[bad_user]

My Nexus 4 (released Nov 2012) has officially received the Lollipop upgrade and is working very well. I barely have reasons to replace it.

Apple does indeed a better job at supporting older devices, however new iOS releases are basically unusable on devices older than 2 years. I have for example a 2-year old iPad 3 and iOS 8 is usable on it, but for iPhone 4S or IPad 2 the upgrade turned usable devices into unusable ones.

[digisign]

My ipad 2 is running ios 8.1 well and i'm posting with it right now.

[hubot]

iPad 2 is one beast device, live through so many updates and is actually very usable.

[MBCook]

It's showing it's age.

The real problem is they're still selling it brand new (in the form of the non-retina Mini) and with Apple's policy of supporting devices for 2 or 3 years that means the device will get six years of updates, even though it's already aging badly at this point.

[agentdrtran]

My Nexus 4 isn't working well and I regret getting it. The speakers pops, it lags when playing audio, and most importantly, the camera bug is still not fixed. I can't make video calls on my phone because it could reboot at any second.

[hrktb]

Bduerst also mentionned updates that "almost bricked" his phone. I think the standards for "almost bricked" and "unusable" are incredibly low in this comment section.

I still have an iPhone4S in a drawer; it's visibly slower than when it was under iOS6 and even compared to a 5S it's night and day, but compared to other middle range android phones that's still decent. Side to side with a Moto G for instance, it's basically the same reactivity, but no one would call the Moto G an unusable device.

[tracker1]

The moto g didn't cost over $1160 over the course of two years (partly for amortized monthly costs, plus higher costs for the plan)... moto g on, for example Simple Mobile is $40/month plus the cost of the phone. Pricing may be slightly different, but when I compared when I got my N4 a couple years ago, the plans I was looking at for my phone would have been around $70-90/month or more, with any iPhone, plus the initial out of pocket... compared to a moto g out of pocket today, that's a lot more.

That's quite a big difference. I've been pretty happy with my Nexus 4, and hoping to get a full third year out of it... since the Nexus 5 isn't a huge bump, and the N6 is way out of the ballpark on pricing imho. I've been recommending the Moto G LTE for most people lately... it's a usable phone without a lot of extra monthly expense.

[hrktb]

Why does the data plan matter ?

The Moto G is under 250 unlocked and the first gen is one year old. The 4S went for a bit less than 700, is now 3 years old and resells for roughly 200. I don't think comparing the performances of the two under the most recent OSes available is biased.

[tracker1]

One is a new device, the other is used. Comparing them when they were new would be where I was talking about.. even today I'd suggest a moto-g over a 4S unless you have other apple hardware already.