> Also, iPhone 3g is ancient.

Released 2008. If I get an x86 laptop from 2008, I can install a modern Ubuntu on it with approximately 0 effort. If anything, it'll usually be better than cutting-edge hardware because the drivers have already been developed and released in a stable Linux version. iOS still loses this comparison.

I’m not saying that you’re not making a valid point, but I would like to point out that you can still install the community-supported whited00r [1] on that 3G and still get some life out of it. Sure it’s probably breaking all sorts of copyright law to do so, and it’s not ideal, but the fact that almost no one on HN seems to know about it, and Apple has ignored it for years, underscores how little demand there is to keep 10 year old devices running.

Meanwhile I have a 5 year old 5S that I use while traveling which runs iOS 12.1 swimmingly, and keeping older devices running longer was a major topic discussed by Lisa Jackson at the last Apple keynote. I fully expect that this old phone will run iOS 13 as well, and I expect that current iOS devices will have increasingly longer usable lifespans than 5-6 years. There isn’t anything close in terms of manufacturer support on the Android side of things.

In terms of keeping phone hardware useful through an alternative OS, you may also want to keep an eye on PostmarketOS [2].

[1] http://www.whited00r.com/features?lang=en

[2] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Main_Page

This. I managed to build recent Linux on a Pentium MMX Mobile (IIRC) laptop from 1998. A cell phone from 5 years ago can't handle a modern operating system, but a 1998 laptop can run Xorg just fine.

The funny thing is the SoC in these smartphones can totally run Linux & Darwin, but the driver support for the peripherals is shovelware. Vendors do the bare minimum to suppprt the hardware, and you get a mess.

Its frankly shocking that the Allwinner A10/A20/A64 (which can run Win10!) /H3/H5/H6 has nearly complete mainline kernel support, whereas nearly any of the smartphones made since 2008 can't boot mainline Linux and drive their cameras, screen, GPS, etc. Its a huge failing of the industry.

Allwinner can't run Win10 (hah, A33 can barely run Android :/ ) and has barely any mainline support on actual physical commercial devices (i.e. tablets, not SBCs)...

I don't know what your on about, Windows 10 can run UWP apps just fine on any Allwinner A64 based device: https://github.com/Leeway213/Win10-IoT-for-A64-Release-Notes...

With regard to supporting tablets, most of the older Allwinner based tablets have feature parity between the mainline kernel and the vendor BSP kernel: https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort

Just the other day I installed the latest lineageos on my original moto G, I think thats from 2013. And it works great.

Edit: actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists.

>actually, when I say 'latest' I mean 'latest available for the moto g'. I'm not 100% sure that's the very latest version that exists.

It's not. You're stuck with an Android that's 2 versions behind current and are still using the original kernel version that shipped with the device.

I guess that explains why it works so well.

iPhone 5s is a cell phone from 5 years ago, and it absolutely does run the latest operating system.

A 2018 iPhone X is vastly more powerful than a 2008 iPhone 3G, whereas the performance improvement of laptops slowed dramatically after that point.

Take a copy of a standard 2008 version of Ubuntu desktop and try and install it on a 1998 laptop. I doubt it’d run at all, not without ditching the default desktop.

Um. I was actually going to concede the point, but look at your sibling comment. Apparently I'm not the craziest one in the room (believe me, I'm more surprised than you).

You've missed the point entirely. It's about software support (or lack thereof), not how the computational power progressed through the last decade.

What't the point with software support if OS is unusable? I have iPhone 4S and it became unusuable when iOS 7 was released. I never wanted to upgrade, I wanted to downgrade which was impossible via official means. That's my main problem. If developers don't want to develop for old phones, that's their right. But they must not prevent me from installing old software.

> What't the point with software support if OS is unusable?

That's something for the users to decide. Imposing artificial restrictions to software, including forced obsolescence, is never a good thing.