Comment by combyn8tor
3 months ago
> the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years
Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:
- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.
- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?
> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.
This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.
The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).
We’re moving away from hardware and into software and longevity in this discussion but wrt “apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates” i would point out that Red Hat is probably more of a beacon / industry leader here as the main promise of RHEL is 10 years of support and updates. But again we don’t ship hardware so I see the narrower sense that you’re making but still would like to push back on the idea that giant companies cannot continue to keep complicated legacy code bases secure and functional about 2x longer in most cases than what Apple has done
Main problem, not just from Apple, is that as phone tech gets standardized and more long-lasting the software support cycles have not gotten longer.
It is abysmal that Android phone makers still need to customize the OS so much for their hardware. Apple has no incentive for longer support cycles if Android does even worse on it.
It has always been like that since CP/M and commercial UNIX days.
Vertical integrations like everyone sell a product, a brand, a whole ecosystem experience.
If all OEMs sold the same CP/M, UNIX, MSX, MS-DOS, Windows software stack, on the what is basically the same hardware with a different name glued on the case, they wouldn't get any brand recognition, aka product differentiation.
Thus OEMs specific customisations get added, back in the day bundled software packages are part of the deal, nowadays preinstalled on the OS image, and so on.
"You cheated on me last night!"
"This is a weird one to complain about, look at Donnie, he cheated on his girlfriend 3 times last month!"
i don't get it, how long do you think is reasonable?
5 replies →
Technically not updates but if you hook up a PowerPC mac with 10.4 Tiger on it you can still get it updated to the latest version released, 10.4.11
I demoed that exact feature (though on 10.5) not so long ago and people didn’t believe me…!
The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.
I had the 2019 cheesegrater Mac Pro. 7TB (going from 1 to 8) would cost me $3,000.
So I bought a 4xM2 PCI card, 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs for $1,100. And as a result got 6.5GBps versus the onboard 1TB's 5GBps.
Same with memory. 160GB (32 to 192GB) from Apple was also around $3K. OWC sold the exact same memory chips, manufacturer, spec, speed, for $1,000 for 192GB.
I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.