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Comment by taylodl | Hacker News Reader

From a reduce, reuse, recycle standpoint - iPhones just make sense.

I don't think I'd use those words to describe locked down hardware. You'd be stuck with a 5+ year old browser that you can't upgrade because Apple bans other browsers from running on iOS, you wouldn't be able to install modern apps because the App Store stopped distributing packages that are compatible with your phone and Apple won't let you install apps any other way, and you can't install a modern OS of your choosing to address either of the first two issues. You're also stuck with old or non-existent drivers for any hardware you might want to use.

Meanwhile, I have 12+ year old Macs that still work great, have up-to-date browsers, can install any app, and can run the same modern software that my 6 month old machine can.

iPhones make sense from a reduce and reuse (as an egg timer) standpoint. Apple can clearly build products that can stand the test of time and still be genuinely reusable, but those products aren't iPhones.

> you wouldn't be able to install modern apps because the App Store stopped distributing packages that are compatible with your phone

As of at least 2 years ago, I was able to dust off an old first gen iPad from 2010 that last got updated in 2012, reset it and log on and download the “last compatible version” of apps like Netflix, Crackle, Hulu, Plex, and Google Drive.

> You'd be stuck with a 5+ year old browser that you can't upgrade because Apple bans other browsers from running on iOS

You never tried browsing modern websites on older iOS devices have you?

> You never tried browsing modern websites on older iOS devices have you?

I have, it's how I learned that WebP images still weren't safe to use because Safari didn't support them until ~2020. Encountered a lot of pages that were just blank white documents, assuming it's because they failed to render the markup or whatever frontend frameworks they used weren't compatible.

I'm basing my post off of my experiences of trying to reuse old iPads.

> You never tried browsing modern websites on older iOS devices have you?

Is it good or bad? Please enlighten us.

Well, on my iPad mini 1st gen the web is unusably slow.

Yeah even if there were modern browsers for earlier iPads and iPhones, they wouldn’t be pleasant to use because modern mountains-of-JavaScript websites are too much for the ARM CPUs in those devices to handle. The average Core 2 Duo PC handily outstrips early tablets and smartphones in terms of raw power, which is why they can manage the modern web better — in comparison browsing the web on e.g. an early iPad is like doing the same on a PC from the era of Pentium 3’s and 4’s and PPC G3s and G4s.

Safari crashed regularly on an iPad 1st gen by 2012 with iOS 5.

What you can use it on does deteriorate though, since tons of new apps require iOS 14 or 15 to even run, and if there is an app with an iOS 12 version, it might just be out-of-date with the remote UI. I suppose that, if your use case for a phone is running the apps and websites of "today", then you must upgrade at least somewhat regularly.

The iPhone 6S (and the OG iPhone SE) still run iOS 15, so should be usable for maybe 2 more years. It was released in 2015, so could come close to 10 years of practical use. Note all iPhones fare equally well, but you should probably be able get 6+ years out of any model.

I'm still using an iPhone 6S as a secondary phone. Amazed at how well it still works, including the battery.

The point of comparison are Android smartphones and those only used to get 1-2 years of updates. This is slowly changing with G. Pixel, S. Galaxy, and OnePlus providing a couple of major Android feature updates and ~4 years of security updates, but this still falls short of Apple's current 6 years of feature (iOS) updates. In that context iPhones make more sense from the "reduce" perspective if they're kept in use for the entirety of their useful life.

The apps you've already had installed continue to run just fine. The device is getting security updates so you don't have concerns there and the device was built rugged enough to still be used years later.

Can you run all the latest apps? Maybe not, but are you confident any device you currently have can run the apps that will be released ten years from now? In the case of Apple you know that the apps you're running right now you'll still be able to run ten years from now. That's the difference, and for a lot of people that's perfectly fine. There are still a lot of people quite happily running their early gen iPads, for instance. It still does everything they need it to do.

Where Apple is setting themselves apart is not forcing you to buy new hardware because you need critical security issues fixed. If you want new functionality and features, sure, you may need to buy new hardware - but you shouldn't have to buy new hardware to get security vulnerabilities resolved.

New apps require the latest version for the newest releases. You can download the “last compatible version” for older devices.

In theory, but in practice it doesn't work. I have an iPad Air 1 stuck on iOS 12 and it's basically useless since probably 75% of the apps you might want to install either refuse or don't work. All things that worked fine during its supported lifetime.

I only use it as a web development testing device since I like to maintain compatibility with older devices even if the userbase is trivial.

Yes that’s true. Especially for apps that require a back end API that’s been deprecated like YouTube.

YouTube apps stopped working on older devices a few years ago.

Netflix on the other hand never deprecates their APIs.

Older Apple apps that you download like Numbers, Pages, etc still work. Last time I checked, Spotify still works as well as music and movies you purchased from iTunes.

I even had Apple Maps powered by Google work on a 1st gen iPod Touch (2007)

No you can't unless you've already "purchased" the app before

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