw you to was that each Samsung phone and others has to released with a firmware bundle specific to a carrier for each country (Orange/Vodacom etc ...).

jayd16• 6 years ago

Has anyone done a comparison to see when iOS 14 features were introduced into Android? I believe picture in picture works on the S7 (which was introduced 4 months after the 6S).

Normally I'd feel a bit bummed about missing features and long term support is a problem but there wasn't much that was new to Android.

drewg123• 6 years ago

That, and supported battery replacement from the oem is why I recently switched from Google Nexus and Pixel phones to an iPhone 11.

dddddaviddddd• 6 years ago

I called Motorola support once to ask about a battery replacement for a Moto G (3rd gen). They told me it was impossible and effectively that I should buy a new phone.

evanlivingston3• 6 years ago

https://www.amazon.com/MAXBEAR-Li-Polymer-SNN5965A-Replaceme...

acd• 6 years ago

You can still install Linux, FreeBSD and FreeDOS on an old PC.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 6 years ago

And if phones used UEFI (or openfirmware or whatever), you could do just as well there (subject to driver support, but that's varied on PC, too). The absurd lack of standards in phone bootloaders and device trees is killing us.

fsflover3• 6 years ago

You will probably be interested in Librem 5 or Pinephone.

KKKKkkkk1• 6 years ago

One of the central tenets of Apple's marketing since forever is that price != value, and this is the manifestation of that idea. You might be paying more for an iOS device, but unlike Android ones, it maintains its value for years on.

LaSombra• 6 years ago

That is the single reason I switched to an iPhone. I don't want to pay US$800 for a phone that will stop being supported after 2, 3 years.

ogre_codes• 6 years ago

When I first bought an iPhone (iPhone 5, I was a slow learner), Android's track record with updates was terrible but Google/ Samsung/ etc said it was going to get better and promises were made. I was skeptical and bought the iPhone. Every year since then, it seems like more promises and efforts get made by the Android crowd but it's never gotten more than marginally better and only for the top end phones.

There are other reasons I don't use Android, but this was very distinctly the single reason I bought iOS initially and I've never regretted it.

maxwellito• 6 years ago

I'll be honest. It's true that it makes Android look a bit bad, at least the ecosystem. But this only matter in the iOS world, where the the whole park always move to the latest version, and you're required to get the latest version. Because on android, you can still download apps from the PlayStore for an Android KitKat. On iOS, if you're 2 versions behind, your device is getting pointless.

guessbest• 6 years ago

The App Store still supports older iOS builds.

OldHand20183• 6 years ago

I have a first generation iPad and the App Store will still allow me to download compatible apps. The Kindle app still allows me to download purchased books.

vladvasiliu2• 6 years ago

I think the problem with those devices is more that security updates for the OS itself aren't released anymore, not that new apps don't work.

My mom doesn't have a lot of apps installed on her phone, just something like maps, the local transit provider app and whatsapp. She sometimes browses the web.

I actually installed LineageOS on her phone a while ago, but I think even that isn't updated anymore (for her particular model).

scarface745• 6 years ago

Apple has supported downloading the “last compatible version” for years. I wiped a first generation iPad and as of last year, I could reload Netflix, Hulu, Plex, Google Drive, and a few other apps still worked. It last saw an update in 2012.

ajkdhcb2• 6 years ago

The ability to install a custom OS like LineageOS again gives the advantage back to android

zanny• 6 years ago

Seriously, the Note 3 and S4 have los support for Android 10. 6 year old devices.

Its not the exact same as vendors supporting it though since its los devs backporting Android 10 to 5 year obsolete kernels but it is the power of free software at work.

aruggirello• 6 years ago

Spot on! Coincidence: my Samsung S6 is on LineageOS 17.1 since May - that is, Android 10 - and despite being an unofficial build, I've got everything covered - save a few minor glitches. Before that, it was on the last official update (7.0).

bserge• 6 years ago

Yeah, but that's something most people will never try.

adrianvincent• 6 years ago

I much prefer Android over iOS, but this is the only reason I switched to an iPhone 11 last year.

Abishek_Muthian• 6 years ago

Even better iPad Air2 was released a year earlier than iPhone 6S and it's getting iPadOS 14; it's like Galaxy Tab 3 Lite which was released with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and never got even a single OS upgrade getting Android 11.

jdofaz2• 6 years ago

Google updated the original Pixel to Android 10, which was nice because that was beyond stated major updates period. That was followed by a single security update before it was abandoned.

I don't understand why they wouldn't keep issuing security updates when they already did the hard part of the major update.

Yetanfou2• 6 years ago

The Android update model is very different from the iOS model since many Android vendors only support their devices for a short time, often no more than 2-3 years where Apple provides updates for a much longer period. This is offset by the fact that the core of Android is free software, on top of which you can - but do not have to - install Google-proprietary parts. I choose not to install those parts since I prefer to keep my data (mostly) to myself.

When Apple says "that's all, folks" they mean it - the device will no longer get updates. When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device.

I'm using a Galaxy SIII - using it right now in fact - with Android 9 more or less because I have not updated it to v10 (the current version of Android) yet. I might upgrade it, then again I might not, the thing works fine on v9. For reference, this phone was launched in 2012 (3 years before the iPhone 6s) with Android 4.0 and got official updates to 4.4. It then got updates through Cyanogenmod, later through LineageOS. It is still updated OTA (as in 'over the air', like when it was new). Once Android 11 comes around it'll probably be ported to the SIII, the limiting factor tends to be driver support.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/developers-android-10-samsung...

asutekku• 6 years ago

Vast majority of the users are not going to get the update through an unofficial channel by downloading a custom rom. The problem are the manufacturers, not that you can’t get updates at all.

mh8h• 6 years ago

When Samsung says "that's all folks" the user can install one of the alternative distributions and continue to use the device.

The problem is that a tiny percentage of users actually do that. It leaves the rest vulnerable to any security issues that are found after the last update.

Yetanfou2• 6 years ago

That is a matter of user education comparable - but not equal - to what is keeping 'the year or Linux on the desktop' always somewhere in the future. The difference is that LineageOS (et al) is more or less identical to (the better) vendor-supplied distributions while Linux is a different operating system, not just a different distribution. Once installed something like LineageOS is just as easy to keep up to date as vendor-supplied distributions.

davemtl• 6 years ago

Wait.. Apple support a 5 year old phone? Why the heck am I still using an Android device? I have a Galaxy S8, while I'm still lucky enough to get the occasional security update, I won't be getting the latest Android release (at least officially), although the CPU in it is probably perfectly more than capable of running Android 11.

I have been considering getting a new phone and I keep eyeing up the iPhone 11 Pro, mostly because of the longevity of available software updates. Secondly, with an Apple I'm not subject to waiting for the carrier to push out the update.

mixmastamyk2• 6 years ago

Nice work Apple. My 6S is having problems†, but I don't want to let it go. Headphone jack and lack of biometric scanning.

† Battery is shot and lightning connector bent from their impractical dock I fancied in years past. Very difficult now to get the perfect angle to allow charging.

brunoluiz• 6 years ago

I guess the jacks need a clean-up after sometime. My lightning jack was not holding the charging cable anymore and I was super desperate to lose access to the phone during Holidays.

I went to an Apple Store and they just cleaned-up for me (walk-in). I bet the same applies to the headphone jack ;)

mixmastamyk2• 6 years ago

My phone's port is bent from use of these docks:

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MGRM2AM/A/iphone-lightnin...

It looks good but after a few years destroys the port due to lack of support.

Humdeee• 6 years ago

Also still have my 6S and have been a heavy user with it for years. It's also my main testing HW for iOS apps I maintain. Other than a decreased battery life, it's still kicking great.

bad_user• 6 years ago

It's true, Apple products age very well. I don't like iOS much, I hate its restrictions, but this is the number one reason for why I like Apple's products.

I'm a previous Android user, my iPhone 8 is almost 3 years old and I'm thinking of keeping it for another year or 2. I also have 2 Macbook Pro laptops at home from 2012 and 2015 respectively and I actually prefer them over the 2019 model from work. And a first generation iPad Pro (2015) that's better than what I see on the market for Android.

Was just thinking of getting a Samsung tablet, but this is making me reconsider. All of my Apple products still work and are kept up to date.

agurk• 6 years ago

Almost five years ago I got a OnePlus Two when it was released and about the same time my then work gave me a new iPhone 6 (unrequested by me, and when they appeared they told me I had to take it).

I still use that OP2 as my daily driver, now with LineageOS 17.1 (Android 10, the current version) installed on it. It's not blazing fast but the battery is at 80% capacity and it otherwise works well (and has a 3.5mm jack).

This obviously is the enthusiast option, but the first OnePlus had Cyanogenmod as the factory installed OS on there. If their relationship had continued and Cyanogen hadn't imploded it's quite possible that the OP2 would have the latest build on there officially as LineageOS is what Cyanogen became. Unfortunately there are no builds of 17 for the OP1.

That iPhone of the same vintage? I gladly gave it back when it was stuck on the then just-outdated iOS 12 and there wasn't much of an obvious future for it.

RMPR2• 6 years ago

Those updates have a price though [0], Android phones sure have their issues, but I never heard something about Google slowing down Pixel phones after updates. Moreover, if your Android device is not supported anymore, you can still opt for LineageOS, with iPhones you're pretty much fucked up.

0: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

hombre_fatal• 6 years ago

Since you keep posting that link, I don't think it's the smoking gun that you think it is.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208387

RMPR2• 6 years ago

I'm well aware of this, but I guess my point was: it's not just black and white like many people wanted to picture it in this thread, I use an iPhone 6S myself.

greatgib2• 6 years ago

I think that no one in the comments recalled that the last times that older iPhones got the last updates, they became slower with reduced artificially reduced battery life.

So somehow, despite getting updates, old iPhones were becoming less functional and users would get the feeling that they have to change it for a shiny new recent more powerful iPhone!

Jtsummers13• 6 years ago

The battery life wasn't artificially reduced, it was naturally reduced by years of use and charge cycles. Apple should have done a better job of communicating why they slowed down the systems, and perhaps made it an option rather than just doing it, but having had devices that shutdown because of the battery (while it still had a charge, but was not capable of providing power to the CPU running at full-speed) I'd have preferred slow downs to random shutdowns.

The latter makes the device unreliable and unusable, the former makes it reliable and maybe unusable for some applications. It's also rectifiable by replacing the battery (which I've done on several iPhones myself, and used stores for others just for the convenience). That last part is what Apple should have communicated to people. We did that with my dad's old iPhone 6 and it went from "slow but usable" to "like brand new and snappy".

EDIT: A note, the device I had that did that to me was a laptop with a spinning disk hard drive. When the battery started failing the laptop was fine until I hit the GPU (which was often, I was in grad school and doing a lot of graphics programming). Plugged in there were no issue, but on battery it'd bring the system down when I ran anything that made the GPU and CPU run close to full-speed. Fortunately I was able to get the data off, unfortunately I'd pretty well fucked the system before I realized why it was happening (so it happened a few times) and ended up just replacing the whole laptop rather than just getting a new battery.

greatgib2• 6 years ago

Indeed, you are right, they did not reduce the battery level but reduced the performances after the update.

So before the update, your phone was reasonably fast. A new phone/os version comes out, you have an automatic update, and then your phone will be slower to do the tasks that it was doing well before.

So, as an user what will be you conclusion? If you are not even aware that performance slow down is due to the update, you will think "my phone become older, I need to buy a more recent one!".

For memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

"Apple Confirms It Degrades Your Old iPhone's Performance"

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewanspence/2017/12/20/apple-iph...

And to be remembered, they were fined for that by the French regulator:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51413724

mataug• 6 years ago

This is one of the many reasons why I switched to the iPhone after 7yrs on Android, and I'm also getting my mother a iPhone as soon as possible.

My mom is used to android phones, its complex but she's understood the basic design language and can navigate the phone easily. Whenever she needs help though, its a massive struggle for me to do tech support over phone / video call. Each android phone is different, and we've never had the same phone, and we both get frustrated because the menus and the steps needed to modify settings is different.

With an iPhone though, regardless of the iPhone model, I can send her a screen recording that she can easily replicate on her phone. Consistency is extremely valuable for a non power-user, and only iPhones offer such consistency over multiple generations of iPhones, and iOS updates. Yes there are changes, such as the switch from TouchId to FaceId in iPhone X, but they are incremental, as compared to the confusing experience of switching from a Samsung device to a OnePlus or a Xiaomi device.

projektfu2• 6 years ago

I found a big difference in application and app store support for older versions. You need to keep updating the iPhone to the newest version of iOS because if you don't, all the apps will be undownloadable. When they stop updating it, it's toast.

I had an Android Gingerbread (2.3) phone for a while when KitKat was out, and I had lots of software to download. Then I updated to one on Marshmallow (6.0) and it had plenty of software and probably still does. I'm not sure how much software is still available that works on Nougat (7.0.1) on the S6 all the way through Android 10, but I was really disappointed that I couldn't even keep the iPhone 4S alive as a toy because all the old software was gone.

However, it's lame that Google drops security updates so early.

unix_fan2• 6 years ago

The minimum iOS version supported for most apps is iOS 11,sometimes even iOS 10.

projektfu2• 6 years ago

Yes but the old versions disappear more quickly. So if they decide to upgrade to requiring 13, they don’t leave an old version available.

intpx• 6 years ago

I can confirm, that even on beta 1, it runs really, really, really well on the 6s. I wonder if they rewrote all of the UI in swift or just really cleaned up the libraries because the perceived speed, that thing makes a end user device feel fast because it quickly moves you from on screen to the next when you command it to, is improved over 13.5. I can also confirm that it runs really well on an ipad (5 i think) with the same generation SoC, though I have seen more bugs with things like widgets. In my limited testing, all of the apps I run often work, i love that it tells me when an app is trying to use network discovery and allow me to block it. I might install it on my daily use phone by beta 2 its so good.

nicwolff• 6 years ago

This makes the old 4" SE still viable too! Apple was still selling them until late last year – it's a fantastic little phone (with an obsolete camera) – and you can get them refurbished for about $100. Highly recommended if you want to hold and use your phone with one hand comfortably, or forget if it's in your pocket!

Tepix5• 6 years ago

Seconded. I made sure to get an iPhone SE as my work phone instead of the iPhone XR. Love the design and the form factor.

saagarjha6• 6 years ago

It's been running iOS 14 quite well. Such a great phone!

fsflover3• 6 years ago

If you think that a smartphone should be supported for much longer than 5 years, consider Librem 5 [0] or Pinephone [1].

[0] https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinephone/

Xavdidtheshadow2• 6 years ago

Knowing basically nothing about either of these, I'm super curious as to if either company will exist in 5 years. I've set myself a reminder and am looking forward to the result.

fsflover3• 6 years ago

You do not need those companies for the software support. You only need upstreamed drivers for Linux kernel for the hardware. This is what these companies are doing and Android doesn’t.

Similarly, my laptop from 10+ years ago works flawlessly With Debian 10.

jordache• 6 years ago

I have a beater iphone 5s around to stream podcast and music while I'm doing yard work. Works great! pretty smooth OS UI..

Can't say the same about any Andorid phones from the same era.

Looking forward to this new era of Apple ARM chips in desktops!

supernova87a• 6 years ago

And yet, cue the armchair commentators about how Apple tries to hobble your hardware to make you buy a replacement.

cooper12• 6 years ago

I hear this conspiracy theory so often from non-technical people. I think what's going on is that obviously this isn't being done intentionally, but rather each new release is mainly written for and performance tested on the newest Apple devices (not to mention obvious hardware differences like CPU instructions/speed/cache size/memory). Apple might test that everything works, but they're not on these older devices 24/7 that they'll notice slight degradations. Also, devices are not uniform. On some devices the flash memory has been written to countless times and degraded. Other people are running tons of crapware or have the storage full to the brim. Finally there's always going to be some psychological suggestion going on: if I tell you to look for a certain thing, you'll be more likely to notice it, real or not.

lostgame2• 6 years ago

I often compose music on the go in GarageBand on my iPhone.

I own several pairs of extremely high quality and highly accurate headphones, and; no - I don’t want to carry an adapter around for headphones that prevents charging while headphones are plugged in. That’s obviously logistically a no go for anyone performing live with an iPad. I’d never want to rely on battery power live.

Even if I hadn’t invested in my audio gear and headphones specifically so much, the latency on Bluetooth has made it a non option forever - unless I buy one of the select few W1 certified Beats units, which then is just an additional expense.

Apple does not currently offer, and it seems that they have no interest in offering, a phone that I will buy in the future. I couldn’t believe they pulled the headphone jack on the SE2, it seemed like the last ‘fuck you’ to the audio content creators they’ve claimed to support forever.

iOS 14 support on iPhone 6S means Apple keeps me as an iPhone user for maybe another year.

I will probably be downgrading to a dumbphone and an old, flash-drive modded iPod gen 3 or 4.

Tepix5• 6 years ago

Little-known fact:

As part of the "Android Enterprise Recommended" program, some Android devices (such as rugged devices) receive FIVE years of updates.

Unfortunately they are all very expensive and most of these devices are not standard phones.

neurostimulant3• 6 years ago

Hmm, according to this page[1], google pixel 1 has the android enterprise recommended seal, but it seem to be out of support after 3 years. Last guaranteed security update is October 2019 according to this page[2].

[1] https://androidenterprisepartners.withgoogle.com/device/#!/1...

[2] https://support.google.com/pixelphone/answer/4457705?hl=en

Tepix5• 6 years ago

Pixel 1 is not a rugged device

nullsmack• 6 years ago

The fact that Samsung won't even provide Android 10 for my Note8 should be criminal, even by their policy of only updating their devices for two "major" revisions. They shipped it with Android 7 when Android 8 was already out.

brailsafe• 6 years ago

Even with a phone that old, Apple is still sending it the latest iOS 14 features, which will allow people still holding onto that device to use it for at least another year.

I'm running an iPad 3 with iOS9 and a OnePlus 3 running Android 9 that I bought off Craigslist for $200. I know it's like driving a 20 year old Corolla, but does lack of the latest OS make a device unusable? If my current car worked I wouldn't buy a new one to get auto distance cruise control.

I haven't found features on smartphones very compelling probably since 2015. Fingerprint sensor is nice, more speed is nice, but the complexity of what I use it for isn't that significant.

makecheck• 6 years ago

It’s been surprisingly easy to support various Apple devices.

I think the notch and home-screen-bar layouts were a bit tricky but they did have APIs in place and it was OK.

The biggest issue really was the 32-bit to 64-bit hardware transition; I remember seeing weird graphical issues because floating-point results were slightly different with float vs. double.

e40• 6 years ago

One of the reasons I left Android for iOS was just this issue. 2 years of updates, then you're expected to purchase a new device. My iPhone 11 I expect to have for many years. Hopefully 5+.

JoshuaRLi• 6 years ago

Love how my old Galaxy S6 is stuck on ancient Android 7. And it's the verizon version too, so I can't unlock the bootloader. Perfectly capable device, what a shame.

Switched to iPhone SE a while ago because of this.

metta2uall• 6 years ago

Given the harm caused by cybercrime, plus the increased police work, governments really ought to make a minimum duration of security updates mandatory.. Phones are already required to meet a raft of various regulations.

jp0d• 6 years ago

I used Android phones for several years before switching to an iPhone 8 two years ago. I think the major reason why manufacturers don't care to provide updates is because they don't expect those phones to last more than 2 years. It's not a joke. I've had some mid-range to expensive Android phones (HTC, Samsung, Motorola) and none of them lasted more 2 years. Whereas my wife's 6 year old iPhone 5s is still working! How do you explain that? Every Apple devices I've owned so far has been incredibly reliable and held their value really well. My wife's 6 year old Macbook air with 4 gigs of RAM still works fine and runs the latest Mac OS! I don't think I can get that level of support from any other vendor.

ngcc_hk• 6 years ago

Size is important and that is something Apple should have deal with from day one. It miss the big phone time and now it miss the small phone time. Really want to have a small one.

iPhone 6S getting iOS 14 is like the Galaxy S6 getting Android 11

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