I'm not a fan of Apple's walled garden mindset and resistance to inter-operating with other platforms, but this degree of legacy support is a case of Apple doing a good thing and deserves praise. Note: I'm not saying that Google/MSFT et al are much better than Apple, but they're not quite as bad.
"Just jailbreak your phone and install <blank>!" they said.
I did that for a while, depending on some random guy in a forum to maintain a working image for my device. He bought a new phone, and that was the end of the updates.
I bought a brand new flagship phone for $1100, couldn't jailbreak it, then the manufacturer got bored, forced an update that bricked it, then got bored and never published an update again.
With Play Integrity / SafetyNet this is also an uphill battle without doing even more work to spoof your Integrity status, if you want mobile banking and finance apps to work.
Pixels are pretty weak hardware wise in the areas people care about (heavy, relatively slow charging, big, etc.); I'd probably recommend people buy Samsungs which also get long term software updates nowadays.
I've never had a pixel phone survive through its support period. The hardware always dies first.
Tbf some pixel models have proven reliable, my mom's pixel 4 lasted long enough to be out of support and then it got owned and her bank accounts got taken over.
I, like most people I know, buy Android devices around the 300 euro limit, use them until they break for whatever reason, which is measured in years.
The only apps that get installed nowadays are the ones that must be for a specific service, or gaming.
Many people even turn updates off due to the way companies get creative changing the application on every update.
In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.
Outside communities like HN, regular people hardly care about updates.
> In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.
Not quite. The phones I had for the four years before the iPhone came out were Treo devices running PalmOS, which got software updates installable via the host computer without any developer tools.
I had a perfectly functional Galaxy A71 this time last year, still had great battery life, etc.
I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.
Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.
After the battery problems that the Pixel 4a, 6a, and 7a have had, I'll stick to the regular Pixel phones (well - who knows far this sideloading clampdown will go).
I know people have had battery problems with non-a Pixel phones, but the number of 'a' phones with battery problems caused Google to publicly respond.
GrapheneOS only updates Pixels for as long as Google does. All their supported devices currently receive the stock OS updates from Google. LineageOS is different in that regard.
I'm glad you had a good experience with it, but I had the Pixel 7 Pro and it was the single worst phone I have ever used. Utterly dogshit, to a point where I swore a blood oath to never purchase another Pixel ever again. I've heard that the later Pixels are better but I guess I'll never know.
It's possible that I had a defective unit, but regardless of the reason it was a laggy mess, that got terrible battery life, and sometimes simply wouldn't finish turning on (it would just stay on a black screen indefinitely). I bought it in July of 2023 and I ended up giving it to a family member and buying a refurb iPhone 13 Pro Max, which I still have and it has been considerably better.
It's not like I'm this huge Apple fanboy (feel free to look at my history complaining about my time working there), but if the Pixel 7 was 2023's flagship Android phone, then I have very little interest in using Android anymore.
Same here with a Pixel 10 Pro. Having seen issues that others have been struggling with, I’m shocked at the poor quality controls. It’s not only hardware, the software breaks every now and then. Looks like every patch introduces some bugs or bricks some Pixels. According to Gemini, it’s all known and has been discussed for a long time. I checked Pixel bug reports, some of them closed with wont-implement states, while users still struggling.
This was the first time in two decades that my smartphone broke, and it could only be replaced.
In the end, to me it’s really too much maintenance with Pixels and Android devices in general. Really don’t get it why people prefer Android. It’s like desktop Linux. Not there yet.
It doesn't deserve praise because the "degree" is very low, and it's undercut by all the other measures like "forcing" min OS version updates, meaning that your phone won't be able to use apps even when OS is updated.
I'll never argue that updates like this are a bad thing, but arguably the best thing Apple could have done is offered a jailbreak for phones after so many years. If you're still using the same ten year old phone, the risks to you opting into the ability to flash a new OS maintained by someone who cares are pretty small. It's not as though those folks are more than a rounding error in sales numbers anyway. Someone buying a new phone every 20 years instead of 15 isn't going to cause anyone to lose their Christmas bonus.
I ran a 5S that I bought in December 2013 as my primary phone all the way up to around March 2020, just as the pandemic was really winding up.
The battery, after ailing for a little while, had eventually just given up. I'd gone skiing a couple of times, with the last trip being just before lockdown, and I think it was the cold exposure of the second trip that dealt the mortal blow, and it died shortly after I returned.
I liked that phone a lot. It did, at the time, everything I needed, and it was a really nice size, but that period in 2020 was a bad time to try to get a phone repaired. I did attempt to replace the battery myself using the guide on iFixit but, sadly, that did not go well due to some contradictory/out of order instructions, and all I succeeded in doing was damaging the phone, I think, beyond repair.
Really good to see that Apple are still supporting them though.
Just so you know, apparently it's reasonably straightforward to replace the battery of the iPhone 5s, even easier than the iPhone SE (same form factor) for whatever reason.
A few years ago I bought a replacement battery kit that came with everything needed for probably something like $10 from aliexpress. I never actually got around to doing the replacement yet but maybe this update will give me the excuse to dig it up and replace the battery too ha!
tokyobreakfast is right that this is just a certificate fix, not a real software update. But it's still notable.
Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.
It's likely that, the Support Contact Rate (and potentially legal contact rate if the phone gets fully bricked and unable to make basic phone calls) is higher than the cost of just pushing the certificate.
I'd assume the legal hourly costs for handling 10 cases probably equals the cost of pushing this cert, even if the cases can be successfully defended.
I wonder if this is because some people keep their iPhone 5s around as a backup phone or for some other reason?
My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.
More likely that, the Support Contact Rate (and potentially legal contact rate if the phone gets fully bricked and unable to make basic phone calls) is higher than the cost of just pushing the certificate.
Had an original SE as banking backup. Recently the banking app demanded a newer iOS after being updated. Now that good old little device that was supposed to save me eventually is basically bricked for me.
Me, my wife and my mom are all using the second SE. My mom is the only one who has updated to the newest iOS. I didn't want to because I heard rumors it was slow. But I tried my mom's phone and it seems as snappy as my phone (more or less, not the fastest phone to begin with, but not slow either). So I'm going to update too.
Replaced the original iPhone SE battery recently with a higher capacity one. Works perfectly. Many apps require an update or else they refuse tor run, but outside of that, still doing well.
AMD might not be doing the work, but they set the world up to be able to support their chips. I'd take that over crossing my fingers for ok Windows driver support to hold out any day.
Top range of these cards had (only 8GB) of 0.3TB/s memory, which is what a modern 9060xt can do. Double that for the 9070xt, but still not bad. 4->~48 (fp32) TFLOPS though, wow! Especially with a modern driver stack. With the accelerators all using much older architectures I wonder if they stand to get any benefit, not that they're getting used for graphics much.
I am locked out of my older iOS devices. I cannot login to my Apple account on these devices because "the OS is too old", and I cannot update iOS without logging into my Apple account. They bricked those devices just by flipping a switch remotely. One of those is an iPhone 6S Plus, for instance.
People complain a lot about planned obsolescence but i'm mildly impressed, even if this update is only to keep the lights on and nothing else.
I remember people complaining that the design of the 5 was already outdated when it was new and they needed to have bigger screens and be thinner to compete with Samsung...
What versions can't access the App Store anymore? I've tried Catalina recently, and that still worked fine, but it only stopped getting security updates in 2022, so it's only been a few years.
Also, I've barely ever used the OSX/MacOS app store anyway, and from what little I've heard from other people, it's not really all that great nor popular a place to get your software from.
There's a problem with older Macbooks on older MacOS/factory reset where they can't access the App Store, so they can't directly download newer MacOS, you gotta go sidecar it
Of course this is completely opaque to people who have to do this, it just ends up prompting you to login and things like that.
I think newer MacOS avoids this stuff by not having OS updates be linked to the App Store
Cant you technically access the old jailbreak app stores on a 5? I would assume these phones were jailbroken far more commonly than modern iPhones. I feel like I dont hear about anyone jailbreaking them anymore.
I’m honestly surprised how they kept track that the certificate for an old version of the OS and deprecated hardware was expiring in the first place AND the executives approved cutting a release to roll it.
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