To be clear, these are new features that will likely have a setting to turn off. There’s no conspiracy, nothing “forcefully” added for the purpose of driving upgrades. (Ah, ninja edit): There’s not even a guarantee these features will be supported on an eight year old phone.

It’s a legitimate concern even assuming good intent.

But Apple has had to publicly admit bad intent specifically with their batteries and had to offer people money etc.

Strange to criticize people for something Apple publicly admitted they did wrong.

When is the last time a company has admitted wrong-doing? No, Apple admitted to slowing down phones when the battery was shot so it wouldn’t just suddenly shut down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

The worst part was that during the boot sequence, the CPU ran at full-throttle for a few moments until the power-management components were loaded. So I couldn't restart it. As long as I didn't open a game or YouTube or a wonky website with super awful javascript, I could continue using the phone for another couple hours. But if the phone turned off, it couldn't be turned back on without charging it more ... even though it had "18%" battery left (as determined by voltage, not taking into account increased internal resistance in the battery as it ages).

I was envious of iPhone users that got a real fix for this (Apple slowing down the phone when the internal voltage got low). I would have greatly preferred that Samsung had done the same for my phone too.

That said, Apple _significantly_ erred in not over-communicating what they were doing. At that point, the OS would pop warnings to users if the phone had to thermal throttle, and adding a similar notification that led the user to a FAQ page explaining the battery dynamics wouldn't have been technically hard to do.

which I am doing exactly, but still new iOS version make my phone slower and slower and I cannot even opt out of updates.

because some apps are forcing me to use the latest version of iOS (Authentication, Okta 2fa, etc)

And you can use third parties as well which Apple now officially supports.

It is just a lie to say you need a new phone.

There is literally a zero percent chance it was anything to do with batteries. This is not a conspiracy theory. It's an objective fact.

I'd much rather us have progress and people with 8 year old phones suffer than ensure that everything continues to run smoothly on any old device for eternity.

Apple absolutely effed up by not communicating the specifics well, but that’s corporate policy. Apple docs have always been targeted at the non-technical user and therefore inadequate for others.

You have what an iPhone 6? 1GB of RAM vs 8GB for modern devices, the first A chip came out 2 generations after yours as has 2% of the power of a current chip so modern chips are likely close to 100x as powerful as your phone.

Why should we hold back software to support extreme outliers like you?

What are apps and mobile sites doing differently today besides loading up unnecessary animations and user tracking? How has user experience improved for those operating on devices fast enough to make up for developer laziness?

I can now do on-device transcription without issue, security improvements at the chip level, HD graphics for video streaming, etc.

You can't choose when to use your OS, and you need to 'update your os' to stay secure.

Laggards cost society by running insecure devices that generally impact the rest of the world besides just complaining about no one continuing to support them long after the useful life of their devices.

Maybe there's also a cost to updating phones as frequently as people do, and inefficient software running across billions of devices.

I wouldn't blame people who make their hardware last longer and call them "laggards". And it's not their responsibility to write security patches for their device, that falls on the manufacturer.

For these people, me included, they don't need the latest hardware features to ray trace a game or run some local LLM. We're just taking some photos, making calls, getting map navigation, messaging, interacting with CRUD apps, and web browsing. None of that requires the latest hardware, and especially Apple hardware from 8 years ago is more than capable of handling it smoothly.

If you're running an insecure device past it's support life it's your responsibility and your fault if it's used to attack others. You are fully to blame for choosing to use something past it's serviced life. You cannot expect companies to support old software forever.

For what? So a designer can get a promotion? This is not progress, this is pure fashion. As if the planet being literally on fire needed more fuel.

So that we can have better features and functionality in our future systems. Backwards compatibility is an anchor. If you want new things then expect to get new platforms to run them on don't expect everyone to limit their possibilities to support you.

We are not talking about new features. Of course no one expects to run a LLM on an ten year old phone, again we are talking about fashion. It is change for change's sake. It is not providing value to users it is so the the designer gets to eat and management and shareholders are kept happy.

There is a difference between actual technical progress and you throwing out your skinny jeans because baggy pants are now in fashion.

Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?

>We are not talking about new features

We are, you are just choosing to ignore them and call them fashion. There have been immense changes in capabilities over the past 10 years.

>Why shouldn't we build phones that last ten year, twenty years, or even more?

We do, dumb phones, why don't you own one of those instead of trying to limit progress in the phones pushing progress?

If we want to take increasing device lifetimes seriously we need to normalize testing and development against slow/old models. Even if such testing is automated, it’d do wonders for keeping bloat at bay.

Otherwise saying it is definitively true is misleading to put it mildly.

Whatever is it that you're saying that Apple does, it's either not obvious or they're shit at it.

like Charlie Munger have said: "Show me the incentives and I will tell you the outcome"

Reality is that designers, product managers, engineers — they all wanna build cool things, get promoted, make money etc.

You don’t do that by shipping plain designs, no matter how tried and true. The pressure to create something new and interesting is ever present. And look we have these powerful Apple silicon chips that can capably render these neat effects.

So no I don’t think it’s a shadowy conspiracy to come after your iPhone 8. Just the regular pressure of everyday men and women to build new and interesting things that will bring success.

And yes, “looking different” doesn’t have to mean “requires faster hardware”, but picking something that requires faster hardware makes it less likely that you will be accused of being a copy-cat of some other product’s UI.