[nindalf]

It’s not economical to support devices used by less than 1% of the user base. Linux only manages it because community members step up to support older architectures. And sometimes when no one steps up the architectures are removed.

- Linux dropping support for old graphics drivers (Nov 2023) - https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Drop-Old-UMS-DRM-Infra

- Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Dropping A Bunch Of Old CPUs (Jan 2021) - https://www.phoronix.com/news/2021-Linux-Drop-Old-CPUs

Supporting all of these is work. It makes development of new features harder, because it has to account for quirks of older hardware. Older hardware is also harder to get in the hands of developers and harder to test on. That’s why Linux has dropped support for 386, 486, IA-64 and other architectures.

There’s no point saying trillion dollar corporation etc. It comes down to some basic fact - phones must be built with SoCs, that’s the easiest way. The PC way doesn’t work at scale. Now that we are on SoCs you have to draw the line on support somewhere. Just because the costs imposed on future development aren’t obvious to us doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

I think 5 years minimum (and sometimes more) of OS updates is pretty good, FWIW.

[zarzavat]

It’s absolutely economical. Apple only has to support a tiny number of devices that they themselves manufactured, they have the easiest job in the world.

Think about how many devices Microsoft has to support in Windows, it’s orders of magnitude more.

Apple doesn’t want to support older devices because they don’t see a benefit to themselves.

5 years of support is pitifully short. Pretty much everything I own lasts longer than 5 years, my phone is one of the things I have to replace most often, not because the hardware is broken, but because it stops receiving updates.

[no_time]

>It’s not economical to support devices used by less than 1% of the user base. Linux only manages it because community members step up to support older architectures. And sometimes when no one steps up the architectures are removed.

Again, bugs are this are not hardware specific. You are not supporting "devices". You are supporting the OS which all of them run. Ideally (I'm not familiar with OSX/iOS internals) all they have to do is push out an update that contains the newly fixed libwebkit.so or whatever. They control everything on their own platform so they don't even have to deal with glibc breaking backcompat like we have to in the GNU/Linux world.

If they can't figure out a way to make changes like this universal across devices, it's either deliberate negligence or incompetence.

[tesdinger]

You're a special kind of clown claiming that it is not economical white Apple profits are somewhere between 20% and 26%. They could build an update, they just prefer making more money.

[beeboobaa]

Shrug. That's their problem. Or it should be, at least.

Don't sell crap you can't support for a decent amount of time. Stop ruining this planet we live on by creating immense amounts of e-waste every few years.

We both know your argument is dishonest or at least naive, though. They could easily support updates if they want to. But it's about money. This way they are forcing people to buy a new phone every few years. It's clever, shame about the planet.

[nindalf]

> dishonest

Dishonest? You're saying I'm lying to support a trillion dollar corporation I have no financial stake in and never have? Is such an accusation really in the spirit of this forum?

I suggest you review the guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Don't be snarky. Don't sneer. Assume good faith.

[smoldesu]

I will say that certain comparisons (eg. "The PC way doesn’t work at scale") are objectively wrong. Even Apple uses the PC model internally, despite not having an open bootloader or really supporting UEFI anymore. AFAIK, the XNU kernel even uses the same DeviceTree layout as Linux for supporting ARM SOCs. Apple hasn't really broken any new ground that can't be re-covered by modern operating systems.

Also, your claim that it's "not economical" is entirely unproven and arguably false. iPhones are still architecturally supported by Linux and will continue to be for a while (even longer on BSD). Other Apple products (eg. Apple Silicon) received community driver support entirely from donations and volunteer time. There's no reason to assume that iPhones lack community interest, especially since Apple has never given the iPhone community the same leverage they had on Mac.

If that's the sum of both arguments, then you're mostly just leveraging FOMO to support an unproven concept. At best you're jumping the gun, at worst you're twisting the facts to preclude discussion of open iPhone software alternatives.