Apple has actually been doing really well on the software side of this iOS9 will support the iPhone 4S (released in 2011) through to the upcoming 6s. That's 5 generations of devices that will be on the latest version of the OS. To put it into perspective, how many other cell phones out there are able to run the latest version of the OS 5 years after their release date?
Electronic devices don't get "obsolete" as much as they get better so fast that the old device seems lame in comparison. A four-year-old PC is as fast as when it was new, but modern PCs are 10 times as powerful for the same price, so the old PC seems obsolete. My 9-year-old Canon 5D camera takes incredibly good photos, but the modern cameras are so insane (shoot a full movie in moonlight) that the 5D seems like an amateur in comparison.
An iPhone 4S is a great phone compared to everything except newer phones.
Electronic devices don't get "obsolete" as much as they get better so fast that the old device seems lame in comparison.
Which would be fine if the device still did what you want it to do. But in fact connected electronic devices do go obsolete as soon as vendors stop providing security updates.
I am a bit confused as to how they stop doing 'what you want it to do' when they stop getting security patches. Sure, they won't have the latest security, but you can still 'use' the device in every way you did before... they might be vulnerable, but they were vulnerable before and you still used it.
Let's not forget about the reliance on services. My second generation Apple TV can no longer view YouTube because it will not be updated to Google's new authentication scheme. So I have a product that does less today than the day I bought it.
This is one of the reasons I have no interest in a "smart TV".
I want a good quality screen, a good quality sound system, and enough connectivity to get signals to them at the highest quality they can use. Updates to where those signals come from should not require physically swapping large and extremely expensive equipment. That is just crazy.
And yet today my TV can hang while showing broadcast TV because someone changed a compression algorithm and caused the decoding software to glitch, and when I put a Blu-Ray in my player often the first thing I see is a warning that I might have to update the firmware in the device just to watch the movie.
This is not progress, and the sooner we go back to separating communications devices/protocols/software from the main hardware in this sort of situation and then using appropriate safeguards and updates on the things that actually need them with everything else properly isolated, the better the world will be.
A four-year-old PC is as fast as when it was new, but modern PCs are 10 times as powerful for the same price
No, they aren't. That hasn't been even close to true for many years.
For example, I work with some very high-end PC workstations (think multimedia, 3D modelling, that kind of thing). Sure, the new spec ones are a bit faster, but if you look back those 4 years you mentioned, there really isn't that much difference.
The price/performance sweet spot back then was probably an i7 2600K. Are modern CPUs faster? Sure. Are they an order of magnitude faster? Not even close. The main emphasis in recent years has been on lower power/heat and to some extent on increasing core count particularly at the high end. Actual per-core speeds or instruction processing has improved only modestly. And in most applications, they were already so powerful that you wouldn't even notice the difference.
Graphics cards are a similar story. Of course modern cards are somewhat faster than their counterparts from a generation ago, but unless you use the most demanding software, the card in that i7 2600K machine probably still works just fine with today's applications. Again, most people wouldn't even notice the difference, because the baseline level was already high enough.
The amount of RAM typically supplied in modern PCs hasn't much changed, so no huge jumps in capability there either. In fact, I'd say storage and networking are probably the only major areas where speeds are dramatically better today than they were four years ago in most western economies. This is largely because it has become cost-effective at mainstream levels to use things like SSDs, fibre broadband and 4G mobile networks where the previous generation of devices at a similar price point would have used spinning platters, old phone lines and 3G. These changes really do render the previous generation of devices obsolete at a similar price point and really do make a substantial difference to what an average user can do with the new equipment.
The only other area where there have been dramatic improvements, not in performance but in capability, are displays. The 200+ ppi devices previously reserved for high-end and physically small mobile devices are now widely available in laptops. Your new 48" TV might show 4K material natively. But again, this only helps if you have content to look at that can take advantage of the finer details, which a lot of people won't, so I'd hardly say it makes a good display from the previous generation obsolete.
I have a 10-year-old Athlon 64 x2 desktop which doesn't seem obsolete at all. It's about the same speed as the docked Atom tablet from last year I am using right now as my regular workstation. It even runs most modern games pretty well. So I've lost a lot of weight over the years, gained a little speed, and lost a lot of GPU power. With the expansion of cloud computing and the stagnation of desktop software, I will probably be able to use that desktop for another 10 years unless the hardware fails, but it's used rarely enough that I think it will last.
The 4S is another example of an older device that competes really well with modern hardware.
This seems to have slowed down considerably on the PC side, and mobile devices seems to rapidly be heading towards numeric increase for numeric increase sake.
Well, a lot of computers cost about $1000 and the depreciation schedule for computers is 5 years. Since iOS 10 won't come out until 2016 at the earliest...
That's just because an accountant somewhere decided 5 years was a reasonable average time to write down the value of the PC as an economic asset. Given both the chances of hardware failures and general accounting practices, that probably wasn't unreasonable at the time. But it doesn't mean that the value of a 5-year-old PC has suddenly become zero to a user if it's still working fine.
This is something that played a big role in me going from Android to iPhone.
I was big into Android since the HTC G1, and just liked the feel of it over iOS. But if I wanted the latest release of android (without flashing the device, and usually compromising some feature) I had to buy a new phone, extend my contract, etc. I really like how Apple supports their past phones with updates for years after their release.
That's 5 generations of devices that will be on the latest version of the OS.
You might in theory be able to run it on an iPad of the same generation as well, but ask a few people who upgraded their iPad to iOS7 or above how well it worked afterwards and you'll hear plenty of complaints, particularly about performance being much worse on the older hardware.
Comments
Apple has actually been doing really well on the software side of this iOS9 will support the iPhone 4S (released in 2011) through to the upcoming 6s. That's 5 generations of devices that will be on the latest version of the OS. To put it into perspective, how many other cell phones out there are able to run the latest version of the OS 5 years after their release date?
How many other ~$1000 devices are obsolete after four years?
Electronic devices don't get "obsolete" as much as they get better so fast that the old device seems lame in comparison. A four-year-old PC is as fast as when it was new, but modern PCs are 10 times as powerful for the same price, so the old PC seems obsolete. My 9-year-old Canon 5D camera takes incredibly good photos, but the modern cameras are so insane (shoot a full movie in moonlight) that the 5D seems like an amateur in comparison.
An iPhone 4S is a great phone compared to everything except newer phones.
Which would be fine if the device still did what you want it to do. But in fact connected electronic devices do go obsolete as soon as vendors stop providing security updates.
I am a bit confused as to how they stop doing 'what you want it to do' when they stop getting security patches. Sure, they won't have the latest security, but you can still 'use' the device in every way you did before... they might be vulnerable, but they were vulnerable before and you still used it.
Let's not forget about the reliance on services. My second generation Apple TV can no longer view YouTube because it will not be updated to Google's new authentication scheme. So I have a product that does less today than the day I bought it.
This is one of the reasons I have no interest in a "smart TV".
I want a good quality screen, a good quality sound system, and enough connectivity to get signals to them at the highest quality they can use. Updates to where those signals come from should not require physically swapping large and extremely expensive equipment. That is just crazy.
And yet today my TV can hang while showing broadcast TV because someone changed a compression algorithm and caused the decoding software to glitch, and when I put a Blu-Ray in my player often the first thing I see is a warning that I might have to update the firmware in the device just to watch the movie.
This is not progress, and the sooner we go back to separating communications devices/protocols/software from the main hardware in this sort of situation and then using appropriate safeguards and updates on the things that actually need them with everything else properly isolated, the better the world will be.
For me a device like a smartphone or even a TV if it's connected to streaming services is unusable once security is permanently compromised.
So then, you would be okay with a military sending in troops with old, underpowered armaments because "it still works."
All it takes is a simple torch to kill a strawman.
A four-year-old PC is as fast as when it was new, but modern PCs are 10 times as powerful for the same price
No, they aren't. That hasn't been even close to true for many years.
For example, I work with some very high-end PC workstations (think multimedia, 3D modelling, that kind of thing). Sure, the new spec ones are a bit faster, but if you look back those 4 years you mentioned, there really isn't that much difference.
The price/performance sweet spot back then was probably an i7 2600K. Are modern CPUs faster? Sure. Are they an order of magnitude faster? Not even close. The main emphasis in recent years has been on lower power/heat and to some extent on increasing core count particularly at the high end. Actual per-core speeds or instruction processing has improved only modestly. And in most applications, they were already so powerful that you wouldn't even notice the difference.
Graphics cards are a similar story. Of course modern cards are somewhat faster than their counterparts from a generation ago, but unless you use the most demanding software, the card in that i7 2600K machine probably still works just fine with today's applications. Again, most people wouldn't even notice the difference, because the baseline level was already high enough.
The amount of RAM typically supplied in modern PCs hasn't much changed, so no huge jumps in capability there either. In fact, I'd say storage and networking are probably the only major areas where speeds are dramatically better today than they were four years ago in most western economies. This is largely because it has become cost-effective at mainstream levels to use things like SSDs, fibre broadband and 4G mobile networks where the previous generation of devices at a similar price point would have used spinning platters, old phone lines and 3G. These changes really do render the previous generation of devices obsolete at a similar price point and really do make a substantial difference to what an average user can do with the new equipment.
The only other area where there have been dramatic improvements, not in performance but in capability, are displays. The 200+ ppi devices previously reserved for high-end and physically small mobile devices are now widely available in laptops. Your new 48" TV might show 4K material natively. But again, this only helps if you have content to look at that can take advantage of the finer details, which a lot of people won't, so I'd hardly say it makes a good display from the previous generation obsolete.
I have a 10-year-old Athlon 64 x2 desktop which doesn't seem obsolete at all. It's about the same speed as the docked Atom tablet from last year I am using right now as my regular workstation. It even runs most modern games pretty well. So I've lost a lot of weight over the years, gained a little speed, and lost a lot of GPU power. With the expansion of cloud computing and the stagnation of desktop software, I will probably be able to use that desktop for another 10 years unless the hardware fails, but it's used rarely enough that I think it will last.
The 4S is another example of an older device that competes really well with modern hardware.
This seems to have slowed down considerably on the PC side, and mobile devices seems to rapidly be heading towards numeric increase for numeric increase sake.
Well, a lot of computers cost about $1000 and the depreciation schedule for computers is 5 years. Since iOS 10 won't come out until 2016 at the earliest...
All computers?
That's just because an accountant somewhere decided 5 years was a reasonable average time to write down the value of the PC as an economic asset. Given both the chances of hardware failures and general accounting practices, that probably wasn't unreasonable at the time. But it doesn't mean that the value of a 5-year-old PC has suddenly become zero to a user if it's still working fine.
This is something that played a big role in me going from Android to iPhone. I was big into Android since the HTC G1, and just liked the feel of it over iOS. But if I wanted the latest release of android (without flashing the device, and usually compromising some feature) I had to buy a new phone, extend my contract, etc. I really like how Apple supports their past phones with updates for years after their release.
That's 5 generations of devices that will be on the latest version of the OS.
You might in theory be able to run it on an iPad of the same generation as well, but ask a few people who upgraded their iPad to iOS7 or above how well it worked afterwards and you'll hear plenty of complaints, particularly about performance being much worse on the older hardware.