This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.
The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).
It is abysmal that Android phone makers still need to customize the OS so much for their hardware. Apple has no incentive for longer support cycles if Android does even worse on it.
Vertical integrations like everyone sell a product, a brand, a whole ecosystem experience.
If all OEMs sold the same CP/M, UNIX, MSX, MS-DOS, Windows software stack, on the what is basically the same hardware with a different name glued on the case, they wouldn't get any brand recognition, aka product differentiation.
Thus OEMs specific customisations get added, back in the day bundled software packages are part of the deal, nowadays preinstalled on the OS image, and so on.
"This is a weird one to complain about, look at Donnie, he cheated on his girlfriend 3 times last month!"
If Apple continues to supply updates for six-year-old phones, iPhone 17 prices range from $11/month (base model iPhone 17) to $28/month (iPhone 17 Pro Max w/2TB storage), meaning it's only about 20% more expensive to store data on a RAID 10 array of iPhone 17 Pro Maxes running current iOS versions than on standard-tier S3 (not a relevant comparison, obviously, but it amuses me).
So I don't know what's reasonable, but Apple's policies certainly appear to be.
I'm still salty that Apple no longer offer battery service on my OG Apple Watch, however, so reason has its limits.
| Model | Launch date | Obsoleted by | Price
|-----------|--------------------|--------------|------
| iPhone | June 29, 2007 | iOS 4 | $399 (*price cut)
| iPhone 4 | June 24, 2010 | iOS 8 | $599
| iPhone 6 | September 19, 2014 | iOS 13 | $649
| iPhone 11 | September 13, 2019 | - | $699
So I bought a 4xM2 PCI card, 4 2TB Samsung Pro SSDs for $1,100. And as a result got 6.5GBps versus the onboard 1TB's 5GBps.
Same with memory. 160GB (32 to 192GB) from Apple was also around $3K. OWC sold the exact same memory chips, manufacturer, spec, speed, for $1,000 for 192GB.
Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:
- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.
- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?