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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

As someone who jumped on the ARM train early, and someone who doesn't want to contribute to creating more electronic waste than necessary, it's disheartening to see 32-bit ARM being increasingly ignored as a platform compared to ARM64.

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It's not just ARM; the same has been happening to x86. 32-bit in general is going out of fashion for general-purpose platforms.

I keep a 32-bit x86 Mac alive as a hobby project, and I've noticed the same thing. Debian seems to be the only Linux distribution with a maintained and up-to-date x86 port.

edit: I don't want to take up more space in this thread, but would like to thank Vogtinator and saagarjha for pointing out other options for 32-bit Linux distributions.

Alpine Linux supports it.

openSUSE Tumbleweed supports i586 and up.

Tumbleweed is just great!!! That comes from a Arch and FreeBSD veteran.

Well, even many mid-tier phones already have 4 GB RAM now.

The demise of 32-bit was/is inevitable for personal computing.

ARM 32 bit is supported by OCaml. Just not for iOS/MacOS since the 32 bit iOS devices are ancient by now.

> 32 bit iOS devices are ancient by now

The last iPhone with a 32-bit processor appears to be the iPhone 5c, last produced in 2015. As I type this on a laptop from 2015, I have to question your definition of "ancient".

iPhone 5c uses technology from 2012; it was already terrible to use as it approached its end-of-life in 2017. Old phones just don’t really have the lifespan that computers do. (In contrast, my iPhone SE–which is using 5-year-old technology as well–is still an excellent phone.)

I think that’s increasingly not the case. I’m writing this message on an iPhone 6s which honestly still feels great. I had the battery replaced a couple years ago but aside from that I haven’t had any problems with it - all the apps I run on it feel smooth and responsive. (And in some cases better than my desktop since they aren’t running through electron.)

If not for the camera and iOS support inevitably ending, I don’t see much reason to upgrade.

I think the iPhone 6S is actually the oldest phone to which this applies. It was a big step up in processor speed from the 6, and I think it marked the point at which phone cpus hit "fast enough". Hopefully apple continue to support the 6S for at least a couple more years, because I don't think there's any technical reason why they can't.

Notably it has also 2GB of RAM, when the older devices have 1.

One of the kids' phones is an SE which is pretty much the same internals as the 6S and it's still good.

Ancient, unsupported, and shrinking as older devices are broken or unused and no new device is built. There aren’t many reasons to target 32-bit iPhones, unless it’s a hobby.

32-bit iPhones run iOS 10, so if you have a deployment target set that far back you should support them.

Right, I meant in the context of bringing Open Source tools to 32-bit ARM platforms. I don't think the people holding on to their iPhone 5Cs would bother with OCaml. Of course, if a hacker wants to do it, it's great.

I too am typing it from a 2015 computer.

The definition of "ancient" is probably not the same for your laptop and for a planned-obsolescence apple mobile device

It's not just about electronic waste, many low power embedded platforms are still ARM 32 bit.

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