> Rectangle with capacitive screen is just that.

If you think that’s all a smartphone is, then it’s natural to come to the conclusion that the only thing that has changed is speed and resolution.

It also happens to be simply wrong.

That's not all that a smartphone is, but it is most of what a smartphone is.

Most applications basically just need:

- a canvas to paint some bitmaps on

- some way to tell what part of the screen the user tapped on

- a way to get TCP/IP or HTTPS traffic in and out - some sound output

- some persistence

- some way to show notifications

- a few other odds and ends like GPS, sometimes

Almost the entire list been supported on every major platform since the late 2000s. Yes, rich multimedia apps that make good use of additional APIs and hardware features do exist. But it's inappropriate to nuke most old "normal" applications just because old rich multimedia apps stopped working over time.

You seem not to think the features operating system itself provides are part of a smartphone.

Back in the iPhone 4/iPad era, there was no facility within iOS to have responsive screens.

Apple introduced size classes and then you needed to adjust for different views for iPads once they supported more than one app being displayed on the screen.

Apple rightfully got rid of 3/ bit app support on the actual die. It introduced new permission models, design aesthetics change, new accessibility options are added, better APIS are written, etc.

It also ensured that many apps/games that were very successful in their time will never be preserved.

https://youtu.be/KB07oxJkd2g

I bought Crash Bandicot in particular when it first came out for iOS 2. It was broken long before the 32 bit purge.

Rectangle, lol, if only.

Older apps don’t properly fit with the curved corners and notch.

Android vendors were able to make it work.

Besides, isn’t this the company that allowed you to install iPhone apps on iPads and blow the UI up to 2x size?

Android was always written with the expectation that it would run on a diverse set of hardware.

You could run iPhone 4 apps on iPhone 5 and beyond. But they looked horrible.

Sorry, I think you’re misunderstanding. Android vendors built compatibility layers that allowed 16:9 apps to run on 18:9 and up screens. The apps weren’t built to run on 18:9 screens but the vendors found a way regardless.

Part of what makes iPhones great is that you aren’t running apps sitting on a pile of compatibility hacks. It was all designed to work correct on the exact device you use.

> running apps sitting on a pile of compatibility hacks

You do realise the only reason iphone retina screens became a thing was to enable double pixel scaling because iphone apps at the time were coded to a fixed resolution.

That's the definition of a compatibility hack.

Of course apple being apple they managed to sell it as a feature and made every person who was happy with a 1366x768 laptop suddenly desire a retina display.

What does the user care if there's a "pile of compatibility hacks" there or not, so long as the app still exists and works as it should?

In the case of Apple removing 32 bit support from the OS first and then the actual processors:

- they care about their apps not being evicted from memory as quickly when they switch apps because memory isn’t taken up by 32 bit and 64 bit versions of shared libraries.

- increased battery life by not having as much RAM - yes RAM takes energy.

- using the die space saved by not having 32 bit instruction decoding means you can use that die space for enhancements that users care about, and decrease the die size to make the phone more battery efficient

- for Mac computers, you have computers that are faster, have more than twice the battery life, are more memory efficient (meaning less swap), and can be fanless without getting hot.

The 2022 SE3 has the same 750×1334 rectangle as the 2014 iPhone 6.

The 2018 iPhone X does not.

Oh no, the horror.

Let the user make the damn choice.