I don't see how planned obsolescence via missing bells and whistles present in new phones is any worse than planned obsolescence via all functionality getting slower.
Written on my iPhone 5S (2013) running iOS 8 (2014) - it is still a phone and is just as fast as it was in 2014. Is that planned obsolescence?
No. But it probably has known unpatched vulnerabilities, and you're putting yourself and people around you in danger of a security hack.
It's unfortunate that I can't get security patches. I'm not willing to update to iOS 76 to get the fixes because I don't want to run code that is tested on an A12 on my 5 year old phone, and I don't want to buy a new phone because this one works fine and isn't larger than my hands.
Samsung could trivially provide security updates on old version as Google does most of the heavy-lifting so they have no excuse for recommending upgrades on older, slower phones. Apple doesn't presently have a mechanism for this on iOS, to my knowledge.
Only if they use online services that are taken down; not all apps are like this. Even if they are, it is still a better scenario than throwing the entire phone away because it's unusably slow or unsafe to use due to lack of security fixes.
The new features being talked about are ones that make an old phone slower. I owned an iPhone 5s and updated to the latest iOS version for 4 years and never noticed any slowness. So, basically, (2) means I would miss out on new features because other people complain about slowness that I don't notice.
And every Reddit client ever, or Reddit in general. Shameless amount of cookies and a horribly bloated UI just to do the same thing they were doing 10 years ago with double the client resource usage.
The amazing/sad thing is reddit with other clients can be blazingly fast. I just tried redreader from the f-droid store (android open source store) and using it feels like the content is loaded locally.
Says who, the government? We are talking about court-imposed fines here, not consumer wishes. Do we want a literal slow-software police?
That obvious answer is no, but as I think back on how many times I've been frustrated by some poorly performing piece of shit application over the past year, it's starting to not seem so bad of a solution.
This court case shows that we kinda now already have one.
The phones from 5 years ago already had amazing processors with billions of cycles per second. They can probably do nearly everything.
But you know us software engineers: "make it faster till it runs wells on my test kit, then oh well ship it!"
I think this ruling is a nudge into a better way. Yes deplay updates for more than 2 years, but don't stop optimizing new stuff when the latest phone can run it pretty well - keep optimizing until devices from the last 5 years run it very well.
That's patently wrong. The point of the fine was not that the phones were noticeably slower after the upgrade. The point of the fine was that the slowness was motivated as a way of inducing forced obsolescence. The manufacturers forced the updates with no rollback mechanism to render phones unusable and thus force their users to purchase replacements. If users could roll back the changes then the manufacturers wouldnt be fined.
Yes please!
It's a lot easier to "not write slow software" if you're not constrained by power limitations. Apple went to all the trouble of switching CPU architectures just to get on a better side of that problem.
It's a bit slow on loading, but after that it's really fast !
Also, I remember the calculator app being unreliable due to animations: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/10/24/ios-11-calculator-anima...
Is this not a legitimate problem?
† The google feed seems to have a consistent lag upon switching to it from the home screen (double tap on the multitasking button is normal) that the animations hide. It loads somewhere around 150ms slower than most applications, even taking longer than the first launch for unused apps.
I believe the problem was that the updates made existing functionality slower. e.g. the same Facebook app you had before the update scrolls slower afterwards or the old launcher is replaced with one that's more jittery, without letting you use the old one.
Adding new features is fine, just don't break the old ones.
And in any case: they're free not to offer feature upgrades to old phones; I just doubt that's a wise choice in the market. If they really can't provide a few updates and reasonable performance - good riddance, their successors surely will.
"this update will harm performance but improves security and gives access to new features; your choice" (imagined release note on update clickthrough)
?
A checkbox isn't that hard.
A naive assumption. In fact, each checkbox exponentially increases the number of possible runtime environments you have to maintain and test.
"Installing this update will give you access to feature X, but will slow down your phone."
For comparison, my AT&T Samsung Galaxy S6 forces me to install updates, which I hate. Wasn't my choice to get this particular phone, wouldn't do it again.
This will mean: almost never updates at all.
Well, I have to admit: my mother will be happy about it.
The problem with (1) is now you've completely stagnated the market, and if your competitors choose either of the other options you're left lagging behind and you lose sales.
The problem with (2) is now customers of older phones will be upset that they didn't get the full upgrade for reasons they don't understand. The iPhone 4S and Siri or the iPhone X and Animoji show the reaction you should expect.
The problem with (3) is now you have planned obsolescence and old phones just become throw-away leading to an ecological disaster.
None of these are good options.