I started programming in the 90s. The other day I found some of the first programs I ever wrote (in qbasic), and ran them in qbasic 4.5 on dosbox on my Mac laptop.
I was running an arm laptop, emulating a modern x86_64 chip, emulating an old i386 chip, interpreting a qbasic program unmodified from 30 years ago. Sound, graphics modes, input events - all of it worked perfectly. I didn’t try running it on windows, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it just worked there too without even needing dosbox.
Backwards compatibility on phones is a joke. Decades of phone software is totally lost to history, impossible to download or run anywhere.
The web isn’t much better because old websites go down. But at least modern browsers will still happily render webpages from the 90s just fine.
The point of fixing security holes is sometimes to make it not possible to do certain things which applications may have been written to "expect". There's a bit of not being able to have your cake and eat it.
Tosh. The fact you can’t download old iOS apps from the App Store, nor can you run them on modern 64 bit iOS devices has nothing to do with apps using undocumented APIs.
What about documented APIs that are flawed? I'm not an iOS programmer but let's imagine an API that requires an SHA-1 signature ... so those become insecure and the API is dropped - or an API that offers an SSLv1 connection and that's insecure so it gets dropped. The only way to emulate that would be to re-introduce the problem.
Perhaps these are bad examples and the real reasons for Apple to not support something is not so neat - I don't know about them - but FWIW my experience from working at Nokia was that compatibility was a big drag to being able to implement improvements and it's a huge effort to maintain it that doesn't come for free.
I see what you're saying - that we can't run old iOS apps on our phones because some features / APIs have been removed. And there are some APIs which have been taken out, and Apple has forced developers using them to update their apps.
The two most ready examples of this sort of thing are that (I think) 32 bit apps aren't supported any more, and that the HID guidelines specified the fixed pixel dimensions that iphones were. That isn't something you can assume any more.
But if I want to run an ancient version of flappy bird, I don't really need it to run on my modern iphone - just like I don't need modern windows to support 1991 QBASIC in order to run my old qbasic programs from when I was a kid. We need two things:
- Access to old versions of iOS app binaries. I have no idea how to get these, if they're available anywhere in the app store (or can be backed up), or if apple deletes them.
- Access to an early iOS simulator / emulator to run those apps on. Apple has had fantastic iOS simulators going all the way back to the first app store releases, though I think they only ran ios apps compiled to x86.
It'd be great if there was a way to run old ios games and apps and things. I don't want those heady days of early ios apps to be lost to history.
Who do we have to thank for this? Apple or Google? The old Symbian app were cool enough that could run on different versions of the OS, they were basically jar packages.
The switch to App Stores and the too fragmented OS updates made everything just a mess like this
You are absolutely right and it is shameful what consumers simply accept for software support periods! I try to buy things that I hope/expect to work for 10, maybe 20 years. Appliances, cars, tvs, and electronics including phones. Yet software support for all these things lasts a mere 3-5 years if that. I have an iPad1 original that still works great! But software support ended a year after I bought it—over a decade ago. Totally unacceptable. I hate how the hardware industry forces obsolescence by cutting off software support for devices in the field. Nobody should be grateful for a mere 3 years of software support.
The companies just do what people want - new phones, more capabilities. People will pay up for new physical gadget but not support, so the money is only coming from making new models. The number of old models gets bigger all the time but the number of people updating the software cannot because they have to be paid for by the sales of the new models.
Well a lot of people are looking at Windows 11, which launched in 2021 and required a ~2018 CPU. Especially when Intel's 8th generation chips were barely different from the ones going back years. Chips close to that cutoff are going to have awful support lifetimes from microsoft if you can't get updates past 2025.
This is looking at it from the wrong side though. It isn't the hardware vendor ending support there, it's the software vendor.
PC hardware can be supported indefinitely because it's documented, more or less. Windows uses a hardware abstraction layer so the old drivers can be used with the new Windows. Hardware only stops being supported by Windows when Microsoft decides it, not Intel or NVIDIA or Broadcom.
The Linux community writes open source drivers, or the hardware makers do themselves, so they can be updated by the kernel developers when they make changes to the kernel and continue to work. You can put run the latest Linux kernel on a PC from 1995.
But for phones the hardware support comes as an opaque binary blob tied to a specific kernel version, so when that kernel falls out of support, the hardware is slag unless someone has the resources to reverse engineer it. Which they might if it was just the wireless or just the storage controller, but it's not.
Win11's line in the sand requirements aren't nearly as "bad" as Vista/XP/ME in terms of disruption. Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
> Honestly I wish they'd gone a step further and required ECC support.
That's a non-starter because Intel upsell ECC as an "enterprise"/"prosumer" feature and regular, non-high-end/workstation/server processors don't support ECC. Sadly Intel is still the CPU market leader, so that would have meant Win11 not being able to run on most existing hardware at launch.
Yes, how different are Intel's consumer CPUs from their Enterprise? Is ECC disabled physically in their CPUs or is it simply a software limitation?
AMD's CPUs have ECC support but the motherboard manufacturers don't support it.
Intel has been shipping TPMs in CPUs for a while. That begs the question, is Intel dictating requirements to Microsoft or is Microsoft dictating them to Intel?
I have a similarly new PC and found there were BIOS settings needed to allow it to get windows 11 -- some security stuff that wasn't turned on by default.
Of course, then I looked into what windows 11 provided and decided I'd wait a bit either way.
I initially upgraded a Ryzen 7 1700 system with the hold TPM module, then got an incredible deal on a 5700X. I was surprised how much I had to fiddle in the BIOS with a year old motherboard to get things like Secure Boot and memory isolation working.
It was something like 5 or 6 BIOS expeditions before I had all the right features enabled.
Windows 11 is meh... They fixed some of my issues with 10 and created new ones. I wouldn't rush anyone to adopt it, it's a Vista/XP/ME style release. I'm expecting Windows 12 to be the keeper.
The original iPhone had 128MB of memory. The iPhone 6s (releasing in 2015, which is the oldest model currently receiving security updates) has 2GB of memory. The latest iPhone, the iPhone 14, has 6GB.
It doesn't make sense for Apple to support devices that aren't even going to be able to run the apps that users want. Not many users are going to want to be using a 6-7 year old device when hardware is advancing and therefore the software is becoming more resource hungry.
There are tons of people who use their phones to make phone calls and send texts and read the occasional Wikipedia article. They don't need newer hardware.
People who want to play video games on their phones will need newer phones, but even they benefit from being able to sell their old one to the people who don't need that instead of having to throw it away.
You're completely right, but I don't think Apple is targeting those people. Most people don't want an iPhone for just the basics.
Aside from that, I'm not sure that even web browsing would be very enjoyable on an iPhone 6s today considering that the performance demands of web pages are getting higher and higher.
Better phones would be designed with upgradeable modems because the phone would be useful for longer than the modem is, but anything with WiFi can be connected to a hotspot.
I'm kind of surprised that isn't more popular in general, because the hotspot lets you connect all your devices with one plan for <$10/month if you don't use a lot of cellular data, e.g. because you mostly use it in your car and spend most of your time connected to some other WiFi.
Yeah, and Linux will probably have an even longer support period. But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market.
The mobile phone business is very different. (But you may argue that that's the problem.) The HW manufacturers sell the SW bundled with the HW. As soon as they have sold the HW, the software is just a liability (while for MS it's a recurrent revenue!). Not only that, but the longer and the better the SW works, the less likely you are to buy new HW from them. (And since that's the only thing they are selling, it means the less likely they will see a revenue from you.) Now this may imply that the business model is flawed and maybe it will change as the market matures and people will stop buying newer and newer phones every year. Just like it happened to desktops and then laptops. (I'm typing this on a 7+ year old Thinkpad and the only thing I miss is +16GB RAM.)
> But MS is in a totally different business. HW manufacturers build and sell new devices to customers who then buy software from a different company (MS). One of the selling point of Windows is that it runs on basically all HW. But they can only afford this because they have monopolized the market.
It's really the opposite problem. Essentially all of the relevant phones run Android; the monopoly doesn't help. And PC/workstation hardware was supported for just as long back in the days of Novell Netware and proprietary Unix. Some of the hardware from those days is still supported now.
The problem isn't the lack of a monopoly, it's the presence of one. The majority of the SoCs in phones are from Qualcomm, and they provide neither documentation nor source code, even though the market is clamoring for the longer support lifetimes that would allow, because with limited competition they don't have to.
There was some hope that Samsung would do better, and they might increase their market share quite a bit if they did, but a duopoly still isn't much competition. Samsung is already a big enough player that they have to be weighing the increase in market share against the longer repurchasing cycle. The have to decide if they want to be the heroes and capture that much goodwill from the people paying attention and making recommendations to others, or not. So far so fail.
Yeah that is pretty good. You're right about MS being the gold standard for backwards compatibility and forward support. Amazon talks about being the best at customer service, I guess that's how MS excelled in customer service, a key differentiator, super-wide compatibility, long lifetimes.
If you where to start a new software project in the mid-90s and had the benefit of hindsight, there is no argument for not starting on Windows NT. Looking back the "correct" career choice would be a C++ developer on the Windows NT platform, you could build a lifetime career on Windows (unless it fails in the next 10 - 15 years, which I doubt).
Sure we have abandon-ware that requires a Windows 95 desktop or a Windows 2000 installation, but bringing a piece of actively developed Windows software forward through the version in the past 25+ years has been relatively easy.
I picked Linux/Unix and languages like Python 20 years ago, so it's a little late for me, but if I could go back in time, I'm not sure that Windows and C++ wouldn't have been an equally good choice.
This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986?
A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone. Computers changed leaps and bounds in the first 20 years just like smartphones have.
Sure my 2010 Dell Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM can run Windows 10.
But a computer bought in 1997 couldn’t run the then current Windows OS in 2010.
> This comparison isn’t really relevant. Could you run the then current operating system in 2006 on a computer that you bought in 1986?
The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later.
> A 2010 iPhone 4s can’t connect to any network in the US let alone a 2007 iPhone.
It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music?
Why not connect the USB and turn it into a NAS or a doorbell camera or any of the things anybody would do with a Raspberry Pi?
> The processor available in 1986 was the i386, which was supported by Linux until 2012. i486 support is on its way out just now, more than 33 years later
What could you do with it in 2012? A 2010 Core2Duo 2.66Ghz Dell laptop can run Windows 10. Browse the modern web, mine had gigabit Ethernet, could run the latest version of Office decently and had a 500Gb hard drive.
> It's not expected to do what modern phones can do. But it could still connect to WiFi, so why shouldn't it be usable for reading text or listening to music?
Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage.
Even back in 2004 - 3 years before the iPhone. I had this
Now you're arguing against yourself. An original iPhone is much more capable than an i386.
> Yes, as far as I know, the iTunes app still supports all iPods and iPhones. You can sync your music. And you can fill all of its massive 4GB or 8GB of storage.
But as you point out, the storage is quite small. The hardware could perfectly well stream over WiFi, until you take away security updates and the ability to install the app.
> It was a much better NAS than trying to repurpose an iPhone with very bad Wifi.
A modern one would be better still, but I'm trying to use the thing I already have sitting in a drawer, not acquire something else.
And sometimes the performance is irrelevant. If I'm just using it for automated backups I don't much care if it finishes in one minute or ten.
> You are going to “read text” on a 3.5 inch 320x480 Poot resolution screen in 2023?
Maybe I wouldn't, but some kid whose alternative is having no device at all, sure.
> And you want Apple to continue supporting a “phone” that can’t be used as a phone anymore?
It was never just a phone, but hotspot + WiFi calling and it still is a phone. To say nothing of Signal or similar.
Your argument comes down to "newer things are better," but that isn't the same as older things are trash. Until you stop updating them and refuse to provide the documentation needed for anybody else to do it.
> Now you're arguing against yourself. An original iPhone
I’m arguing that my 2010 Dell Core2Duo that had 8GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 display has specs that in some ways are equivalent to a computer you could buy today and has hardware capable of running the latest browsers, the latest version of Office has enough RAM, has wired Ethernet that is still capable of completely taking advantage of my gigabit Ethernet and has wireless N.
A 2007 iPhone has a crappy display, not enough memory or processing power to run a modern web browser and can’t actually function as a phone. My old first gen iPad crashes repeatedly on modern web pages. Of course I have newer devices.
The earliest iPhone that has any decent hardware to handle the modern web is the iPhone 5s. Apple just a released a security update for it recently but
What are children going go do with it if it can’t even use the modern web? They would be much better off getting one of the many $40 unsubsidized unlocked phones you can buy on Amazon.
And from working with different educational institutions, I know for a fact that they think old computers are more trouble than they are worth and would much rather have a bunch of low cost ChromeBooks.
If you want to help a child, give money to the organizations instead of junk computers.
> It was never just a phone, but hotspot + WiFi calling and it still is a phone. To say nothing of Signal or similar
The first gen iPhone couldn’t support hotspot functionality nor could it do wifi calling.
Again, why try to keep an old half functioning phone when you could buy a much more capable $30 Android phone.
Even in developing countries the average phone user has a much better phone than the original phone. The phone penetration rate even in the poorest countries is 80-90%
And on top of that, Apple only sold around 10 million first gen iPhones. How many do you think are still in the wild?
> I’m arguing that my 2010 Dell Core2Duo that had 8GB RAM, a 500GB hard drive, gigabit Ethernet and a 1920x1200 display has specs that in some ways are equivalent to a computer you could buy today and has hardware capable of running the latest browsers, the latest version of Office has enough RAM, has wired Ethernet that is still capable of completely taking advantage of my gigabit Ethernet and has wireless N.
The Core 2 Duo is so old they don't even test it against the modern benchmark suites, but the Pentium Dual Core is the same chip with a different amount of L2 cache:
But the Core 2 Duo is still useful for many of the things it could do at introduction. As is the original iPhone.
> A 2007 iPhone has a crappy display, not enough memory or processing power to run a modern web browser
"Modern web browsers" are more efficient than old ones. It's modern web pages that are resource hogs, but that depends on the page.
> What are children going go do with it if it can’t even use the modern web?
I hear the kids are into texting.
> They would be much better off getting one of the many $40 unsubsidized unlocked phones you can buy on Amazon.
The ones that aren't actually unsubsidized because they're full of crapware?
> And from working with different educational institutions, I know for a fact that they think old computers are more trouble than they are worth and would much rather have a bunch of low cost ChromeBooks.
Google designed ChromeBooks as a mechanism to get people into their ecosystem. They allow the administrators to externalize the cost of that onto the kids, and they're under enough resource constraints that they're willing to do it, but that doesn't make it in the best interest of the kids.
Given the choice between Chromebooks and "Core 2 Duo laptops" running some Debian derivative, the kids would get more out of the latter, even if they're slower. And have higher administrative costs because the kids can mess with them -- that's how they learn about computers.
> The first gen iPhone couldn’t support hotspot functionality nor could it do wifi calling.
You don't use the phone as a hotspot, you use a hotspot to connect the phone to the internet via WiFi as a workaround for its obsolete cell modem that Apple chose not to make replaceable. And WiFi calling is an app, not a characteristic of the hardware.
> Again, why try to keep an old half functioning phone when you could buy a much more capable $30 Android phone.
Less crapware, less e-waste, save $30 (recurring, since the crap Android phone will probably be out of support again in a year).
> Even in developing countries the average phone user has a much better phone than the original phone. The phone penetration rate even in the poorest countries is 80-90%
But many of those devices don't have significantly better hardware than the original iPhone...
> And on top of that, Apple only sold around 10 million first gen iPhones. How many do you think are still in the wild?
Not as many as there would have been.
But even if they don't want to support it themselves, what's their excuse for not publishing their hardware documentation so someone else can do it?
> The difference between these and modern CPUs is stark
And that doesn’t obviate the fact that I know from personal experience that it could run Chrome, Windows 10, the latest version of Office365 and it could be used as a Plex server to serve standard definition and low complexity high def video.
> Modern web browsers" are more efficient than old ones. It's modern web pages that are resource hogs, but that depends on the page.
Modern web browsers are much less memory and resource efficient than old ones.
The first gen iPad from 2010 - 4 years newer can’t handle modern web pages except for HN. It had 256MB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.
> Given the choice between Chromebooks and "Core 2 Duo laptops" running some Debian derivative, the kids would get more out of the latter, even if they're slower. And have higher administrative costs because the kids can mess with them -- that's how they learn about computers
Yes because the ROI of old Linux devices that aren’t centrally managed without standardize hardware or any MDM solution is going to be much easier to manage.
> You don't use the phone as a hotspot, you use a hotspot to connect the phone to the internet via WiFi as a workaround for its obsolete cell modem that Apple chose not to make replaceable
So yes. There is nothing else that you need to do with an iPhone with a 400Mhz processor, a really slow bus, 128MB of RAM and a total of 4GB - 8GB of storage except make the modem upgradeable.
> Less crapware, less e-waste, save $30 (recurring, since the crap Android phone will probably be out of support again in a year).
So instead, Apple should keep supporting the original iPhone that sold around 10 million in the first year…
> But many of those devices don't have significantly better hardware than the original iPhone...
Are you really going to say it’s not any better than an iPhone from 2007, with a 30 pin iPod connector, 128MB RAM, a low resolution camera that couldn’t do video, 4-8GB storage, and a 400Mhz processor?
> And that doesn’t obviate the fact that I know from personal experience that it could run Chrome, Windows 10, the latest version of Office365 and it could be used as a Plex server to serve standard definition and low complexity high def video.
And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
> Modern web browsers are much less memory and resource efficient than old ones.
Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers. But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.
> Yes because the ROI of old Linux devices that aren’t centrally managed without standardize hardware or any MDM solution is going to be much easier to manage.
You're telling me why Google was smart to make their "get 'em while they're young" tech appeal to administrators, not why this is better for the kids.
> So yes. There is nothing else that you need to do with an iPhone with a 400Mhz processor, a really slow bus, 128MB of RAM and a total of 4GB - 8GB of storage except make the modem upgradeable.
Nothing else you need to make phone calls.
> So instead, Apple should keep supporting the original iPhone that sold around 10 million in the first year…
Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.
And the only reason they're the only ones who can support it is that they don't publish sufficient documentation for anyone else to make drivers for it. They could do that once at the end official support and no one would have any complaints.
> Are you really going to say it’s not any better than an iPhone from 2007, with a 30 pin iPod connector, 128MB RAM, a low resolution camera that couldn’t do video, 4-8GB storage, and a 400Mhz processor?
You can get a Core i5-4590 PC for less than $50. Are you really going to say it's not any better than a Core 2 Duo with no AVX, a max of 8GB of RAM and USB2?
> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
I dusted off my old iPad from 2010 - a device that was four years newer a couple of years ago. It couldn’t handle many web pages.
I also dusted off my old 1st gen iPod Touch a couple of years ago it had the same hardware - except for the cellular modem - as the first gen iPhone. Do you remember that with the first gen iPhone, it didn’t have enough memory and processing power to hold an entire page in memory? If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard pattern while the rendering caught up. The iPhone couldn’t even handle what was the modern web then.
It definitely couldn’t handle inline video. It didn’t even have enough memory to allow you to have a background image on the Home Screen.
> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.
Texting and SMS always goes over the carriers network. The carriers don’t support their 2G network anymore.
> Nothing else you need to make phone calls.
You remember that whole problem that the 2G original iPhone works on a network that is not supported anymore?
> Why not? Their OS is portable.
The “modern” version of iOS is not “portable” to a phone that only has a 400Mhz processor and 128GB of RAM. iOS 5 could barely run on the first generation iPad that was 4 years newer. The original iPhone struggled with iOS 3.
> 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.
> Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines
They are “more efficient” because they have multistage just in time compilers that cache the pre compiled code. Caching takes memory - modern iPhones have 3GB - 6GB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.
A modern iPhone also has multiple cores. Some of those cores can be used to do JIT on the JavaScript code while other cores are used to make sure that the UI is responsive. The original iPhone had one slow 400Mhz slow core compared to the 4-6 multi GHz cores.
> and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers.
Desktop operating systems have swap where they can swap memory to disk and they also have a larger 64 bit memory space. The original iPhone didn’t have swap and it only has a 32 bit processing space.
Even today, Safari will unload pages when it runs out of memory and refresh it losing context. But do you remember that whole issue that the original iPhone couldn’t keep the graphic context of one entire page in memory?
> But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.
That’s not true on mobile even today.
> Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices.
Back when the iPhone was introduced, Jobs said he wanted to capture 1% of the cellular market by selling 10 million devices. The iPhone only made up 1% of the cell phone market as it existed in 2007. How many users do you think were still using an original iPhone in 2010 let alone 2023?
> That doesn't make the Core 2 Duo useless.
The Core2Duo is not useless precisely because it can do what a modern computer user wants to do - run the latest OS, run the latest browser, use a decent wireless network standard (802.11n), mine had gigabit Ethernet which is still the highest speed commercially available to most consumers, run the latest version of Office365. It has a front facing camera and a nice screen. Low end computers today still come with 8GB of RAM. The average low end computer today still comes with less than 500GB of hard drive space.
The original iPhone can’t function as a phone. It has 40-60x less memory than a modern iPhone, 8-16x less storage, an outdated wifi technology (802.11g)
Laughs in Microsoft
How about 20 years?!
I have a laptop built in 2006, it runs Windows 10 and will be supported untill 2025.
It can also run software compiled in 1999! What platform can beat it, an IBM mainframe?
Microsoft is the gold standard! Its a shame they never get credit for the one thing they do well.