It used to be Apple was criticized for dropping support for phones too early. Now, they're still supporting the iPhone 6S, a phone from 5 years ago. Did Apple change their policy due to criticism, or have they honed their tech to improve support for older devices?
I think it's the latter, but it is also an under-reported aspect of Tim Cook's regime: a focus on sustainability. They have a whole page on their site about their efforts [1], including how they had to invent new materials and processes to achieve some environmentalist goals.
This is just a theory, but I think a fair bit changed with this as their custom A series chips improved. It was easier to support devices further back because they started to have such a commanding lead in performance, which gives some extra room to keep improving the OS without it slowing down like it used to do.
It's not likely to be a pure "performance" thing. The 6S, according to wikipedia [1], is the oldest phone containing an A9 chip, which has an image processing unit, a coprocessor that can handle Siri voice commands, and an NVMe storage controller. It is also the minimum requirement for ARKit.
I doubt very much that Apple is being arbitrary in their support cutoff for phones. If it's capable of the features they build into the OS, it gets support. If I had to make a guess, the next cutoff point (iOS 15?) is going to be a chip having the Bionic Neural Engine, which would make the iPhone 8 the oldest supported phone.
I mean that's fair, but I think in general, the advancements they've made to the A series chips over the years has been them a lot easier to continue to support for longer periods of time.
Hopefully we'll see Mac's with longer lifecycles and macOS support as well. I think the Mac side is a tad short at the moment.
I think that's fair. Big Sur support is limited to 2014 iMacs and later, which is a shame because my late 2012 iMac is absolutely fine for home and business use still.
Intel released Haswell in 2013. Big Sur probably requires features introduced with it, such as AVX2, new low power states, increased GPU execution units, etc.
Apple wants to meet environmental aims and paint themselves green - something I fully support for that matter - and they have at least for consumers the expectation of quality and craftsmanship, not "crap that's obsolete in two years".
Windows has a different reason why they're so focused on desktop BC: lock-in. Had Windows not taken care of BC over decades and a provable track record of that from the beginning of the DOS era, enterprises with tens of thousands of licenses would have fled the ship (and funded WINE with ludicrous amounts of money, probably). On mobile they didn't give a flying finger about BC, and the contrast was noticeable.
It was that way even at the Windows CE times. Truly a shame, MS and Blackberry essentially owned that market, and they let it slip away. Now both are fucked in that space.
It's not that Apple is particularly good at supporting older devices, it's that Android vendors are catastrophically bad across the board.
Apple tends to drop support when some hardware feature or limitation doesn't play well with the new OS. For instance, the iPhone 6 only has 1GB of RAM.
My Nokia 6 from 2017 is still receiving security updates. The update cycle switched from 1 month to every 3 months after the device reached the 3 year update guarantee but it's still acknowledgedby the manufacturer.
Nokia phones are in my opinion way too underrepresented on the market for the support they give.
I don't think you have your history right on this one. At least not if it's about support for older iPhones. Apple has always exceeded typical industry practice in how long it supported old mobile hardware.
Yeah, my experience across their device lines is that, for build quality reasons alone, their products outlive any competitors: I have a ‘08 MacBook Pro that still basically works, except it can’t connect to my WiFi network and 2GB of memory is basically useless today.
Or hardware improvements have become more incremental and less cataclysmic.
From a software and developer side, it makes sense to drop 32 bit support early. It's less radically different architectures to target. It means they can guarantee the performance of the os and apps. But as processors got good enough to handle most things, the need to drop the slow ones, and the slow ones holding back the software evolution is minimized.
