[froo]

>> Devices shouldn’t become outdated every year. They should evolve with you.

I really don't understand this sentiment.

I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus. I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It does absolutely everything I want.

At this rate, the only reason I'm going to upgrade is if I destroy my phone somehow (I've yet to even put a major scratch on any of my smartphones over the years) or if a vendor comes out with some feature where I'm like "yeah, I could really see myself getting use out of that"

>> Technology should assist you so that you can get on with enjoying life.

It's a smartphone for crying out loud. It's a platform designed for communication. Bonus points for having a camera in my pocket and some apps which help me for various tasks.

> The first actually open platform phone is the one that will have longevity.

Exactly, I feel that we're kind of getting there with all of the recent phones that have come out in the last couple of years. There's no real killer feature anyone's come out with, just nice things to have.

[patrickthebold]

>>I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus.

Not the parent, but that's pretty new. I used a 4s earlier this year and there were several apps that couldn't be upgraded and/or stopped working.

[BoorishBears]

I got my pair of Nexus 6 dev phones a month after my iPhone 6 Plus.

The Nexus 6 reached it final OS update with N but the 6+ is about to get iOS 11.

The iPhone 5s is about to get iOS 11. If it weren't for the 64-bit transition I wouldn't be surprised if it had gotten on the iPhone 5 as well.

Apple gives about 5 years of iOS updates, which makes keeping the same phone a lot more feasible. Meanwhile my Google sourced Nexus barely makes it two without landing on security patches-only.

[ufukbay]

I got my iPhone 5S (The 5S replaced my 3GS) when it was released and I'm still using it. The only problems I have are a little bit of yellow tint on the screen and the battery not having full capacity.

Maybe I got really lucky with both of my iPhones but even though I hate to pay this ridiculous premium price for iPhones it kinda evens out in the end considering I use the phone for 4-5 years.

[on_and_off]

The device does not stop working after that period

[wingerlang]

That's still an 6 year old phone, do you consider this long or short? Generally Apple are extremely good at keeping their devices usable.

I used an iPhone 4 up until late last year, my dad is still using it. Now I upgraded to an iPhone 5s.

The annoying part is generally apps that require a higher OS, which is the app developers fault. But even then you don't always necessarily /need/ the absolute newest version of an app.

[simonh]

Up until November last year my youngest daughter was using my old 3GS. She loved that phone and could even still download apps from the App Store. I know this because I installed Lemonade Stand for her last summer. You can't get that now because it only worked on the older OS versions, but there it was in the App Store for her 6 years after I bought it. I'd try and boot it now to check it, but I'm not sure where it is.

Planned obsolescence by big fat arse.

[illumin8]

The 6 Plus will be 3 years old in a month. The fact that its still a powerful phone, and will receive OS updates for another couple years speaks volumes about iPhone longevity vs. Android.

[froo]

That doesn't seem to be a manufacturer issue though is it?

In case of tablets, my partner is still using her iPad 2 and Netflix has a version of their app that still runs on that.

The core software on her tablet, like the core software on my older phones that were given to family members still work fine.

Its the 3rd party apps that seem to be abandoned by software developers. That's going to happen regardless of what phone manufacturer's want.

[Joeri]

I have an original ipad and netflix is pretty much the only thing that still works fine on that. You can't use it to browse the web anymore because web pages have gotten so heavy it runs out of memory trying to render them. The app store is also broken to the degree of being unusable, even if you could find apps. If it wasn't so locked down it would still make an excellent linux device, but as it stands it's basically a dedicated netflix viewer.

So in my view it's a bit of both. These devices could have a longer life with manufacturer support, but the app developers are the ones driving the obsolescence.

[PacketPaul]

App developer here. It is impossible to build an app for the original iPad. Apple tools will not allow you to compile backwards compatibility to iOS 6 (or is it 5?).

[g00gler]

App developers are only a piece of this equation, though.

From (solo) developing an sms based app in 2017 there was little incentive to target an API level lower than 19 (KitKat), which provided a standard API for SMS.

The majority of devices support it so what's the incentive to support legacy software?

Now if there are breaking changes introduced to telephony in the future I'll probably maintain 4.4 support and add a check for API level. That isn't feasible for every app, though...

[ekianjo]

> I've still got my iPhone 6 Plus. I haven't seen the need to upgrade yet. It does absolutely everything I want.

That's hardly an old phone. Do you see yourself still using it in 3 years time?

[zanny]

I've got a Galaxy S3, an S4 couple first generation Moto Gs, a 2012 and a 2013 Nexus 7, a Note 2, I think? 2 Note 3s, and a One Plus One in various states of: loaned to cousins, used as house phones, backups in a drawer, backups in cars, or lying on my desk.

They were all either broken, at yard sales, given to me my clients / contacts that don't want them, or were <$20 on ebay.

In general four things kill these devices:

* Touchscreen breakage. It is almost never worth trying to replace if the screen cracks.

* Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies.

* Charger port wear. Microusb sucks, replacement parts vary wildly depending on model - I can get an S series charger for <$5 most of the time, but trying to replace a Droid phone charger once was impossible because the charger harness was soldered to the pcb.

* Software. I generally outright ignore devices without a ROM scene and an unlocked bootloader, but even then it is entirely volunteer how long Cyanogen/Lineage/Paranoid/etc are willing to keep supporting these fossil kernels. The S3, Note 2-3, and original Nexus 7 are all on their deathbeds because of lagging community support for these devices. It is worth mentioning, however, for the Samsung devices they have gone community supported far longer at this point than their official support periods lasted. Great job Samsung.

Batteries are usually a non-issue. You can buy shitty Chinese knockoff batteries (or if you are lucky Anker) that don't hold a charge and don't last long, but you can keep these devices running on bootleg parts for a while.

The software is the ultimate killer. What should be the easiest to maintain is the hardest, because corporate greed and hunger for control trumps customer respect. All my mobile devices are cheap, used, or broken when I get them because none of these exploitative abusers are worth giving a direct cent to.

[ekianjo]

> * Flash burnout. Shitty flash chips don't last forever. I've binned almost every older phone than this crop because the flash memory dies.

I have never experienced this before, what are the signs that the flash chip is going sour? Slow to load? Losing information? Is there anything you can do about it ?

[zanny]

Sadly mobile flash doesn't support smart monitoring. There are three indicators, but your flash can randomly fail without any of them being observable:

* Sector reallocations. As flash stops writing or reading the package will reallocate data. This process is intensive and usually lags out the phone. If when moving large amounts of data into / off the flash the whole phone is freezing, it can be due to this.

* Stunted read / write speeds. As the flash degrades and more sectors go bad, your read and write performance suffer. Fragmentation gets worse as working sectors dry up. If your phone was benching ~80MB/s read or write speeds the day you got it and is down to ~20 5 years later, it is likely nearing a failure point. This is usually a gradual aging thing, but you do often see a steep slope of sudden performance crash before the whole chip becomes unusable.

* Crippled access times. The former was data rate, this is data latency. The latency should always be consistent and not age much throughout the life of the chip - the ability to access flash almost always stays near-constant over the lifetime of the chip. If this starts going, for very small data sizes, the chips controller can be dying. Which happens, because in phones a lot of corners are cut, and flash mmus are often really, really cheap.

There is also the really rare chance you find a corrupted file you cannot open that used to work, which can in extremely rare circumstances mean that your phone has ran out of unallocated sectors and is now losing capacity including written data, but that is highly unlikely - flash almost always becomes unwritable way before becoming unreadable, and your phone will fail before unreadability starts manifesting en masse.

It would be useful if we could get A. lifetime write averages for the flash chips in popular phones and B. trace such a number throughout the lifetime of the device, but we don't have those, so you are almost always flying in the dark on when your phones memory will die.

[teknologist]

A year or so ago my iPhone 6 was constantly freezing up and was practically unusable. I tried changing literally every setting available in an attempt to resolve it. Wiping it clean and restoring from a backup solved it.

I was almost convinced it was a problem with the flash chip as symptoms were exactly what you describe here.

[pjc50]

Same as on a desktop: mysterious slowdowns everywhere.

My wife has a four-year-old Windows phone, the Nokia 1020, which is completely fine in all aspects other than suffering from this.

[froo]

Yes.

My vision isn't great, so I upgraded from my iPhone 4 to the 5 because of the larger screen, and the 5 to the 6+ due to a larger screen.

Really, the screen size has been the main driving factor in my phone purchase decisions.

My 4 & 5 have been passed down to my mother, so they're still in use. Hell, I was still using my 1st gen iPad until just over a year ago when the screen just failed.

[Aaargh20318]

> That's hardly an old phone.

In the smartphone business, it's practically an antique.

[piyush_soni]

Besides, they don't give any more software update guarantee then Google's flagships are giving (previously Nexus phones, and now Pixel) - i.e. 2 years.