Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xFFC | Hacker News Reader

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>Device manufactures depend on you buying new phones. They cannot support phones after two years or else it kills their profit margins.

This is the reason after using Nexus devices for 5 year, I will buy an iPhone and I will never ever look at Android again. My girlfriend switched from Galaxy note 4 to iPhone last year, and she is amazed how much iPhone experience is better than high-end Android experience.

2 year only update? Give me a fucking break, this total rip off. If I remember correctly even iPhone 5 does get update(and remember iPhone 5 is 5 year old phone, which will get new version of OS, not just security update, this alone is more than lifespan of Nexus or pixel device). Let alone the fact phone processors passed the threshold, phone produced after 2015 are almost as powerful as desktop from ~2005. My point is , if you don't play intensive games or any specific use case, an above ordinary phone would run browser,mail client, chat apps for more than 4 year without any issue. But companies trying to minimize lifespan just because of their own profit.

And my answer to them would be my middle finger.

They are totally screwing up customers.

I agree with you, phone companies have developed a planned obsolesce model that is very frustrating. I actually just went through the same process in the opposite direction - I switched from having iPhones to Android. I've heard tales of iPhones staying capable and functional for many years but my experience was that after a year or two there'd be an update that drastically reduced the performance (or rendered it basically unusable which happened 3 times). I suppose the grass is greener on the other side but I'm pleased so far with my switch. Good luck.

In my experience with iPhones, this was true for older generations where they simply didn't have the processing power for newer OS features. My switch from my iPhone 4 to a 5 was strictly for performance reasons, but I went from my 5 to a 6S just to have something newer with mostly a better camera and touch-id. Performance-wise the phone was still perfectly usable (my brother still uses it). Sure it was a lot faster, and there still are massive leaps in performance with every generation, but these days that performance is mostly used to race to idle for improved battery life.

For the current applications, an iPhone 5S level of performance - a phone which is 4 years old - is still very usable today. That's also why Android flagship phones aren't really in trouble while still struggling to match the performance of a year-old iPhone 6S, and can't even dream of getting near the iPhone 7's performance. They mostly try to compete with stuff people do notice these days: the camera - where they have a lot more success.

...Cyanogen?

For instance, if your kernel depends on Qualcomm snapdragon 800 support and Qualcomm no longer supports those closed bits for OpenGL and the rest, then even with cyanogenmod you'll never be fully patched. But cyanogenmod isn't the smoothest experience to be honest.

"..remember iPhone 5 is 5 year old phone, which will get new version of OS, not just security update"

Yes, and remember that Apple intentionally writes OS updates that will run slower on their older devices, thus achieving almost the same thing but slightly less blatantly.

It maybe the case that OS updates run slower on older devices but I think it's a pretty strong statement to claim that this is "intentional", at least in the sense that you seem to be implying.

Do you have some strong evidence of this? Amusingly it's actually being tested in court (see the class action referred to in the link below):

http://www.cbronline.com/news/mobility/devices/apple-accused...

Some updates actually make older devices go faster, anecdotally.

My iPad 3 is still usable and receiving security updates. The idea of the same being true for an android tablet of the same vintage is hilarious.

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