I think it's really about the cloud. I kept my last iPhone way past a typical phone's lifespan, and got to experience watching it slowly revert back to being a dumbphone. In the same way that smart home devices have a nasty tendency to stop working as soon as the vendor decides to stop maintaining some critical server the product needs to be able to ping just to turn on properly, apps eventually stop working with the latest OS your phone can run, and pretty shortly after that some service running in the cloud will stop being able to talk to whatever version of the app you're stuck on.
In the case of Apple's or AT&T's apps, this happened almost immediately after the first version of iOS I couldn't upgrade to came down the pipe. In the case of others, it was 6 months or a year later. The web browser died in its own special way, choked to death by more JavaScript than it could handle.
I get the economics behind why companies do this, but it's sad, all the same. A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand.
I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system").
"A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand."
The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was.
We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones.
The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.
No, but it can do all the things it promised to do when it was first sold.
By contrast, one of my old iPads is thinking about enrolling in a job retraining program to learn to be a trivet. This despite all of its components being in perfect working order.
I never suggested this was a conspiracy, just that it's a travesty.
I have an iPad Air 1, a device that is pushing ~5 years by now, that became abhorrently laggy with the transition from iOS 10 to iOS 11. Sliding up the multitask view or sliding down the cover sheet usually hovered around 5-20FPS, and sometimes came with a 1 second (!) delay. I don't know what magic the iOS devs worked with the upcoming iOS 11.3 (I run the beta) but both actions are fluid now, and the delay is gone. Besides that, my parents have an iPad 4, which is 'stuck' on iOS 10 but still is incredibly smooth and, so far, works perfectly well with iCloud.
I used to think that Apple didn't mind old devices being bogged down with big updates, since the unintended side effect would be people pushed to newer devices. However, with techniques like App Thinning, the way the 5S became smooth again going from iOS 9 to 10, and now the way they revived my iPad Air I'd say they seem to be reasonable in choosing when devices are too old and holding back iOS as a whole. Hell, with Apple your iOS device gets 4-6 years worth of big updates.. with Android, you're lucky if you get 2.
FWIW I think developers should support old hardware as long as they can, but only the lastest operating system for each particular supported model.
Yes, and no.
I have a launch-day iPad, and it became less and less useful over the years as the apps stopped being supported by their developers.
The last version of Safari for the original iPad is unusable if you surf anywhere but HN. It might as well be Lynx.
This time last year, my iPad was down to just e-mail, notes, streaming video from my satellite box, PBS video, and a great app from Panic called Status Board.
Now it's down to just e-mail and notes, so it spends more time in the desk drawer than propped up on a tiny easel on top of the desk.
To some extent, RMS is right on this subject: When your devices rely on the cloud, it means you don't really own them, because any cloud-dependent functionality continues to exist at the pleasure of others.
Wearable tech has already been around for more than 10 years. Whether it's raincoats with speakers built into the collar, or the digital watches from the 80s. The problem isn't so much wearable tech but rather current tech trends (eg the IoT revolution). To that end, I'd wager something like Pebble (baring hardware failure) would still work in 10 years since the only dependency that has is bluetooth.
I doubt it. The watch will still work, but the app needed to sync to the watch won’t.
I’ve been really frustrated with old “utility” apps not working anymore on iOS (due to not being updated to 64bit). I’m all for upgrades and new stuff, but it sucks when a simple app that did exactly what you needed is no longer able to run.
I may be an outlier here because I came to the Apple Watch from the world of higher-end watches. My usual daily wear piece before was an Omega, e.g.
I started wearing the Apple Watch when I was training for a half marathon, because it worked really well for that purpose (when paired with Strava) -- and I discovered it was also so USEFUL for me that I wore it almost all the time.
After about 18 months, I realized I was really only taking it off when I felt I needed to wear something that looked a bit fancier -- but I didn't want to give up the Apple functionality. Then the series 3 was introduced, with actual water-resistance and the in-built cell capability, and that was that. I sold my initial one (a Sport model) and bought the next nicer model in steel with the sapphire crystal on the Milanese loop. I swap in a composite band if I'm being active, and wear the loop if I'm going to dinner.
I don't expect this watch -- about $750US -- to last 10 years, but I will be happy if I get 3 out of it before I want to upgrade. I also expect it'll still WORK at that point, and the driver for me will be new features or functions and not failure. I'm okay with that, because of the relatively modest cost vs. definitively high usability/duty cycle.
If I were the sort of person who would wear a sport model all the time, it'd be an even easier choice ($359 w/o cell; $429 with).