or keep using your device after you dropped it. or keep using the same device long enough for the battery to wear out. or use the same charger on your phone as you would use on any other device.
it’s frickin ludicrous how apple users whose devices break prematurely just go and buy another device from apple, as opposed to doing the sane thing and buying from a different company. like after my lenovo laptop wiped its own bios on a forced “upgrade” i’m sure as fuck not buying lenovo, but if an apple device encountered the same error 9 out of 10 users would just go and wire daddy tim apple another $1500 for a replacement. like wtf, why would they not enforce failures if that’s how their users behave
i highly doubt they were anywhere near as easy as just taking off the back of the phone, removing the battery, and plopping a new one in. y’know, like how it worked on everything before apple decided to change it and most manufacturers followed, because lithium batteries are really good for limiting the lifespan of a device. but you can still get smartphones that have that old model (like the samsung xcover 6 or the fairphone 4), just not from apple.
apple could still do that when they’re forced to include user-replaceable batteries. it’s going to be even simpler, the person in the “genius bar” will just open the phone, take the battery out, put the new one in, and hand it back to you. hard to beat a 30 second repair.
i honestly have no clue why you think forcing apple to build their phones in sane and pro-consumer ways would prevent them from giving you this premium service that you already pay a premium for. the only reason they might stop is because they might get mad that they don’t get to screw over everyone who doesn’t sign up for apple care, but that’s on them. no one is asking for apple to not care about its customers, we’re asking for the exact opposite.
that is entirely because android phone manufacturers are copying apple and doing it even worse, not because apple is somehow good. the fairphone has seven hears of support, and before the smartphone era, you had no issues keeping a phone for a similarly long time.
apple made this model of limited software support, and they do their damn best to enforce it, by revoking the new ios from their devices five years after release on average, and actively pushing developers to only support the latest ios. yes, it’s better than most android manufacturers ensuring your phone gets slow about twice as fast but it’s still anti-consumer.
and again, when my last xiaomi phone did that to me, i bought a fairphone, not another xiaomi. buying again from the same company that screwed you over is lunacy.
Most iPhones only last 5 years from release to when they lose the latest iOS. Currently the record holder is the 6S with its 83 months, which is almost on par with the Fairphone, but it’s important to note that on iPhone if you don’t have the latest iOS you’ll slowly but surely lose apps, while on Android you can be 4-5 versions behind and still be just fine because that’s the development target. And yes, you can use an iPhone that’s no longer compatible with a bunch of apps, but at that point what’s the difference between that and using an old Android phone?
Also, sure, most Android phones indeed do worse than iOS, but that was never my point. My point is that this is a problem Apple manufactured out of thin air when they created the modern smartphone paradigm with the iPhone, and then Android manufacturers copied them and made it even worse. But that doesn’t make the iPhone’s planned obsolescence problem any less anti-consumer, it just means there’s even worse stuff on the market.
If you stop thinking about it as an us vs them between Apple and non-Apple, and start thinking about it as “are those corpos ripping us off” it’s a lot easier to wrap your head around this. Yes, I know the Apple mindset is about supporting the scrappy little underdog that’s fighting the evil Gates, but they’re no longer the scrappy little underdog, they’re literally the largest corporation on the planet. They became the very thing they swore to destroy.
iPhone 8 is 6 years old and still runs the latest iOS version. Apple may have made the smartphone popular and mainstream, they didn’t do what android developers do which is leave modern handsets in the cold.
If we look at the question of is a phone usable like the old days you keep referring to, they work fine for phone calls and sms. If you want to run the latest apps with the latest iOS version 6 years or a bit more seems to be the limit. Which is reasonable.
If we look at security releases Apple is still updating iOS 15 which supports the iPhone 6s released back in 2015.
Many arguments can be made against the Apple approach to software and their walled garden.
I’m saying you can’t make those same complaints against ongoing software support as they are leaders in that.
If you stop thinking about it as an us vs them between Apple and non-Apple, and start thinking about it as “are those corpos ripping us off” it’s a lot easier to wrap your head around this.
Your entire point is that Apple is not bad because the general state of Android is worse. I’m calling both bad. And I’m blaming Apple for leading that trend – which also doesn’t absolve most Android manufacturers from following that trend, but Apple still made it.
Also, this whole debate is in the context of a bill that mandates that phone manufacturers make batteries replaceable. The Android side of things actually had that for a long time, while Apple has been doing unibody phones from the beginning and hammered that idea into the whole industry through years of insistence. That’s why I put so much of the blame on them.
You brought up the software support issue and I corrected you as you are wrong. Apple didn’t start anything and lead the industry in ongoing software support.
In my opinion legislating replaceable batteries is anti-consumer as they will be forced into wider devices that aren’t waterproof. I would prefer that they legislated that battery replacement guides be made available by the manufacturer with genuine parts made available at a low profit margin to enable user replacement with the correct tools.
I’m not ignoring anything, I am trying to be factual and provide accurate information about software support periods.
If I’m being idealistic, I’d prefer that all devices support foss and that vendor blobs aren’t required, that is more important than bringing back carrying a spare battery in your bag. Until then we have patchy android software support and Apple’s closed ecosystem as the only major players.
The Samsung Xcover6 is waterproof. The Samsung Galaxy S5 was waterproof nearly ten years ago. Both of these phones have toolless user-replaceable batteries. This excuse is moot and always has been. (On the same note, both of these phones have a headphone jack as well, which is also often brought up as “impossible to waterproof”.)
But the legislation is not even calling for that. There is nothing in the law preventing a company from making a waterproof phone (and I would be strongly against it if there was), and there is actually not even any text preventing the use of screws for battery replacement. It just calls for it to be easy. That’s an engineering challenge, and Apple has many smart engineers who could figure this out – for example, they could go back to the two screws next to the charging port to open up the phone (they’d just have to make them torx or phillips, not pentalobe, since proprietary tools are prohibited by the same legislation) and not glue in the battery. They don’t have to adopt the Fairphone’s or the Xcover6’s style, they have options, the law only mandates the end result, not the method.
But also, your idealized phone exists, it’s called the Fairphone. It’s very likely that it greatly influenced the EU’s decisionmaking on this one by providing an example of what a phone can be like.
As for this:
Apple didn’t start anything and lead the industry in ongoing software support.
So you deny that the iPhone ushered in an entirely new paradigm for phones that was wildly different from anything ever before? Because that’s where we lost the mindset of using a phone literally until it breaks, no time limits, just like you can do it today with a laptop, or you could always do on a “dumb phone”. You can’t both credit them for inventing this whole new class of devices but refuse to blame them for the planned obsolescence built into that class of devices from the very beginning.
or keep using your device after you dropped it. or keep using the same device long enough for the battery to wear out. or use the same charger on your phone as you would use on any other device.
it’s frickin ludicrous how apple users whose devices break prematurely just go and buy another device from apple, as opposed to doing the sane thing and buying from a different company. like after my lenovo laptop wiped its own bios on a forced “upgrade” i’m sure as fuck not buying lenovo, but if an apple device encountered the same error 9 out of 10 users would just go and wire daddy tim apple another $1500 for a replacement. like wtf, why would they not enforce failures if that’s how their users behave
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i highly doubt they were anywhere near as easy as just taking off the back of the phone, removing the battery, and plopping a new one in. y’know, like how it worked on everything before apple decided to change it and most manufacturers followed, because lithium batteries are really good for limiting the lifespan of a device. but you can still get smartphones that have that old model (like the samsung xcover 6 or the fairphone 4), just not from apple.
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apple could still do that when they’re forced to include user-replaceable batteries. it’s going to be even simpler, the person in the “genius bar” will just open the phone, take the battery out, put the new one in, and hand it back to you. hard to beat a 30 second repair.
i honestly have no clue why you think forcing apple to build their phones in sane and pro-consumer ways would prevent them from giving you this premium service that you already pay a premium for. the only reason they might stop is because they might get mad that they don’t get to screw over everyone who doesn’t sign up for apple care, but that’s on them. no one is asking for apple to not care about its customers, we’re asking for the exact opposite.
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It’s not “no cost to me” if you paid for apple care
iPhones win the longevity wars and have far better software support for older devices.
that is entirely because android phone manufacturers are copying apple and doing it even worse, not because apple is somehow good. the fairphone has seven hears of support, and before the smartphone era, you had no issues keeping a phone for a similarly long time.
apple made this model of limited software support, and they do their damn best to enforce it, by revoking the new ios from their devices five years after release on average, and actively pushing developers to only support the latest ios. yes, it’s better than most android manufacturers ensuring your phone gets slow about twice as fast but it’s still anti-consumer.
and again, when my last xiaomi phone did that to me, i bought a fairphone, not another xiaomi. buying again from the same company that screwed you over is lunacy.
I checked Wikipedia. iPhone is still supported and that is 6 years old.
If android manufacturers did actually copy Apple and provided 6+ years of support, we’d be a lot better off.
You can’t win the Apple is bad with software support argument, because it is where Apple is strongest.
Most iPhones only last 5 years from release to when they lose the latest iOS. Currently the record holder is the 6S with its 83 months, which is almost on par with the Fairphone, but it’s important to note that on iPhone if you don’t have the latest iOS you’ll slowly but surely lose apps, while on Android you can be 4-5 versions behind and still be just fine because that’s the development target. And yes, you can use an iPhone that’s no longer compatible with a bunch of apps, but at that point what’s the difference between that and using an old Android phone?
Also, sure, most Android phones indeed do worse than iOS, but that was never my point. My point is that this is a problem Apple manufactured out of thin air when they created the modern smartphone paradigm with the iPhone, and then Android manufacturers copied them and made it even worse. But that doesn’t make the iPhone’s planned obsolescence problem any less anti-consumer, it just means there’s even worse stuff on the market.
If you stop thinking about it as an us vs them between Apple and non-Apple, and start thinking about it as “are those corpos ripping us off” it’s a lot easier to wrap your head around this. Yes, I know the Apple mindset is about supporting the scrappy little underdog that’s fighting the evil Gates, but they’re no longer the scrappy little underdog, they’re literally the largest corporation on the planet. They became the very thing they swore to destroy.
iPhone 8 is 6 years old and still runs the latest iOS version. Apple may have made the smartphone popular and mainstream, they didn’t do what android developers do which is leave modern handsets in the cold.
If we look at the question of is a phone usable like the old days you keep referring to, they work fine for phone calls and sms. If you want to run the latest apps with the latest iOS version 6 years or a bit more seems to be the limit. Which is reasonable.
If we look at security releases Apple is still updating iOS 15 which supports the iPhone 6s released back in 2015.
Many arguments can be made against the Apple approach to software and their walled garden.
I’m saying you can’t make those same complaints against ongoing software support as they are leaders in that.
You’re still ignoring the last part I said:
Your entire point is that Apple is not bad because the general state of Android is worse. I’m calling both bad. And I’m blaming Apple for leading that trend – which also doesn’t absolve most Android manufacturers from following that trend, but Apple still made it.
Also, this whole debate is in the context of a bill that mandates that phone manufacturers make batteries replaceable. The Android side of things actually had that for a long time, while Apple has been doing unibody phones from the beginning and hammered that idea into the whole industry through years of insistence. That’s why I put so much of the blame on them.
You brought up the software support issue and I corrected you as you are wrong. Apple didn’t start anything and lead the industry in ongoing software support.
In my opinion legislating replaceable batteries is anti-consumer as they will be forced into wider devices that aren’t waterproof. I would prefer that they legislated that battery replacement guides be made available by the manufacturer with genuine parts made available at a low profit margin to enable user replacement with the correct tools.
I’m not ignoring anything, I am trying to be factual and provide accurate information about software support periods.
If I’m being idealistic, I’d prefer that all devices support foss and that vendor blobs aren’t required, that is more important than bringing back carrying a spare battery in your bag. Until then we have patchy android software support and Apple’s closed ecosystem as the only major players.
The Samsung Xcover6 is waterproof. The Samsung Galaxy S5 was waterproof nearly ten years ago. Both of these phones have toolless user-replaceable batteries. This excuse is moot and always has been. (On the same note, both of these phones have a headphone jack as well, which is also often brought up as “impossible to waterproof”.)
But the legislation is not even calling for that. There is nothing in the law preventing a company from making a waterproof phone (and I would be strongly against it if there was), and there is actually not even any text preventing the use of screws for battery replacement. It just calls for it to be easy. That’s an engineering challenge, and Apple has many smart engineers who could figure this out – for example, they could go back to the two screws next to the charging port to open up the phone (they’d just have to make them torx or phillips, not pentalobe, since proprietary tools are prohibited by the same legislation) and not glue in the battery. They don’t have to adopt the Fairphone’s or the Xcover6’s style, they have options, the law only mandates the end result, not the method.
But also, your idealized phone exists, it’s called the Fairphone. It’s very likely that it greatly influenced the EU’s decisionmaking on this one by providing an example of what a phone can be like.
As for this:
So you deny that the iPhone ushered in an entirely new paradigm for phones that was wildly different from anything ever before? Because that’s where we lost the mindset of using a phone literally until it breaks, no time limits, just like you can do it today with a laptop, or you could always do on a “dumb phone”. You can’t both credit them for inventing this whole new class of devices but refuse to blame them for the planned obsolescence built into that class of devices from the very beginning.