Nexus 5 released late 2013, last major OS update in late 2015. Compare to the iPhone 4S, which came out late 2011 and still got iOS 9 (4 years later).
Really not buying the "two years is plenty of updates" excuse, especially from the Nexus line.
In my experience, the bigger issue was designers assuming everyone has the taller iPhone 5 screen size (or worse, iPhone 6) and burning up 95% of the screen with keyboard + giant fixed header + fixed footer. Some apps would give you space for maybe two lines of content in between all that.
More of a complaint with 3rd party devs on that though.
Also the "cherrypick" comment is a bit of a dodge - Google already does security patches for older releases (3 years vs. 2).
It would arguably be just as easy to secure one codebase and pare features down for performance.
So I do commend apple for getting updates to that device for 4 years, but at least in their experience, it made the phone worse and didn't bring all the features that they wanted.
As I recall all those features were built only for 64bit CPUs which the 4s/mini didn't have.
well they should.
I'm not impressed with two years of updates either, but I don't think people have any right to complain when that's exactly what they were promised when they bought their phones.
If people are disappointed because they chose to believe, against all evidence, that Google would exceed the promised two years of updates, that's nobody's problem but their own.
The damage is possibly my fault as I opened the phone to change the battery (which died in two years), but the lack of an user accessible battery and it's poor battery life are a problem.
I'll feel sad not to be on the leading edge for the first time in years (had Nexus 4 before)
If you want to save a couple hundred dollars, then maybe it's time to learn about a custom recovery and loading the 7.0 rom yourself!
I don't think the factory images are even out yet, so it'll take a bit for them to get a nice stable AOSP+gapps package for you
Wireless charging is the killer feature for wireless devices in my opinion. I can't wait for the day when every one of my devices and wireless peripherals supports wireless charging, so I can just lay them down on a large charging pad when I'm not using them and never have to worry about not having a full battery when I pick it up for use, or have to fumble with plugging wire into every single device.
There's a way to add wireless charging to your 5X if you're handy with a soldering iron, though.
My Nexus 5 was in use up until a couple of weeks ago. Then it entered a state where, when plugged in, it rebooted in an eternal loop and, when not plugged in, it shut off. Judging by the internet, this is a common problem for them.
I followed the advice I found in multiple places of trying to dislodge the Nexus 5's stuck power button by whacking it against a soft object. That worked -- it will now try to boot, fail to mount the hard drive, and just keep displaying the booting animation forever. It can boot into the bootloader and recovery mode, and I can flash a new recovery image in fastboot, or at least I can issue the command and see a report of success, but on reboot I just get the old recovery mode.
So... I guess I do have a compelling reason to upgrade, although the N5 was satisfactory in every other way. My Nexus 4 still works fine, but it's gotten much puffier than it should be, and apparently it's impossible to get a new battery for it.
:(
Unless you are unlucky enough to get a device that they can't update due to drivers (Texas Instruments CPU).
Every one of my phones has lost manufacturer support 1-3 years after I got them...but my 5 year old Galaxy Nexus still has Cyanogenmod builds being released for it (based on Marshmallow).
With the timelines of when these different markets began, I think that's a fair comparison. Manufacturers want to maintain as few models as possible, but the community often does the work to provide extended support time.
We're going through the same technology change with mobiles now, but that even seems to be tapering off now.
The bigger story may be the inability to come up with a compelling reason for N5 users to upgrade, other than getting the latest OS revision. The N5's compactness in particular makes the 5X (and the impending successor, codenamed "Sailfish") a tough sell.