One of my friends just got the battery replaced on her 1st gen iPhone SE and she's not giving it up until it dies of natural causes.

Typing this on my iPhone SE, I replaced the battery myself a couple of years ago and am planning to do it again soon. It's only got iOS 15 but it's still getting security updates and works well.

The first Gen SE? Mine was getting too slow with iOS15 with barely 5 usable tabs in Firefox before app-switching would kill them. Plus, too many apps gave up on designing for small screens so I had lots of unreachable buttons and input boxes.

I booted it yesterday, and it still has that issue where you can’t type a alphanumeric passcode on boot, because the keyboard doesn’t show up. The workaround is to click on emergency, then get back to the passcode screen.

I suspect my general usage might be a bit more basic than yours - my main apps are WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Safari, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Spotify, YouTube and Netflix.

I'm also on a 1st gen SE and it's a great phone but the end is probably near. OS upgrades stopped last year, I've had one dumb app I can't use because it needs iOS 16+. Also I fancy having eSIM which the phone doesn't have. I think maybe the 13 mini next?

the 6 has stopped getting updates, I had to update it last year

Yeah the 6 is the previous generation, this old versioning style was confusing

I don’t think the comment you’re replying to suggests never stopping updates. I don’t suggest that either. Otherwise people will think software is properly patched when it isn’t and application developers will not be able to modernize their stacks. I think currently 5 years is acceptable but we should strive for more. Some of these Android ones are BS.

I think it will get updates with bug fixes and security updates.

iOS 12.5.7 for the iPhone 6 came out this year as a security update.

There is only so many iPhone models there. There are hundreds of thousands of Androids there, on a different platforms, with different chipsets, CPUs and radio. Sure, Google can travel back in time and re-do it's the proper way.

Or fix it over the three next years, if that is the average lifespan.

There was a short period of time when I thought that they finally solved this problem, when they deferred the browser updates to Google Play instead of being part of the whole OS update. I really thought that they would move everything there slowly over a year or two, and it would stop being a shitshow... but I realized fairly quick how wrong I was.

Yes, and then Google hyped up project treble but that apparently didn't mean we will get more updates

That was bout control. They reduced the usefulness of Android Open Source Project without Google Play Services.

And yet Wintel figured this out almost 30 years ago.

Do you understand what the most ARM systems still doesn't have anything resembling ACPI?

Yes, Wintel figured this out, after the legacy of IBM PC.

And Windows compatibility was a complete shit show before the OS vendor - Microsoft - worked with Intel and the other hardware vendors

Google just can’t manage a platform or more realistically doesn’t care to as long as they can serve ads on the device.

My iPhone8 just got an ios 16.7.1 update but ios 17 is not supported.

Hoping it lasts even longer.