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 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.
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.
> 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.