[dangus]

Personally I don’t think Apple’s level of support is incredibly bad when you take a look at the used device market. Even with Apple’s famously high resale values, depreciation on smartphones is huge.

Don’t buy brand new old phones new from Apple, they’re a ripoff. If you buy either an iPhone 12 or 13 used for $250-350 you can basically plan on a $50 a year budget to have a smartphone that always has the latest OS judging by their expected remaining lifespans.

I think the big flaw with the status quo is e-waste more than cost to the consumer. I think an iPhone 6S or 7 are incredibly slow and outdated devices for today’s usage but in 5 years I don’t think we will be able to say the same thing about an iPhone 12 or 13. Smartphone hardware is far more mature now than it was even 6 generations deep into the iPhone product line.

We should be able to replace batteries for $20 and replace things like broken screens for not much more, and Apple should be enthusiastic about it considering how services are their bread and butter moving forward. Apple should be happy to produce fewer phones and keep more consumer dollars allocated toward the purchase of high margin digital goods.

[chatmasta]

> I don’t think we will be able to say the same thing about an iPhone 12 or 13

The wildcard here is local LLM use cases and any new hardware that increases their speed by orders of magnitude.

[dangus]

That’s not really a need for smartphone users. I can access an LLM on a website for free right now.

I also don’t see any indication that there will be impactful local LLM silicon at the smartphone scale anytime soon.

[calgoo]

You can yes, but the rumor is that Apple is focusing on adding them directly to your device, and if they integrate it deeply in the OS, then it will require the chips to run it. I’m sure you will be able to run old devices but without the latest Siri for example.

[paulryanrogers]

Can I get a user replaceable battery instead?

[butlike]

I just want a glorified iPod from my old phone that won't get pwned at the airport.

[walteweiss]

I still use a 6s and a fist Gen. se, I won’t say they’re terribly slow. It’s the apps, the modern apps, that make the device too slow. If you use not so many, it works quite very well. The only downside that the OS is not updated any longer. Although I got a security update recently, weeks ago.

[davnn]

Not yet, I believe. Revenue from iPhone sales is still quite fundamental to Apple‘s success, it‘s more than triple the revenue from all services combined (not including Google‘s search engine deal).