[WhyNotHugo]

This is how they sell new phones. The grand majority of new features don't require the latest hardware, but artificially restricting it increases sales of new phones. None technical people can't usually tell the difference between hardware and software clearly enough to understand this nasty trick.

[illiac786]

To be fair it’s less bad than what some other vendors are doing, which is stopping to provide updates. Not saying apple is an angel, they intentionally generate ewaste by withholding such features…

[danielheath]

I spend a lot of time using my phone, and can afford the latest & greatest - but I use a 6 year old apple phone, because it's _perfectly fine_. A 10 year old apple phone is "just barely usable".

When I was in the android ecosystem, a 4 year old phone was "just barely" usable, and phones stopped being "fine" after about two years.

I'll give apple shit for a lot of things, and they could definitely do _more_ about e-waste... but this is as likely to be "we put the image encoder on the camera module, so it would have been slightly more work to backport to old phones"

[marcellus23]

I don't think anyone is deciding to buy a new phone or not based on JPEG XL support.