Nope, they aren't. My home PC hails from 2008, runs the latest Windows 10 update, and a range of software from early 2000s to 2018. It runs modern games, too (I like playing indie games that aren't too demanding).

Secret sauce? Modern SSD and a GPU from a few years back, plus an HDD to serve as a repository of all my data.

But even without the benefit or running Win 10 and hardware upgrades: I also spun up my old 2006 laptop the other day to rip a CD (my other machines don't have a drive), and guess what, FF Quantum runs well on it. Bring on your web apps, that XP machine will run 'em.

My point is that the PC's really don't suffer from the level of planned obsolescence that device like iPad do.

The PCs, ultimately, have one large window to see the online world with: the browser, and as long as that runs, the PCs don't lose any utility: whatever task they have enough computational power for today, they will be able to handle in a decade. The mobile devices, with their shift to the app-for-everything ideology pioneered by Apple, have thousands that are easily broken, prompting you to upgrade.

The only real obstacle is the lack of NVME support. SATA3 is a bit of an upgrade bottleneck on these old systems, but even software development on this box was just fine with a fast ssd.

If you are lucky, your BIOS can boot from it.

A fast Core2 or 1st gen i7 is perhaps half the speed of a mid-range system today, and will probably beat some of the budget chips.

Upgrading an oldish system with an SSD can make a big difference. Obviously, GPUs have also got a lot faster too.

Hopefully, the recent competition from AMD will make us see better progress again.

Because it's a costly upgrade, and you might need to buy a different type of RAM.

Adding an SSD or RAM or GPU to an existing system are relatively quick and painless.

Maybe eventually, but not within 5 years. I'm currently typing on a 2011 Dell with an i3 proc and 6GB of RAM, running Ubuntu. I have 19 other tabs open in Chrome. It dual boots Win7.

I can use this 7ish year old PC for social media, email, HD videos and streaming music with few annoyances due to performance, in either OS. Not so with the 5 year iPad he describes. While I can do several of those things at once, it seems he has trouble with even just one.

In that regard, I really don't understand what's happening with smartphones/tablets that suddenly makes them incapable of performing the same tasks, at the same performance, they always did. It's not like I'm suddenly trying to use some performance hungry app/game I never used before, it's the same apps I always use, but they simply perform worse.

If it wasn't for this simple fact I'd probably be still on my iPhone 4s, but after a while, that became even too slow for simple stuff like using WhatsApp. It can't be that the apps become that much more demanding, WhatsApp still did what it always does: Sending and receiving messages, so I really don't understand where that extra demand for performance comes from which suddenly turns whole generations of portable hardware into fancier paper weights.

Plus factor in that the app frameworks themselves get more complex, and the current trend of using-browser-as-frontend (plus all the bloat of the web) and one can see how old devices don't cut it as much. And since each iteration gets bigger, the longer an OEM maintains support the worse it performs.

It would be interesting to compare how well old devices function by how soon OS support is cut -- I'd bet that the earlier a given device is left behind, the better it ends up running.

Competition, that’s what happening.

On PCs we had no competition for many years, that’s why performance has stalled. For example, cpubenchmark.net gives 8739 points to i7-2700K from 2011, and 12078 points to i7-7700K from 2016. Very modest 38% improvement in 5 years and 5 generations of CPUs. Same 4 cores/8 threads, same 8MB cache.

You think WhatsApp of today is the exact same app or backend server logic from a year or two ago?

Any online service is constantly adding functionality on the server side even if the app code is constant ( given its a mobile app this is simply unlikely)

Unless you have an app that's not been upgraded and running in offline mode it's definitely not doing the same thing as a year ago.

To me as a user, it does exactly the very, mundane, same thing it always did: Sending and receiving messages. It's not like WhatsApp now has become an awesome 4k video player, it still does the very same thing it always did.

In that regard, "Added functionality on the server side" does literally nothing for me except make the usability worse by making my client perform worse, so what's in it for me except being forced into buying new hardware? As far as I can tell: Nothing at all.

Tell someone around 2000 that a 7ish year old PC would be adequate and you'd get laughed at. 1993 to 2000, for instance: You'd be comparing a Pentium at 60Mhz (some quick googling says 60Mhz was first hit this year) on the high end to a 1Ghz Athlon. Probably >20x real performance improvement (the clock alone is 16.7x).

Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly.

Then somewhere around when people started to expect Windows on a computer the lifespans got quite a bit shorter, and that seemed to stick into the late 00s. And it's swung back the other direction now... my late 2011 MacBook Pro is good with current Mac OS or current Windows 10 installations, and is only being retired because its soldered-on discrete GPU has started to flake in a way that makes it unusable. (And a replacement motherboard would be stupid expensive.)

The advent of hard disks, and installable OS environments changed the model. Outside of zOS, and maybe IBMi, there simply aren't any OSs that actually have provided a fairly stable OS API over time. Even windows has decided they don't care about backwards compatibility despite the fact that for most purposes the core win32 API present in win2k provides basically everything needed to host the vast majority of modern applications. Games might be the exception but people forget the directX was an install-able component until MS decided to tie to to the OS with vista).

I can run 25-year-old Windows 3.1 applications on a 32-bit Windows 10 box and they work correctly. If I have upgraded to 64-bit, I am merely constrained to 22-year-old Windows 95 applications.

"Mobile devices will catch up and stagnate too, sadly."

Uh, if they catch up to my point, then they will still be useful at 5 - 7 years, thus the opposite of stagnant.

I believe the GP meant that the rapid progress of feature improvement will stagnate, which means older devices won't 'age' as quickly.

Plenty of people used 7-year-old computers in 2000.

My grandpa never got a smart phone. But he was never more than 5 years behind in Home computing well into his 80s.

Gadget nerds have criteria for computers which are not necessarily related to predictability, sturdiness, or fitness for a particular narrow purpose. Instead there is a mix of excitement about technology qua technology, new toys to experiment with, status signaling, etc., in addition to functional improvements for doing real work.

Not everyone shares a gadget nerd’s sensibilities. It’s fine for people to be happy watching TV on a 18" CRT, listening to music on a cassette player, reading paper books instead of a screen, rolling down their car windows with a little crank, playing card games instead of VR games, etc.

1: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/specs/mac_se....

Fixed that for you. Remember that every time you experience an unresponsive GUI anywhere, and that's the easy case.

Beyond that, parallelization is generally not easy.

E.g. Qualcomm SDM845 has 8 cores in total, 4 faster ones that are only used rarely, and 4 power efficient ones.

Also they offload increasing amount of work from less power efficient general-purpose CPUs to other on-chip hardware, DSPs (for many years), and now GPUs (marketing folks call them neural engines or AI chips).

The death of older mobile hardware is at least somewhat exaggerated.

- Automatically upgrading devices to Win10

- Announce that they will keep adding upgrades to win10 instead of creating new releases

- Office 365

- Require win10 to develop for windows phone 10

and important software companies like adobe/autodesk moving to subscription model isn't gonna help.

And once you have the hardware new enough to run hardware virtualization well, there are truly no limits other than raw RAM and CPU.

I've revive an iMac 5,1 under Debian, and it runs. But with 1 GB RAM, it's good for only a small handful of Web browser pages before starting to swap heavily. The system should be good for memory and HD upgrade, though I've yet to look into that.

Compared to a newer Retina iMac, it's actually the screen which is one of the elements that's got me hesitating on an update. The resolution (and brightness) are sufficiently poor that even an update wouldn't give it all that much utility. Given the cost of modest new generic PC hardware, I've got to question the validity of that.

For non-Web use, basic apps, shell, and server roles, it's just fine. It's browsers that are absolute resource monsters.

I fail to see how that is the case? Apple neither forces OS updates, nor forces app updates. An iPad will perform exactly the same, given the same software, after 5 years or 10 years, and the user is in control of that software.

If you are speaking of services, well, that's not unique to iPads, or Apple, but is a consequence of the Internet.

Apple will let you download the most recent version of an app supported by your OS... but only if you'd installed it previously. If you try to install an app for the first time, it won't give that option, and will instead tell you to upgrade your iOS instead. And then there's the fact that many of the old apps simply won't work, because they rely on out-of-date API's no longer supported by servers.

Due to the inability to choose versions of apps to install, I'd say that in iOS the user is not in control of their software.

The only thing that hamstrung me was having to sign out and in to the itunes store once, but i was able to install several games and hulu(which worked!)

I do wish you got a popup with a few options of which point release to install, but i think "newest compatible point release" is a good system for 99% of users

I find this amusing; iOS 6 is just 4 years old (at least, the newest revision of it). My iPod Touch is about 9, and started losing access to new apps about 6-7 years ago.

And of course, Youtube, Netflix, and such stopped supporting the relevant codecs years ago too.

Back to the iPod Touch that I was talking about: The Netflix app that's on there (the newest available for iPhone OS 3.1.3) apparently can't authenticate with Netflix's current backend. Their site says that there's a version for iOS 5 that will still work, and that the current version requires iOS 9.

As I said in another post, comparing the longevity of a mobile device in its first decade to a PC is Apples and Oranges.

Today, I have a few 10 year old computers that are still being used either by me or my parents. My 10 year old PC, I'm using as a plex server can use modern USB 2 peripherals, has gigabit Ethernet that takes full advantage of my gigabit internet, runs a modern OS (Windows 10), etc. It has a 1920x1200 display. It has 4Gb RAM but can be upgraded to 8. 10 years later, most consumer PCs come with 8GB.

Now in 2008, my Gateway Solo from 1998 with an 800x600 display, 16Mb RAM, no USB, and a 4GB hard drive would have been useless. It definitely couldn't run modern software.

But going back to iPads. Compare the longevity of the iPad in 2010 running iOS 5 with a 2007 iPod Touch that came out 4 years earlier. On the other end, compare the longevity of an iPad 2 that got upgraded from iOS 5 to iOS 9 to the first gen that only got upgraded from iOS 3 to iOS 5. I fully expect to see the usefulness of mobile devices - at least on the Apple side where you actually get OS updates to continuously lengthen.

And you'll notice that I corrected the statement from my first post, in the post that you replied to.

> As I said in another post, comparing the longevity of a mobile device in its first decade to a PC is Apples and Oranges.

Where in this thread have I compared the longevity of a mobile device to a PC? If you'd like, I'll add a device comparison. My 40 year old Atari 2600 (from the first decade of home gaming systems) still sees use, and works as well as it ever did.

Time becomes much more of a factor when we rely on constant 3rd party maintenance (app stores, online services, and so on). The age of the device category is less pertinent than how much it relies on off-device services to provide functionality.

> Now in 2008, my Gateway Solo from 1998 with an 800x600 display, 16Mb RAM, no USB, and a 4GB hard drive would have been useless. It definitely couldn't run modern software.

A couple things here. First, I hope you didn't spend much for that computer. Mine at the time had 6x the RAM, USB, and double the hard drive space. Second, I don't see why it would need to run modern software, for the sake of comparison. I'm not asking the iPod to run modern software, I'm asking it to provide the capabilities that it did when I bought it, which it can't, due to excessive reliance on an app store that refuses to carry older software and other 3rd party services that like to move forward in incompatible ways.

She was not given the option to download an older version compatible with iOS 10 and the device is old enough that it does not support iOS 11.

When I was growing up, my parents would give me their 5 year old hand-me-down computers, which were already 4-5 years old or so. the iPhone 4 is 8 years old, so that would already be DOA for my teenage self.

My dad is happy with his iPad 4th generation, which is one iOS version behind. But he is more patient than I, and also it's his only internet-connected device, so he's not comparing it to a fast PC or fast smartphone.

Can I:

     1. Download iOS program binary
     2. Install said iOS binary
     3. Inspect files copied on by installing binary
     4. Modify said files

Apple.

Apple still makes an older version of iTunes available.

Wouldn’t be surprised if they do it for battery replacements as well.

Apple does not, but vendors of networked apps often do in practice (as they don't want to maintain backcompat APIs on the server side). So, you may be perfectly happy with iOS7 on your iPad2, but one day your Skype just stops working, and it demands an update to its newest version - which in turn requires a modern iOS, installing which will effectively brick your tablet. This way, little by little, your tablet's functionality is taken away from you.

A daily (?) annoying prompt to update the OS that can't be permanently banished isn't technically a "forced" update, but it's a clear degradation of usability.

In practice they do. I recently deleted a timelapse app from my new phone (se) because the app wouldn't work with the new update. That may not be the best airtight example as the new OS update I did 'choose' to upgrade to which did somehow break the app, and the creator didn't release an updated version for the new OS, but in a real world scenario are you going to discontinue OS updates on a device you purchased months earlier for a few apps? Meanwhile there's decade old computers running windows xp that have no problems starting photoshop 7.0. There's also this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH1BKPSGcxQ showing Windows upgrades from earliest versions to newest and software like excel being compatible from earliest versions onward.

Under the old desktop upgrade model it's easier to run an unmaintained OS, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Edit: Obviously running a lightweight linux distro is an option for the more technically minded, and it would be great to see projects like https://www.postmarketos.org become more widespread for extending the life of tablet and phone hardware.

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-ca/help/14223/windows-xp-en...

[2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?alpha=W...

If I chose to put Windows 10 on my 9 year old desktop, it'd run better than Windows 10 on the laptop I bought a year ago as a netbook-style machine. Anything that can run Windows 7 well can run Windows 10 well, and machines that would be well-suited to Windows 7 weren't uncommon a decade ago.

But that's all beside the point. The point is that having a single source for software to run on a piece of hardware, and not having control over access to your software, puts a hard upper limit on how long a device will be useful. It's more practical to do something useful on the 18 year old Windows 98 machine I've got at home than my iPod Touch that's half that age. My Android tablet is just a couple of years younger; it's still a useful device because I can keep around backups of apks, download software from project pages, or add one of several app stores that still provide working software.

That's exactly the point. You know all the bazillion things that people usually do with their Raspberry PIs? An old PC can do all of that, and often much more. My old PCs are used for:

- HTPC (Home Theatre PC) - NAS (Network Attached Storage) - Retro gaming (this is the same box as the HTPC) - Network-wide ad-blocker (same box as the NAS) - Print server (same box as NAS)

Now back to the iPad. I am thinking to repurpose my old iPad Mini as an external screen using Duet Display (I would use it as a GPS display in a flight sim cockpit) but in general finding purpose for an old iPad is much, much harder than a desktop PC.

A "top end" iPad will lose in performance to the "bottom end" of the very next generation of iPads. Granted, that isn't the same thing, but the point stands.

With 16gb of memory, a Samsung 850 Pro and a NVIDIA 980, this PC which is now my spare / 7 year old son's is still going very strong indeed.

>Intel's Kaby Lake Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying. The top-end Kaby Lake part is the first desktop chip in a brave new post-"tick-tock" world—which means that instead of major improvements to architecture, process, and instructions per clock (IPC), we get slightly higher clock speeds and a way to decode DRM-laden 4K streaming video. Huzzah.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/intel-core-i7-7700k-...

PCs have a much broader choice of operating systems and software to install whilst maintaining compatibility. Take Voyage Linux as an example (http://linux.voyage.hk); it's a stripped down Debian system for embedded devices which can fit down to 256MB of storage, but nothing prevents you from apt-getting more software and make it grow to a full featured desktop system depending on the underlying hardware capabilities. Mobile devices as of today cannot even dream a fraction of this modularity, but we already know why: they're black boxes intended to be consumed then thrown away, and their OSes reflect that nature. Mobile manufacturers should be forced to publish all hardware source code after a reasonable time (say after 3 years) so that "old" devices can be repurposed instead of being littered into landfills.

I know because I own a first generation iPad that does all of the above - after a reset last year and downloading older versions of apps.

The only thing I can't do is view the modern web with a tablet with a measly 256MB of RAM.

The capabilities of the first generation iPad in 2010 compared to a modern iPad is like night and day.

I have a 2008 Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz laptop with 4GB of RAM, Gigabit ethernet, that runs the latest version of Windows. The average consumer laptop only comes with 8GB of RAM and gigabit ethernet is still the fastest consumer networking protocol. It serves as my Plex Server.

A modern iPad has 8 times the amount of RAM, a processor that's orders of magnitude faster, etc. You can't compare the improvements in mobile to the lack of improvements in desktop computers.

Back in 2008, could you imagine using a 10 year old computer and still expecting support from a new OS like you can with a 10 year old computer today?

As a counter point I recently got a 12 year old MacPro to fix up and it is almost impossible to make usable even though the specs are better than some old PCs I've given away. So it's an design issue and Apple is a real crook in this regard.

A 2006 Mac Pro though? What issue is it giving you? Admittedly - the processor will no-doubt show some age. And it's not qualified for the latest releases of Mac OS in quite a while. But it had user upgradable RAM and disk drives. Throw your preferred distro of Linux on there and I imagine it would be a sufficiently capable machine.

What has happened is that maximum hardware performance has levelled off. Modern web design is slowly converging to a place where everyone needs maximum hardware performance everywhere.

In other words, your experience has nothing to do with Android vs iPhone, rather that earlier devices simply didn't have the same amount of resource headroom as more recent ones.

Ever since the iPhone 4S, they've been usable for at least 3 years before expectations catch up to them. And now I think since the 6S and SE—which have the same hardware generation—iPhones can claim to have 4+ year lifetimes.

(At 3.5 years old, the iPhone 6 is still a great device today, particularly with a cheap battery replacement.)

My Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone was top-of-the-line six years ago, and is essentially useless now. Just switching from an app back to the homescreen takes multiple seconds, and launching or switching between apps often takes upwards of 15 seconds. It takes more than half a minute to start Kindle Reader and open a book. These are all things that happened almost instantly when it was new. I've wiped it and reinstalled Android multiple times, and it only helps a little.

Haven't met a Chromebook that can replace the production "experience"