[snuxoll]

Why does anybody buy an $800 graphics card when it will be obsolete in under two years?

Because they plan on dealing with it being outpaced by newer hardware but not by enough to care about upgrading for a generation or two in most cases.

This is why I’m still rocking my iPhone 7+, I don’t know if I’ll upgrade to the 9 when it comes out at this point because the phone still runs great - just like I plan on skipping Volta since I just bought a 1080 Ti and there’s not a game in the world that taxes it enough yet at 1440P.

[olegkikin]

An $800 graphics card has an immediate use case: high FPS for games at high resolutions and high settings. Which is very important in competitive gaming, for instance.

I don't see such a use case for a $1000 smartphone. What important task does it solve that a $300-400 phone doesn't? A slightly better camera, slightly smoother scrolling, slightly faster web page rendering. None of that impresses me in the slightest, these improvements are marginal.

[snuxoll]

Camera is hugely important to me, as is web browsing performance - the two tasks I use my phone most heavily for. In fact, these are the only two reasons I jumped from my iPhone 6+ to the 7+. You can find a decent phone for $400 these days, but there's always tradeoffs and I'm not willing to compromise (and to be honest, I have an investment in the Apple ecosystem, so unless I plan on figuring out an entirely new workflow there's not much choice for $400 phones right now).

[olegkikin]

That's what I don't get.

Which websites are radically slower on iphone 6+ compared to 7+?

And the camera - what use case are you talking about? Taking family photos to post on Facebook? If so, how is that "hugely important"? Taking professional photos?

[na85]

And yet I'm still rocking my $350 Oneplus after two years.

Future proofing and spending exorbitant amounts of money do not necessarily have to go hand in hand.

It's ok to admit you spent the apple premium because you like apple phones.

[ohiovr]

Apple will eventually ruin the performance of the 7+ like they did with the ipad 2 and the iphone 6. I would advise you to wait a few months for reports to come in regarding what implications to your ux the next ios update has.

Keep in mind this is intentional destruction of your property.

[valuearb]

Yea, there is no evidence they have ever done anything like that. Throttling CPUs so an old phone won't reboot during use is actually improving performance, and you can get rid of throttling with a new battery. Apple should be criticized for poorly communicating the choice users had to make, not for the throttling itself.

And an iPhone 6 only has 1 Gb of RAM, and it's multicore performance is less than half of an iPhone 7, and one quarter of an iPhone X. And an iPad 2 only has 512 Mb of ram, and it's multicore performance is one quarter that of an iPhone 6, and around 1/18th of an iPad Pro.

It's basically impossible to add useful new OS features without impacting a three year old devices performance, so the only choice is whether to withhold those features from older phones or accept the tradeoffs. And you control whether you accept those features by accepting the upgrade.

[ohiovr]

I don't care about new bells and whistles. How about this, your update makes my ux poor, let me go back to the previous version when that os was selling that phone.