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Apple will update iPhones for at least 5 years in rare public commitment
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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This isn't new at all. Apple has been consistent with long term updates for a while.
iPhones have been getting at least 5 major annual updates sense the iPhone 4. The average is 6 updates.
If anything, it gets to a point where the old hardware can barley handle the newer OS.
This is the equivalent of them promising to be called Apple in 5 years - it changes absolutly nothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_version_history
Edit: thinking about it, this gives them an excuse to reduce the number of years they support phones. Instead of 6-7, can we now expect that to become only 5 years?
This could be a huge loss disguised as a win
Didn't Apple push updates to older devices that made them slower so that you'd buy their newest?
Depends how cynical you want to be and whether or not you trust Apple.
They claimed to slow things down so the aging batteries could run for close to as long as they could when they were new
Just give me a performance slider so I can slow my phone down myself when I need it.
Anyway I have an android, battery lasts 2-3 days with normal usage (like 3h SoT per day for 3 days usage) so I don't think I'll have to worry about battery - and batteries are getting better with every new model, we'll eventually reach a point where they're a non-issue
It was more that older batteries can't handle the power draw, so they would shut down if the power draw spiked by an expensive operation.
It was a really bad user experience so Apple throttled so phones wouldn't crash.
If only they made their batteries easier to replace so this would be a non issue.
They did offer cheap battery replacements to anyone with the affected models, essentially just covering the labor cost. Like $30 for a brand new battery.
No one makes batteries easy to replace on flagships these days because everyone is more concerned with waterproofing and form factor than they are with ease of battery replacement. I do miss the days of my old HTC Sensation, where I could just pop the back off and swap out the battery. I would carry around charged spares with me, so I would just turn off the phone, swap the battery, and have full battery instantly.
Oh I thought it was just to get some extra juice out of the batteries, thanks for the info
This myth keeps propagating online and it seems people never try to even Google what the issue was.
I think the main issue (amongst the tech community) was that they did this with out making it known to users (patch notes don't count - especially with autoupdates, who reads them?) the device just started getting slower.
If there was an option that was presented to users once the device got below 80% battery health to slow down the system to make daily batter life longer, then that would be an actually welcome feature. The problem was Apple just went a did it, and to a normal non-technical user, that means their phone is dying and they need to upgrade.
Why in the world do patch notes “not count”? The whole point of those is to communicate changes to the users.
Because in the world of auto updates, patch notes aren't presented to users, and the average user isn't seeking them out to read them. They essentially just wake up to a new OS.
A what's new pop up or something would be more effective.
A what’s new pop-up that would immediately be closed by 99.99% of users because the patch notes literally take twenty minutes to read (I read them all). It’s not useful to waste time adding a dialog that the vast vast majority of users aren’t going to use and that users that want to see it can literally just click the update notes in the settings dialog.
Pop up
"Hi, you're battery is getting old. Would you like to enable a mode that slows down your phone to preserve battery life, Yes or No."
That’s not a single pop up though. Go look at patch notes for any iOS release. There will be upwards of a hundred items. You want a pop up for each and every one of those? And then that has to get programmed for, bug tested, and that’s just going to increase costs. Or people could just read the release notes and none of that has to happen.
This isn’t why they did it. Degraded Li-ion batteries cannot sustain their rated voltage at high currents due to increased internal resistance. Sufficiently undervolted CPUs/memory cells produce errors (specifically bit flips), which can rather quickly lead to memory corruption and a crash.
Reducing the CPU frequency (thereby reducing the peak current draw) is practically necessary in the face of a degraded battery. Various laptops were infamous for not doing this, because it resulted in a ~20-30 minute battery life, as the voltage drop became too great once the battery charge drops below 80-90%. Within the context of a smartphone, neglecting to use the remaining 80-90% would make it basically useless.
What Apple (and the rest of the smartphone industry, at this point) really needs to do is make their batteries replaceable.
I suppose it may be the Mandela effect, but I thought they did announce it, just not everyone read it.
Just like the idiots at work who ignored a newsletter, two email blasts and announcement on a support text that there would be an upgrade. Then marched blindly ahead for the three week transition, ignored the support threads about upgrading, and it was suddenly our fault when the old systems “disappeared without warning”
A battery that lasts 8 hours and is a little slower, or a battery that lasts an hour… huh that’s a pretty easy choice, but yeah it can always be swung to make someone look bad.
It’s more like a phone that slightly slower, or a phone that will randomly turn off. Pretty sure everyone would want the first.
The phone would shutoff because the battery would under volt, it was usually around an hour. So what did you think you were correcting…?
You’re being less specific lmfao.
It had nothing to do with the capacity of the battery. It had to do with providing instantaneous high current when doing something demanding. Old batteries couldn’t do this and voltage would drop to unsustainable levels causing a brown out/black out.
Because the capacity was diminished…. New batteries didn’t have this issues since they were… well new…and had the capacity.
In a fully charged battery you could run demanding stuff, it’s only when the charge depleted that it became an issue, which is it couldn’t acces the capacity for the extra voltage anymore.
Without capacity, you can’t provide the high current… they’re literally related and go hand in hand……..
Again, you’re literally explaining more or less the same thing, in a far less technical way… so sure to a laymen you’re “correct”, but that’s where it ends.
But it’s NOT a capacity problem. The phone would turn off and then turn back on. The batteries still had power.
It’s funny you say I am less technical when I describe the exact technical reason for a shutdown. You just keep saying the same thing.
It’s a chemical aging issue with batteries. As they age they cannot provide the same amount of current at the same charge level.
Current draw is not even close to steady, there are lots of spikes. It’s the spike that is a problem.
If you had a new battery that had say 500mAh of charge remaining the issue wouldn’t happen. If you had an old battery with 2000mAh of charge remaining it’s very possible the issue happens.
Hopefully this is a simple way to describe to you that capacity does not matter. It’s all about current.
Yeah.. no… that’s not the case at all. A larger battery with more capacity that is aged would do the same thing as a brand new battery with the same capacity.
They’re a function of each other and your description is now contradicting itself. Capacity is the end function, without voltage can’t have capacity… you’re claiming otherwise.
A 500mah battery can’t provide the same over voltage as a 2,000, you’re claiming it can, come on dude lmfao. Without capacity, it can’t tap the over voltage needed, so the phone crashes and reboots, until you try the same thing. The phone effectively becomes useless after an hour since it can’t do anything demanding anymore, I never said it was dead….
Current is a part of the calculation to get capacity…. You can’t have capacity without current (A)….. you can have current (A), but it’s useless without voltage, and voltage and current gives us… capacity!!
I’m done explaining. You’re still wrong. I understand max capacity is voltage*current but that literally does not matter. Study some electrical engineering and then get back to me.
Or broke their screens
Never forget the iOS 4 update for the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G.
If they wanted to limit support to 5 years, they could've done so already. Apple never guarantees any support length, so they're just committing to the minimum this new UK regulation requires. This is probably nothing more than a formality.
Public commitment to what? That's two years less than Google's latest Pixel.
Those updates are easy when you have to release an system update to update the safari browser. Hell, you could call it a major security fix and fix some security issue on an old phone and every fanboy would be like "OMG iPhone 3s got an update.🤤" whereas Google can just ship browser fixes over the app store.
And version history means jack all when you can just name releases as you please. Google has been doing the same thing last 5-10 years. Emoji mixers, magic cleaner, launcher with google search bar at the bottom, turning a toggle into a big button on nav bar, enabling aren't major updates. Sure there are underlying changes, but they're mostly security patches and bugfixes. Android is still a bloated mess that needs ungodly amount of RAM and processing to keep even few apps running reliably in the background.
And guess where did Google learn this deceptive "long term update support" trend from?
The only thing they'll need is to decouple chrome and require a system update, and they could be providing updates for a decade.
Except that’s not what Apple means when they say they’ll update phones for five years. Security fixes aren’t the same as full iOS versions.
iOS 17, which came out September 2023, is available for the iPhone XR and XS, which came out in September of 2018. That’s a full OS update with all the non-hardware-based bells and whistles.
Security patches may very well release for older phones, but not full OS updates. Earlier this year they dropped a security patch for the iPhone 6S, a phone from 2015.