>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.

Yup.

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.

FWIW I installed iOS 12 on my mom's iPhone 5s a few weeks ago, and I can tell you it ran much faster than iOS 10 or 11 on that device.

I'm OK with manufactures not providing full-version/new-feature updates to old phones, as long as they provide frequent security fixes - which is one thing Google is doing right with Android security fixes.

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.

Yes, but the problem is that the casual user will view this as planned obsolescence rather than a delicate tradeoff between performance and new features for older devices. Slowing down old iPhones was done to preserve battery life, but users did not see it that way, which led to massive backlash. Sure, Apple, should've communicated its reasoning and decision making before (which they have now done), but the casual user just doesn't care enough about the nuances here.

I think slow phone is more planned-obsolencence-y compared to "no OS upgrade, but phone works just as it did since the last supported upgrade - features and speed". I don't think the majority of users would know there is a new version out if they didn't get the upgrade nag-screens.

That sounds good in principle, except that 3rd party apps would also be frozen and start to fail.

> 3rd party apps would also be frozen and start to fail.

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.

A customer won't see it that way. Their apps will nag them to update and they won't be able to.

Just as fast, sure, but holy cow the number of WebKit exploits in iOS will leave myself scared shitless that you’re running that thing on the internet still...