I'd like to give kudos to Apple for including the iPhone 5S in this security update, which was released on September 20, 2013, over 7 years ago! Supporting a product for even 3 years is rare in the smartphone world.
Wouldn't last official sale date be a better indicator of true device support? For example if someone bought it in an Apple store on the last day available, how long period would they have received updates for?
Comparatively, no. Android phones generally get a maximum of 3 years of security updates from launch, not from last device sale date. So, within mobile phones, it's more informative to compare it to their competition. It shows you just how much better Apple is at mobile device support compared to everyone else.
Well, you still get updates through the store way longer than 3 years. With more and more components (e.g. the browser) coming through the store, the picture is not as black and white anymore.
Galaxy S8 on sale at Walmart, Staples, and NewEgg. Likely falls off support in 3-4 months. So Android flagships are close to zero or even negative support time?
This is what got me to finally switch to Apple. Updates take forever. I bought a Samsung off Amazon for testing and for some reason I still have to wait on T-Mobile. And then after a year, maybe two, there just aren’t anymore updates.
It's accurate, though. When I am evaluating devices to buy, a metric I care about is "after I buy this, how long will it remain up-to-date with security patches?" And the answer to that question is "on the day that you buy it, it is already several months behind on security patches and will not improve." That metric is not the be-all-end-all of support, but is meaningful, and low or negative values have the correct interpretation in that context.
Apple uses this metric as well[1]. If something hasn't been sold by Apple for 5 years (but less than 7 years), it's considered vintage and you can still get hardware service and certain critical software fixes, though not necessarily any new features.
The support for MacBooks is actually great. Certain Late 2013 and Mid 2014 Retina MacBook Pros, while considered vintage, will be receiving the Big Sur update[2].
> The support for MacBooks is actually great. Certain Late 2013 and Mid 2014 Retina MacBook Pros, while considered vintage, will be receiving the Big Sur update.
I think it's more likely that Apple's new frameworks don't require any fancy hardware features that aren't available in the Late 2013 MacBook Pros.
It's true that laptop computers have not changed as much over the years. This in large part because Intel CPU's and architecture have not changed as much, while iPhone CPU's have improved by leaps and bounds.
I wonder how much this might change when Apple Silicon comes to the Mac.
It feels like smartphones are stabilizing as well. I don't see myself needing to replace my iPhone 8 for a while, even though there have been three more generations afterwards. An iPhone 5 felt much more outdated at the time of the 6s/SE.
> I think it's more likely that Apple's new frameworks don't require any fancy hardware features
Mojave and higher isn’t “supported” on the cheese grater Mac Pro’s despite it running more than fine, including with FileVault 2 enabled on the boot volume (which an Apple exec tried to claim was technically not possible).
No, because devices can be and sometimes are sold with software that is already out of date. The better indicator is how long software support is provided for a device from beginning to end.
If I buy a new phone from the manufacturer and it's already unsupported, that's really bad. I don't care if it was supported for 8 years before I bought it.
Hah. This bit us when I got my mother an iPhone SE (2016) to replace her iPhone 4 a year or so ago. I tried to restore from iCloud backup and it kept failing, and finally it dawned on me that the OS may have been out of date. Skipped the restore, updated the OS, and wiped the phone. The restore worked correctly.
On the flip side, the Apple guys have a lot of patience to deal with my stubborn ass trying to activate an iPhone 4... the non-SIM servers were taken offline years ago so I popped in a SIM and off I went.
Sure but that doesn't change how long they supported after end of sale which wasn't in 2013 but at least until 2017. So ~3 years of software updates from end of sale. Still OK but not anything special.
To not be special, there must be many phones out there getting the same or better support. What are they? Who sells these many other smartphones that have had 3 or more years of updates from last sale?
Certainly not the Pixel phones, they get 3 years support from first launch only, and they're supposedly the gold standard for Android software support. It's pretty much the reason they exist. Yet after last sale support for the 5S matched the Pixel's from launch support, and we don't even know that this is the last update the 5S will get.
You decided to count the days of support in a completely uncommon way that no one usually discusses but decided that three years was ok based on the common way people count, which is since initial release.
Well, let's not get crazy. It's fine (I'm using it currently because my Samsung S9 died) but it's definitely no perfect phone. It doesn't even have water resistance and the screen to body ratio is pretty bad, IMO.
Only upside is the thing is built in such a way that it has barely taken any damage from the years of abuse I put it through.
I'm likely getting an iPhone 12 Pro Max very soon and will continue to only use the iPhone 5S I've had since 2013 as a backup.
I love the 5S form factor as well. I only updated from it earlier this year to get iOS 13 to use the COVID Alert app here in Canada (and my upgrade was buying a smashed-screen iPhone SE for next to nothing, of course, and swapping the old phone's screen onto it).
What's in your back pocket? Seriously, love my SE. I just got the battery replaced, $49 taken from a MacBook trade-in value, so basically free since I can't use that money any other way.
How do you still have one that's running OK? My Apple products almost always "die" after a few years. I had the 5S but one day it crashed and would not turn back on no matter what I did. The iPhone I had before that did the same thing.
Is that a common issue? I've certainly heard about devices losing battery life and cameras progressively getting worse, but complete death is very uncommon unless you use it without a case and drop it all the time or something.
I still have a working iPhone 5 (no S) with a home button that spins and a slightly broken screen bezel but no other issues.
At one point I thought it died permanently. But it turned out to only be the screen dimming to much. In bright light it auto adjusted enough to be visible, allowing me to rise the brightness.
The list of old Apple devices that still work well is impressive: I still have one original iPad, an iPhone 3GS, several iPhone 4. Same goes for the more recent ones, with the exception of the few devices that I dropped on hard floors over the last 10 years...
Still have a first-generation iPod Touch running iOS 3. Works like a charm, can even download some apps from the App Store. Bit of a shock how both primitive and advanced the early versions of iOS were.
I had an iPad 1 running iOS 5 I think, but in the end I stopped using it because Safari would "crash" on most websites due to it running out of ram I guess.
I have a 4S that's still running perfectly happily. Can't do much with it, mind, given that everything is wildly out of date but it may yet get repurposed as a webcam when I get some free time.
I believe you but I've honestly never heard of anybody suffering "random cellphone death" - Apple or otherwise. Everybody seems to break them or upgrade them long before that.
I had it with Nexus 5x. It died after 1.5 years when I used an app to get a train ticket. It turned out it was a known hardware bug judging by forums. It was in Norway so the phone was still under warranty and it was “repaired” - the motherboard was replaced. Still not much later I bought the original iPhone SE. I just did not like the idea of phone stopping working for no reason.
I have an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 2 that still work. They are very slow and most apps don’t support their oses. I’d still have an iPhone 7 Plus if it wasn’t at the bottom of a river rapid. My wife has a white MacBook somewhere from 2009/10.
The only problem I’ve had was a 2011 MBP have a gpu issue.
I write iOS software, so I have a whole bunch of test units.
My "low-end" test unit is an iPod Touch (last gen). Basically, a skinny SE (Apple doesn't even have an iPod simulator -you're supposed to use an SE sim).
My regular daily phone is an Excess Max (XSMax). I'm sick to death of it. I don't have much use for all that screen real estate, and it's a big honkin' monster.
The 5S was sold from Apple stores in India in mid 2017. So that's 3 years of updates from end-of-sale and this is an OS update for a 2 year old OS. So two years of support. Less than the Pixel.
When someone buy a 5S in 2017 they surely know already, or should, that it is a cheap buy to last less than a newer model. So 3 years in this case is actually a great deal.
Wasn't the purpose of that throttling to extend the life of older phones? Throttling the CPU let them stay within the limits of the worn out battery and let the device continue to be used without crashing.
It was to extend the battery life, which was a workaround for the flawed battery design (contra CPU power draw). I bought an iPhone SE in the first month available and it started throttling by month 10, I'm not a battery designer, but I did not buy a device marketed as 2x the speed of 5S only for it to silently drop to 0.8x the speed of the 5S less than a year later.
In which they had a whole year of really cheap, highly subsidized battery replacements to correct their error. I think Apple should be forgiven for this
I was unable to benefit from the battery replacement due to a chip in the screen they discovered after I got a CS code to do it: https://i.imgur.com/Gr1bPTU.jpg
Effectively a coupon code issued by a customer support representative.
Apple did not actually offer the replacement program within ~600km of my home, but I managed to convince them that an Apple Authorised Service provider in my town at least do it. They agreed and gave me a CS Code valid for the the battery replacement to be done.
But it was ultimately denied because of a tiny chip in the glass on the screen.
I really liked every other aspect of this phone though.
I wish they gave those odds in Vegas: OP said right there in their comment that they're not a battery designer. Now, granted, perhaps OP should have not run their fingers on the keyboard about topics they know little to nothing about...
This is just great, and you see why it's so hard to be a product manufacturer.
Not only does the person not understand why it was done, and that it produced a phone that would be functional for longer lifetime than if it hadn't been implement, but he also continues spreading unhelpful information to others.
I turned off this feature when they shipped the option and promptly turned it back on. I use Apple because they make reasonable decisions instead of requiring endless configuration, and they made the right decision here. The lawsuit feels like pure power politics... Apple can handle the cost, I don’t feel bad for them or anything, but I see it as a pure money grab rather than any culpability for Apple.
My 8 (or 10?) year old AppleTV just got an update today. I was excited because the YouTube app pause function stopped working after the previous update a couple of weeks ago. Alas the problem remains.
Since this is a security update I think it’s more about support of an OS which is only 2 yrs old than the class of device as that class was supported with the initial iOS 12 release.
This is what I try to explain when it comes to "why are you paying so much for Apple". Because when you buy a cheap Android phone from Xuoiamiaeoi or whatever, you get some custom crippled OS in god knows what ways in close to 0 long-term support from them.
