[khedoros1]

Hi! I'm not talking about a device introduced after 2010; I'm talking about a device introduced in 2007, and which I bought about mid-2008. You have 3 devices that I wasn't talking about (beyond being amused by iOS 6 and iPhone 4 being called really/truly old).

Back to the iPod Touch that I was talking about: The Netflix app that's on there (the newest available for iPhone OS 3.1.3) apparently can't authenticate with Netflix's current backend. Their site says that there's a version for iOS 5 that will still work, and that the current version requires iOS 9.

[scarface74]

That's true. I also have a first gen functional iPod Touch from 2007. It's not a codec issue, Netflix doesn't support that version of the authentication API.

As I said in another post, comparing the longevity of a mobile device in its first decade to a PC is Apples and Oranges.

Today, I have a few 10 year old computers that are still being used either by me or my parents. My 10 year old PC, I'm using as a plex server can use modern USB 2 peripherals, has gigabit Ethernet that takes full advantage of my gigabit internet, runs a modern OS (Windows 10), etc. It has a 1920x1200 display. It has 4Gb RAM but can be upgraded to 8. 10 years later, most consumer PCs come with 8GB.

Now in 2008, my Gateway Solo from 1998 with an 800x600 display, 16Mb RAM, no USB, and a 4GB hard drive would have been useless. It definitely couldn't run modern software.

But going back to iPads. Compare the longevity of the iPad in 2010 running iOS 5 with a 2007 iPod Touch that came out 4 years earlier. On the other end, compare the longevity of an iPad 2 that got upgraded from iOS 5 to iOS 9 to the first gen that only got upgraded from iOS 3 to iOS 5. I fully expect to see the usefulness of mobile devices - at least on the Apple side where you actually get OS updates to continuously lengthen.

[khedoros1]

> It's not a codec issue, Netflix doesn't support that version of the authentication API.

And you'll notice that I corrected the statement from my first post, in the post that you replied to.

> As I said in another post, comparing the longevity of a mobile device in its first decade to a PC is Apples and Oranges.

Where in this thread have I compared the longevity of a mobile device to a PC? If you'd like, I'll add a device comparison. My 40 year old Atari 2600 (from the first decade of home gaming systems) still sees use, and works as well as it ever did.

Time becomes much more of a factor when we rely on constant 3rd party maintenance (app stores, online services, and so on). The age of the device category is less pertinent than how much it relies on off-device services to provide functionality.

> Now in 2008, my Gateway Solo from 1998 with an 800x600 display, 16Mb RAM, no USB, and a 4GB hard drive would have been useless. It definitely couldn't run modern software.

A couple things here. First, I hope you didn't spend much for that computer. Mine at the time had 6x the RAM, USB, and double the hard drive space. Second, I don't see why it would need to run modern software, for the sake of comparison. I'm not asking the iPod to run modern software, I'm asking it to provide the capabilities that it did when I bought it, which it can't, due to excessive reliance on an app store that refuses to carry older software and other 3rd party services that like to move forward in incompatible ways.