I think it’s weird how confused people get when you suggest a 9 year old electronic device should work. Every computer in my house is over 10 years old. My A/V receiver and home theater speakers are 15 years old. My TV is 18 years old. My electronic thermostat is 11 years old. While they no longer receive firmware updates, they all continue to work as well as they worked on the day I bought them.

For some reason, nobody expects this of phones and tablets. The manufacturer cuts you off from updates and now somehow you’re obsolete! The 3rd party developer ecosystem pulls their old-device-supporting apps, and suddenly the device is useless. I don’t know why we accept this!

What is so special about phones where we allow them to be considered obsolete so quickly?

> My TV is 18 years old … they all continue to work as well as they worked on the day I bought them.

This is unlikely to be true. The process is slow so you may not have noticed it, but the tv is probably much dimmer than when it was brand new.

You may have a reasonable point about device longevity, but comparing full blown, internet connected, general purpose computing devices to an A/V receiver is obviously intentionally obtuse.

It's a Hitachi 42 inch plasma and it still looks absolutely beautiful. Not a single problem with it in almost two decades.

Want to know what failed first? The goddamn Mac Mini I have attached to it as a HTPC, where, after "upgrading" to Big Sur or Monterrey, suddenly Apple just up and decided to drop 1080i resolution support (the TV only supports 1080i, not 1080p).

The weakest link, in terms of longevity, is always the software developer.

You have undercut your case here.

The TV works and had not been upgraded. The mac mini works if you did not upgrade it.

The weakest link is doing an upgrade, it does not matter which hardware.

I think it’s unreasonable that Apple sold a device that is capable of displaying 1080i and then disabled it in a software update. Doing stuff like that encourages users to not update and leave themselves vulnerable to security threats.

It may be an unfortunate relic of the carrier upgrade economics. Most people, in the US at least, on a subscription phone plan get essentially a new phone for free every 2 years. Things are changing a little lately and now it’s not quite a free phone but a heavily discounted one, but it’s still pretty reasonable to expect most of your uses won’t have phone much more than a few years old.

I guess that means if we want to see this change we need to stop trading up every other year. Which would mean carriers need to stop charging $70/mo for a phone line. Etc. I don’t upgrade my thermostat yearly, the economics are different, and so the product approach is too. My thermostat also doesn't come everywhere I go on a daily basis and doesn't run apps (it’s not a general purpose computing platform that needs to grow more powerful as software becomes more demanding.

Also I have to add: phones are a fashion statement. Old phones do work, they’re just not cool. Nobody cares about the AV receiver sitting in your tv console as long as it’s amplifying audio. The tech hasn’t changed in years. Well unless your receiver does video, in which case I am certain your 15 year old audio receiver is not capable of 4k 120 HDMI handling. Update that TV to a 4k panel and your receiver will need a bump too.

> get essentially a new phone for free every 2 years

What you mean to say is the payments for the phone (and the interest for the loan) are just bundled into the monthly plan.

The phone is categorically not free, the payment is just obfuscated to the point that many people don’t understand.

Of course. Either way you’re getting what you pay for and there’s no way to select “I don’t want a free phone every two years take $15 off my monthly payment please”. It kinda is moving that way now, though. The monthly cost for new hardware is increasingly more optional and better delineated from the phone service. But thats’s new stuff—it will take awhile for things to percolate down.

Of course there is!

Show up with your own phone and the plan options are entirely different and cheaper.

I’ve never had a plan where phone payments are rolled in.

They still offer(ed) you a new phone after two years. The “payments” are(were) hidden costs. I thought that was what we agreed on. 15 years ago there were no other options unless you did pay-as-you-go. Recently, yes, there are plans that let you skip the subsidized upgrade. They don’t cost any less than the plans that have upgrades did in the past though, they just cost less than other plans from the same carrier.

Not true at all. Where are you that is the case? I’ve done this in Canada, Australia, Iceland, the uk. Plans with a “free” phone every two years are something like 50% to 100% more expensive than if you walk in with a phone and don’t want one or upgrades and just get a plan.

That’s not how it worked in the US. I also stipulated that I’m talking about contract plans not pay-as-you-go. From my time in Europe I recall pay as you go being much more of a prominent option.

The one thing in phones that was pulling people along to upgrade was the camera, but even that is leveling off now.

I am sympathetic to the argument/feeling that somethings last a long time therefore all things should last a long time.

> What is so special about phones where we allow them to be considered obsolete so quickly?

The phone / computer works exactly as it did when you bought it. What changed is everything around it. That's not true of those other things. New video codex, new services, new sites, new apps. Let's pick ChatGPT. They have app. It's about 2 years old? It strictly costs them more money to cover older hardware than just not supporting it. And, going forward, each year they want to support the newest phones/OS but keeping support for both strictly increases costs. I work on a project that run on nearly every device (Windows/Mac/Linux/iOS/Android) and we are always evaluating which devices we can stop supporting and what new devices we need to add to our testing infra going forward.

Your 18yr old TV is great. It works exactly as it did when you bought it. But for example, let say your TV was 25 years old. It wouldn't have HDMI and there for, without expensive adapters, would not work with an XBox, PS5, Switch (afaik).

The point is, your TV does exactly what it did when you bought it. No changes. For a smartphone to keep working requires constant changes. As a simple example, HEIF images didn't exist before. JPEG's with gain maps didn't exist. Zoom didn't exist. Etc... Your phone needs constant updating. Your TV, A/V receiver, speakers, thermostat do not. It costs money to keep the phone up to date. It costs nothing to keep the TV, A/V receiver, speakers and termostat up to date because there is nothing to update

But apple explicitly tries to make the environment around the old phone obsolete. They have an incentive to do so.

Your old TV still works even with an adaptor - but there's no such a method for the phone.

I want my phone to work until the hardware fails, not when apple decides they want to push people to buy a new one next quarter.

> "I want my phone to work until the hardware fails... But apple explicitly tries to make the environment around the old phone obsolete."

As of December 31, 2022, U.S. telcos* decommed the 3G tech phones of the mid-2000s used.

As long as your iPhone can still use the telco network, it still does the functions it shipped with just fine.

A phone's environment depends on a lot more than its hardware maker.

(FWIW, thanks to its different incentives than other handset makers, Apple continues to offer the longest average OS support of the hardware and OS giants. Google's Pixel 8 is the first to bump Google's 3 years to match Apple's 7, and Samsung's S24 also finally matches 7 years. So on current devices, they stepped up, but on devices before 2023, Apple's support is more than double theirs. Arguably, these two finally stepping up were in response to the "environment" of Apple's incentives and EU regs.)

* Verizon was the last. AT&T turned off its 3G network on February 22, 2022. T-Mobile dismantled Sprint's 3G CDMA network on March 31, 2022, and its own 3G UMTS network on July 1, 2022.

I have an iPhone 3GS from 2009. It still makes and receive phone calls and will pick up email. Some web pages will still render

I miss my 3GS. Jumped in a pool back in high school and fried it instantly. No water-resistance back then!

> The phone / computer works exactly as it did when you bought it. What changed is everything around it.

I consider that "everything around it" (The Ecosystem, as they say) to be part of the product I bought. When I bought my OldPhone N years ago, I could go to the app store and download versions X, Y, and Z of apps A, B, and C, and they worked. I expect today that if I factory reset that OldPhone back to fresh, I'd still be able to re-download those compatible versions of those apps, and that those apps continued to work as they did N years ago (barring some obvious, but still unfortunate cases like companies going out of business or turning down online services). That's my bar for "working."

If the world moves on, and people are sharing image formats that my phone was never able to read in the first place, or writing web pages my browser was never able to render correctly, then I have to accept that. But what I don't accept is the device manufacturer, or (usually the case) 3rd party apps telling me "your phone is too old, and we're no longer going to let you use it as you have for the last N years anymore!"

I’m confused, that is how it works. If a developer increases their target version to say iOS 18, a user running iOS 16 would be able to download the last app version that supported it, even after factory resets. If the third party developer dropped support for APIs or whatever to break that version, it’d be broken regardless to whether or not you had the app downloaded already.

I'm pretty sure what I've seen is: If you backup and restore your apps, the version you previously had gets copied back over. But, if you wipe and try to re-download, only the versions that the developer has up on the AppStore are available to you, and if none of them support your OS, you're hosed. This is definitely true if you set up the device with a new account.

I agree. Phones aren't increasing in performance all that fast any more and the use cases haven't really changed. OS and sdk makers should start to consider their tools "mature" and stop breaking compatibility with each and every update.

Something like the Go 1.0 compatibility promise.

> My TV is 18 years old.

Here they have turned off analog TV signals over a decade ago, and the national broadcaster are about to turn off standard definition digital TV signals in favour of high definition.

> It's 9 years old, it just stopped getting security updates three months ago. Is there anything even close to that outside of the iphone world?

Of course there is, just take a look at any computer/laptop.