It may make you laugh, but when I was homeless, someone gave me an outdated iPad thinking that would help me out. It was essentially useless.

A lot of people who have old phones have them because they can't afford anything newer. The pressure to constantly update to newer hardware is a hardship for poor people. It de facto is one of the ways they get excluded from modern life.

I am also real freaking tired of Google apps being a suite on my cheap phone that constantly updates and threatens that you may break other apps if you disable this one. It makes it very challenging to add any apps to my phone. And my wants and needs are not huge. But Google is eating a large share of the storage space and eats into my time for clearing the cache, etc, to keep the phone functional.

I'm not the OP but I'm guessing it makes him laugh because you can still run things on Windows that were written in the early 1990s. I have personally worked on an application in 2016 that was written in 1989 and still ran. It depended on mainframe code that was written in the 1980s and possibly some from the 1970s.

(Yes, it would have to be Windows NT to run I think)

Read Raymond Chen's fantastic blog for how much MS have worked to keep backwards compatibility going.

And then we come to backward compatibility and mainframes:

"The IBM Z family maintains full backward compatibility. In effect, current systems are the direct, lineal descendants of System/360, announced in 1964, and the System/370 from the 1970s. Many applications written for these systems can still run unmodified on the newest IBM Z system over five decades later.[3]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Z

It would be interesting to see someone try to see what the oldest unmodified app they could run on a Z series was.

That's interesting; I still use a Nexus 7 (2012) as my main mobile device. It's occasionally frustratingly slow, but I haven't found almost anything that wouldn't actually run on it. Is the iOS ecosystem worse in that regard, or was the iPad even older?

I agree with the Google Apps thing, though; my employer gave me a new but cheap phone with just 4GB of internal storage, and I'm always having to cleanup so I can install anything new. And an SD card barely helps, lots of stuff simply can't be moved.

I don't remember how old the iPad was and I no longer have it. But it was old enough that support had been discontinued for its os and I was having trouble finding ways around that. Perhaps someone more technical could have found a solution. I did ask around, but to no avail.

Thanks. Experiences like yours are why I'm always wary of the pushes to make access to services exclusively online. They're usually an attempt to cut budgets by throwing the people who need it more under the bus.

A lot of libraries don't have the latest software. Internet access is often limited to 2 or 3 hours per day on public computers. Public computers frequently do not allow for even temporarily saving images or other files to the desktop, which seriously limits what you can do in them.

I love the internet. It makes my life vastly more workable. But it makes me crazy that there is so little effort to keep the bar for entry low in terms of money and technical savvy.

Why does my cheap phone need so many apps that I don't use, that cannot be disabled and that promptly update again after I delete all the data off of them, forcing me to delete the same data repeatedly? Is this really necessary? Come on.

Some tips, just in case they help. When disabling apps, you can generally ignore the warning that other apps may break. Do not disable Google play services, though. Also, go into the account settings and make sure sync is turned off for everything, you can sync manually when needed. Finally, disable auto-update in the play store. Google apps update frequently but will generally continue to work for quite a while if you refuse those updates.

I had no idea I could turn off auto update in the app store. I couldn't find a way to do it on my phone, so I thought it could not be done. That alone should make this more manageable.

Thank you.

My mom gave me an old iPad that’s limited to running iOS 9.something. Even though GarageBand existed back then, it refuses to install from the App Store. It took a decent bit of hacking, including an older version of iTunes and mitmproxy, just to get an older version installed that would still run on it.

There’s an easier way (had the same issue with Spotify and iPhone 4): use the same iCloud account from the “old” device to login on a newer device. There, download the app you want to use on the older device. Once it’s installed, go back to the older device and go to the App Store to “purchased apps”. This will now include the app you just downloaded on the newer device. Click “download”. The App Store will recognize that this app won’t run on your crappy old iOS version, but since you purchased it, it will offer you to download the latest version that still works on your device... insane, I know, but less involved than a mitm-proxy...

That’s the first approach I found to be recommended, but nope, didn’t work in this case for some reason. The app appeared as one I had indeed installed previously (on my newer device) but still refused, saying a newer version of iOS was required. I wonder if it may have been because I had never downloaded the older version of GarageBand, only the latest one.

Yeah I was thinking the same. 2007 is not the dark ages.

Considering smartphones didn't exist until 2007, I think lots of tech actually do consider 10 years to be the dark ages.

I had a touchscreen phone that could hold hours of video or hundreds of songs, send instant messages, browse the web, get apps, use WiFi... In 2004. In 2005 you could alreday get GPS, more versatile hardware and better accessories.

The much maligned N-Gage had a true multitasking OS with internet and apps in 2003, except Americans never got along with Nokia or Symbian OS.

It also had smooth (and more comfortable, due to love handles and buttons) realtime gaming with graphics a cut above the PS1.

https://youtu.be/s3xsSwjQ1oA

They did. Even the article mentions the Palm Treo, then there were the Nokia Communicators, etc. The iPhone was far from being the first smartphone, but it was the first to break the nerd-wall and sell to the masses.

The first iphone was not even a smartphone, it was a featurephone with a fancy UI.

Only with the 3G could they start claiming it was a smartphone.

Sadly didn't stop boneheads like a NYT writer to try to relabel it as a "superphone" because smartphone was apparently by then too pedestrian for something Apple made...

This is indeed correct – the first iPhone with iOS 1 did not have any apps, or ways to install apps.

The very defining feature of a smart phone are the apps, though.

EDIT: Due to downvotes, here’s Apple’s own page advertising how iOS 2 (introduced with the iPhone 3G) adds apps to the iPhone: https://web.archive.org/web/20080912112138/http://www.apple....

Of course it had apps, just no 3rd party apps. Email, texting, contacts, calendar, and by far the best web browsing experience made the very first iPhone plenty smart. Jobs pretended you didn't need 3rd party apps, everything could be done on the web; of course Apple always intended to allow 3rd party apps.

> mail, texting, contacts, calendar, and by far the best web browsing experience made the very first iPhone plenty smart

Back then pretty much every high end phone had that... The IPhone wasn't anything special at that time. The IPhone really took off then they allowed 3rd party apps.

The whole point of a smartphone are third party apps.

LG had more than a dozen phones with touch screen (resistive) at that time that had "apps" but no third party apps (except for JavaME apps).

The game changer (as the linked site from Apple states as well) was an App Store allowing direct access to third party apps. And that's what created another modern tech revolution.

> The whole point of a smartphone are third party apps.

No. The point of a smartphone is to expand the scope of what can reasonably be done so they it can be considered more like a computer than a dedicated device with a narrow, defined set of capabilities. Jobs was right that the quality of the iPhone's browser was sufficient to raise it to that level.

Of course having 3rd party apps raises it to another level. It would have been a death sentence if the iPhone proceeded for too long without them while competitors developed a robust app ecosystem but that was never the plan.

Cell phones have only existed since the 80's... "smart phones" have existed since the 90s - back in a day when Palm, Nokia, Windows and Blackberry ruled...

http://www.nicolasnova.net/pasta-and-vinegar/2015/6/28/some-...

10 years ago? As far as cell phones go? Most definitely the "Dark Ages"... Considering we are moving into a time frame when watches are starting to have cell connectivity:

https://www.lifewire.com/smartwatches-with-cellular-connecti...

Where are we going to be 5 years from now? 10? 20? Compare the Treo and BlackBerry to the current iPhone X, Note 8, etc...

> Compare the Treo and BlackBerry to the current iPhone X, Note 8, etc...

And i see screens with more colors and pixels, but other than that not much new. It is still calendars and messages that rules.

"more pixels" is quite an understatement. From 320x240 and 640x480 to 1920x1080 and beyond (Sony made a 4K phone!).

But from EDGE to LTE, from weak single core processors to 64-bit 4/6/8 core beasts, from no GPU to what would be considered desktop grade back in the day, from shitty 3gp 144p videos to hardware accelerated 4K H.264/5/VP8/9…

Yeah, people still do messages, but messages now include high quality multimedia edited on device.

Also, web surfing rules. Opera Mini on J2ME and others sucked, it was nothing like the modern mobile web.

And here i still find myself preferring OMini set for single column, as it also strips out all the "modals" and JS bloat found on this "modern" web of yours.

As for editing videos or such on a mobile device, bah humbug. The interface is not there in any more than the most rudimentary way. If anything it has regressed unless one happen to have a Galaxy Note, as fingers simply do not offer the precision.

All you see is more pixels? What about GPS? Music? Movies? Facetime in realtime to anyone in the world?

What about doing all of the above at the same time?

"I only see" is because you are limiting what you see in a way that goes against what the vast majority of people see.

That's like saying the new MacBook is no different than a 286 because you had Excel Worksheets on both.

Or saying there is no difference between a Model-T and a 2018 Honda Civic - they both use gas, have 4 wheels and a windshield.

> What about GPS? Music? Movies?

Lots of high-end feature-phones had all these features in 2007–2008. (GPS was not common before then, but some had it earlier.)

> Facetime in realtime to anyone in the world?

Video calling was a heavily promoted feature of the first 3G phones, a long time ago.

> What about doing all of the above at the same time?

Good feature-phones had multitasking in 2006. I would often listen to music while running multiple third-party apps (!) at the same time.

Of course, these phones cost a tiny fraction of the price of the first iPhone, so hardware limitations like having only a few megabytes of RAM were a bit constraining. The functionality was basically there though.

I owned a Moto Razer (original). I've owned a Treo. I've owned multiple iPhones and multiple Samsung Notes.

Even comparing the original iPhone vs the current batches of iPhone - we are talking GENERATIONS of improvements. Massively better camera's, GPU, CPU, Batter, Screens - both pixel counts and size, network infrastructure, software infrastructure (MySpace vs Facebook).

Orders of magnitude improvements across ALL of those metrics.

Simply talking multi-tasking on the original Android and iPhones vs today? Comparing those vs the Palm and Blackberries they replaced?

I've lived through 20 years of Cell Phone... 10 years ago may not have been the "Dark Ages"... but it was the time immediately afterwords (Palm/BB/WinPhone were definitely the Dark Ages).

We are comparing Horses & Buggies, Model Ts and 2018 Honda Civics... the Model T was better than horses and buggies... but not that much better.

10 year old software is one thing, but 10 year old SERVICES supporting 10 year old software is certainly unusual.

I'm going to make a guess here: You never worked in an enterprise environment.

Came here to say the same =)