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by ezekg 2049 days ago
How do you still have one that's running OK? My Apple products almost always "die" after a few years. I had the 5S but one day it crashed and would not turn back on no matter what I did. The iPhone I had before that did the same thing.
7 comments

How do you still have one that's running OK? My Apple products almost always "die" after a few years.

Consider yourself unlucky and never buy a lottery ticket.

Apple is well-known for making products that last longer than most others in the industry.

I have a launch day iPhone 5 that gets daily use and still works fine as of this morning. Launch day was in September of 2012.

Is that a common issue? I've certainly heard about devices losing battery life and cameras progressively getting worse, but complete death is very uncommon unless you use it without a case and drop it all the time or something.

I still have a working iPhone 5 (no S) with a home button that spins and a slightly broken screen bezel but no other issues.

I have a 4S still running.

At one point I thought it died permanently. But it turned out to only be the screen dimming to much. In bright light it auto adjusted enough to be visible, allowing me to rise the brightness.

I had a 5s die at one point, it got reset to the point where it needed to activate, and couldn’t.
The list of old Apple devices that still work well is impressive: I still have one original iPad, an iPhone 3GS, several iPhone 4. Same goes for the more recent ones, with the exception of the few devices that I dropped on hard floors over the last 10 years...
Still have a first-generation iPod Touch running iOS 3. Works like a charm, can even download some apps from the App Store. Bit of a shock how both primitive and advanced the early versions of iOS were.
I had an iPad 1 running iOS 5 I think, but in the end I stopped using it because Safari would "crash" on most websites due to it running out of ram I guess.

IIRC there's 128M of ram on the fist iPad.

I have a 4S that's still running perfectly happily. Can't do much with it, mind, given that everything is wildly out of date but it may yet get repurposed as a webcam when I get some free time.
I believe you but I've honestly never heard of anybody suffering "random cellphone death" - Apple or otherwise. Everybody seems to break them or upgrade them long before that.
I had it with Nexus 5x. It died after 1.5 years when I used an app to get a train ticket. It turned out it was a known hardware bug judging by forums. It was in Norway so the phone was still under warranty and it was “repaired” - the motherboard was replaced. Still not much later I bought the original iPhone SE. I just did not like the idea of phone stopping working for no reason.
Yes, the 5X has a known nardware issue.
I have an iPhone 3GS and an iPad 2 that still work. They are very slow and most apps don’t support their oses. I’d still have an iPhone 7 Plus if it wasn’t at the bottom of a river rapid. My wife has a white MacBook somewhere from 2009/10.

The only problem I’ve had was a 2011 MBP have a gpu issue.

I fired up an old 5S as a result of this post and was sad to find that it appears to be dead.