> The fact that a device can be perfectly usable for 5+ years is pretty good
No. No, it's not good at all. For almost every other product it would be deemed unacceptable. Beyond unacceptable even. We should not normalize this.
My car is > 10 years old. My desktop computer is > 10 years old. My laptop has had both the screen and battery changed. And the fan, multiple times. I don't know how old my laser printer is, probably twice as old, it doesn't see much use.
Users would never accept if Linux or Windows stopped supporting five year old architectures. It would be an uproar, and rightly so.
A phone no longer a toy, it is a tool among others. Five years is hardly enough to get to know a tool. You should just swap out the battery when it goes bad. You should not have to worry about software at all. That people accept this is a travesty.
For most people a phone is a monthly payment. One of the rewards that keeps them paying is that every few years they get an "upgrade." The phone companies and the mobile carriers very smartly followed the car model of selling: they sell a payment, and when the balance is paid off they offer a trade-in/upgrade (and a new loan). If you resist, you eventually stop getting support.
For the same reason, many car dealerships don't work on cars more than 10 years old. They keep their techs focused on the newer stuff, and increasingly pressure owners of older cars to trade them in.
Fortunately for car owners, there is a robust market of, and legal requirements to allow, parts and independent service shops for older cars. We don't have nearly that kind of support for older phones.
This is very country-specific. I can think of quite a few countries where the norm is to just buy the phone, or at least finance it through a regular personal loan, not something tied to your operator.
Yeah, you can do that here, and it's what I do. I do the same with cars. But most people in the USA have a car payment and a phone payment that is just a perpetual part of their monthly budget.
The big travesty is third party software developers. They just give up after the OS vendor releases a new major version and they stop working on older major versions. This should be totally unacceptable. The software works on iOS N one day, and then the next day when iOS N+1 comes out, the developers give their users the big “up yours” and stop caring about iOS N.
It's because older computers don't support TPM, the hardware is generally fine because Windows 11 doesn't really need anything that isn't supported by Windows 10 or realistically what was required by 7 or 8.
No. No, it's not good at all. For almost every other product it would be deemed unacceptable. Beyond unacceptable even. We should not normalize this.
My car is > 10 years old. My desktop computer is > 10 years old. My laptop has had both the screen and battery changed. And the fan, multiple times. I don't know how old my laser printer is, probably twice as old, it doesn't see much use.
Users would never accept if Linux or Windows stopped supporting five year old architectures. It would be an uproar, and rightly so.
A phone no longer a toy, it is a tool among others. Five years is hardly enough to get to know a tool. You should just swap out the battery when it goes bad. You should not have to worry about software at all. That people accept this is a travesty.