Obama was in his first term for 20 days of 2013, not overlapping with the release of the iPhone 5s.

Oops - thanks!

I love the iphone. I get my wife the latest and greatest every two years, and I forget about it. If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support. It's absolutely worth the inflated price for me, and the fact that it's extremely limited in possible features is a bonus. Just like I used to love stick, but now an automatic tranny is great, as my enjoyment is the destination not the trip.

Now as far as the iphone 6s being usable - that's my point. It is usable, on the old OS it was designed for. Because you can't load your own OS on it, it will never run the latest. While the Nexus does run the latest, and is completely usable. I do remember when my brother loaded some latest ios on his iphone 5S, and it literally became too slow to answer a phonecall.

Apple's lock-in is in my opinion a feature for its target market. That's why they get like $1200 from me every two years. Me, my concern was battery life. For that I needed to not have crap that keeps phoning home and waking up the phone. Imagine charging once per week. While not an issue now, I used to travel a lot. Country-hopping trips. Yes, you can charge at the airport, tied to a full charing pole for an hour. Yes you can charge while sleeping on the plane and have a usb cable hanging in six inches in front of your face getting in the way. Or... You can literally not worry about it for a week.

There are of course other things - I want to chromecast my screen or cast a movie from a pirate streaming site (not the youtube app). I want toggles on my lock screen and home screen to turn off data/wifi/bluetooth. I want to turn on the flashlight if I press both power buttons when the phone screen is off. I more importantly need a filesystem that I can store OVAs on that I can take to customer sites for demos - why would I carry a usb stick when my phone is always with me. I want a web server running on it and my laptop to dump a backup of itself onto the phone daily. This means the phone phone software needs to recognize that the phone hardware is a computer, not a toy for 5yo kids. My wife on the other hand needs it to be a toy, because if it wasn't, she'd do everything possible to get viruses, delete everything, and screw something up. So I got an android, she has an iphone.

Now, you think I'm complaining about longevity. Let's see the reality though.

The post I'm replying to touts the iphone's longevity compared to Android. I point out Android has much, much longer longevity and he has it backwards. You then declare I'm complaining about the iphone's longevity.

Now, normally I would normally unload on you with all kinds of funny (for me) things at this point, because you now fit into a certain category of people, but this isn't the place.

> get my wife the latest and greatest every two years, and I forget about it. If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support.

That's... An odd thing to say. I'm not sure what you're saying about your wife, but I've never had anyone, young or old, have a problem with an Android phone that would require anywhere near that amount of time.

I've got to hard disagree with many of the points here based on my own experiences.

My whole family has Android phones from different makes except 2 people with iPhones and they don't need hours of tech support. Your experience may be different, but I think most people using Android phones would agree that for the most part it just works.

For the battery life and the latest iOS, once you upgrade your iPhone to a later version, it is hard to go back, and you need hacker chops to do that if it is even possible. Later versions of iOS do often reduce performance and battery life.

On top of that, iPhones have smaller batteries so even with a tightly-integrated OS, what happens is that with active use, the battery level drops precipitously. Sure they last ages when not touched, but what's the point of that when a video call drops the battery by 50% because the battery itself is smaller?

Most people stuck to power banks these days are people using iPhones, especially the smaller iPhones. Androids have taken care of the battery issue by going with 4000 mAH+ batteries.

>If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support.

I highly, highly, highly doubt that.

Considering how static phones honestly are after initial setup, when you've installed the apps you need and configured the few things you need configuring, you never touch anything that's not an app.

try installing 5 random apps per week from the google app store and report back to us with the results. make sure to change your phone to mandarin and look for apps from china. repeat in japanese and cantonese. this is what my wife does. she's a language teacher and translator.

What are the issues she faces and does the iPhone work better for that?

> If she had an Android anything, I'd be spending at least an hour per week on tech support First: I hope your wife doesn't read this ;-) Second: I can believe this to be true if-and-only-if you tried to run it on a language setting you can't read! Third: One gets comfortable with whatever phone+ecosystem they familiar with or use the most and that is not a basis to claim one is superior to the other. For that person, yes it might be superior(experience), but it cannot be extrapolated to the general population. In my little circle, if anything, I hear complaints and "how to get this done on my phone" requests way more from iPhone owning family members and friends than the ones with Android phones. But this doesn't just make Android a superior OS over iOS, because it is just 1 data point. While Apple does provide updates for older devices, the devices are barely usable. Foremost, you most certainly will need a battery-swap on anything older than 3 yrs (not a cheap proposition) and their devices seem to get progressively slower (in my albeit limited) experience.

Apple and Android ecosystems and user-bases are wildly different so a true apples-to-apples comparison (pun-intended!) is not trivially possible.

So I'm like your wife. I need my phone to be fast in the first place, then it's enough for me to have those features it offers, not more (I would definitely catch all kinds of viruses, 100% sure!), delete sth for sure or drown it like I did with my last Samsung. Fortunately, almost all iPhones are water resistant. I can even wash mine with soup, then just eject water with https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clear-wave/id1557211189 and continue using it. I'm not afraid my data disappear or micro SD to be damaged.

As I said, I agree with most of what you said.

> Now as far as the iphone 6s being usable - that's my point. It is usable, on the old OS it was designed for.

That phone was running the latest OS when I gave it to my friend last year. I think it might have been running faster thanks to ios 13 (or whichever version improved performance). I believe you when you say your brother's iphone 5s became unusable with subsequent updates. But my 6s kept chugging along just fine, updates and all.

I'm delighted there's solutions for android phones like what you're talking about. This sort of thing is really important - I mean, they're fully fledged computers capable of way more than we're able to use today. Its crazy that people throw them out after a few years. My iphone 12 is faster than my 2016 macbook pro. And I still occasionally code on that laptop. If I could run OSX on my phone and use my laptop as a terminal for it, that would be really sweet. But I can't because Apple doesn't care, and I'm locked out of making changes like that on my own hardware. Using old phones as web / file servers would be fantastic.

Companies like Apple are actively incentivized by the market to make their old products feel worse over time. And for that reason I'm always impressed when occasionally they release an OS update that improves performance across the board.

I guess my take is, Android phones have an awful history of dropping official support for recent devices. I'm delighted the hacker community can and has stepped in to clean up android's mess. Its a shame they have to, but such is life.

I'm sad you can't do that on Apple devices, but one saving grace is that, the 5s aside, apple seems to do a much better job of official software longevity than android. I'm expecting my iphone 12 to last 5-10 years. I do wish the battery lasted all week though - that sounds phenomenal.

I'm not covinced companies are out to "make their old products feel worse over time". It's just the inevitable consequence of the steady march of technological progress. A 10-20% per year performance improvements and new radio/camera hardware just add up over time and means that your old phone is worse than a new one. And that's before you take into account any degradation in things like nand and battery that they try and make fail gracefully (even if the PR messaging occasionally goes very wrong on that front).

There is of course also a degree of investing time writing to the new hardware more than the old one, and just cutting down features that don't fit due to lack of processing power or just lack of underlying tech on older hardware, but it's not something that being able to throw a different OS on seems likely to fix?

> I'm not covinced companies are out to "make their old products feel worse over time"

I don't think they're trying to make their old products worse over time. But I also don't think companies generally care that much about making old products work better over time. One of the parent commenters noted how well modern android runs on really old nexus phones if you strip out the "modern" animations and useless features. There's nothing stopping google doing this. People would love it. So its notable that they don't. Apple got a lot of good will from me a few years ago when they focussed on performance in ios 13 (or was it 12?). That OS release made my phone feel new again. After that update I think it ran faster than it did when I bought it.

Another way to think about it is that when you buy a product, your incentives and the company's incentives are aligned. You want the best phone. The company wants your money, and knows they need to deliver a good product to get it. After you've bought a product, the company's motivations aren't as well aligned with yours.

Arguably a company sells more phones in the long run when they have a good reputation for delivering on quality, and supporting their products. Eg, a few years ago some of my friends would buy every single blizzard game simply off the back of their reputation.

But most companies don't take advantage of this, and mistakenly focus on short term sales even if it harms their reputation. And, in turn, their long term profits.

As someone much wiser than me said, service and support is a form of marketing to repeat customers.

People aren't comparing their old phone to the new hotness, but to how it was when it was new. I think it is reasonable to assume that planned obsolescence is a thing and that OEMs make their products slower on purpose so people buy new ones.

I completely agree with you. If you want simple, if you want OTA updates from the people who made your phone, if you don't want to worry about it - iphone is perfect, i buy them for my wife.

But the discussion in this thread was specifically about the claim that iphones unlike android have a long life of updates. That's like saying "my dell from 2010 came with windows vista, windows vista is not supported, the computer has a short support life. Umm, no, you put Win10 or Linux on it, and can probably put win11 on it, and in 30 years still put the newest linux on it.