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Comment by oneeyedpigeon | Hacker News Reader

> the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2013~2016 iPhone

Devil's advocate: you don't have to install iOS 11 on your four-year-old iPhone.

This, unfortunately, means no more security updates. So if someone finds a new exploit you are vulnerable. Plus the software update will keep nagging with its damn badge on the settings icon (that alone would drive me crazy enough to just do it).

If your phone can't upgrade to 11 you may very well get security updates, this has been the case in the past. I don't know what's the situation is like when you can but won't update to a new major version.

> Devil's advocate: you don't have to install iOS 11 on your four-year-old iPhone.

That is in fact my plan, but is nonetheless frustrating.

It only takes one "This app requires iOS11 to run" and there you go.

There are very few apps that require the latest OS to run unless they are 64 bit only. Even then, if there is an older version on the app store that was supported by your OS, you will be given the option to download an older version most of the time.

I can still download older versions of apps on my first gen iPad that hasn't been supported by iOS since 9/2012.

The typical lifetime of an iPhone is so short, I can imagine that Apple will one day save themselves a lot of pain and cost and just limit each iOS release to a single phone / ipad release.

That's not accurate. I keep my iPhones for two years, and when I upgrade I give them to family members who have always gotten another 2-3 years of use out of them. (And Apple has continued to support them during that time with software updates.)

It's actually one of the main things that keeps me in the iPhone ecosystem.

That's strange, I still see iPhone 4s/5/5s on the regular. The lifetime of my iPhone is typically a year, yes, but my used phones live on for many more years through other people after I sell them.

Yes, 5 years of constant updates for every phone is so short, especially compared to Androids zero years.

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