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Apple Expects Users To Replace Their iPhone, Apple Watch After Three Years
Apple says it expects its users to replace their iPhone and Apple Watch after (more like, every) three years. The company adds that it expects a Mac user to replace their computer after four years. The iPhone maker shared the expectations in a recently released document as part of its latest environmental push. In the document, Apple underscores how much its products contribute to the greenhouse gas lifecycle. The Guardian reports: Within a new question and answer section Apple said: "Years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for OS X and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices." That assessment doesn't take into account the recycling of devices, their reconditioning and their resale, of course, but when you buy a new iPhone 6S for $649 (starting price, off-contract), Apple expects it to last three years, something many suspected. Apple has been accused of intentionally slowing down iPhones every time a new one is released, although there is little evidence to support the theory.Also see: Apple's Recycling Initiatives Recover $40 Million In Gold
Apple doesn't "expect" customers to replace their phones after three years. Apple "assumes" that they do this, which is very different.
Why?
Unless it breaks, I see no reason to replace my phone.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
Marketing will tell you that you want to change the product. Technologically you probably do not need to change it every three years. The product will probably work for ten to twenty years before it fails (excluding batteries) and it will in many cases still function as it does now in ten to twenty years. Software is the limiting factor these days and the majority of walled garden products can and will be disabled by their marketing departments. If you think that this is a scam to screw more money out of the customer then you are right. There is a reason why Goldman Sachs refers to customers as "Mugs".
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Said someone who has never had two same model devices side by side with a full version number difference of 2 or greater.
Just try an ipad 2 on ios 6 then try it on ios 8 or 9.
That old unupdated ipad can run circles around the one that someone has been trying to keep up to date.
There is no question that the newer os's are slower on older hardware. Which makes it all the more of a pita they don't allow you to downgrade the os to versions that were actually designed to run on that hardware.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
This may have made sense in previous years, when there were a lot of new and innovative features being added each year, security was dramatically improving, and hardware speeds were climbing rapidly. That's no longer happening. Year to year, there's very little difference between phones except for modest, incremental improvements, and new styles and colors.
You see this happening *right now* with the PC. The market is "stagnating" (I say it's just stabilized) in part because there's absolutely no point to replacing a four year old PC unless you've got some exceptionally demanding requirements. It's probably only reached mid-life, assuming it was half-way decent when you bought it.
I'm pretty sure the trend of replacing phones rapidly will continue for a few years, but I think as people realize the big innovations have already occurred, they'll be less enamored with the notion of paying $400-800 for a smartphone that's only marginally better than the one they currently have. Sure, there will always be the die-hards who trade in their phone each year or two, but I really believe they'll soon be a vanishing minority.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
While I have been dismayed that, at least in my experience, the iPad and iPhone seem to have a deliberate degrading of performance after whatever OS update comes out after 2-3 years of use, my macs typically get between 8-10 years of use. Much more than the 3-5 years of use I get from my PC's.
To be fair, the OS argument doesn't apply to iOS devices - Apple actually provides OS updates for a few years after the device stops being rolled.
CPU,GPU,OS, ??? That is not an answer to the question. Sure these things change over time, sometimes improving. Phone features also go backwards from time to time. No removable storage, No replaceable battery. These are part of a trend to planned obsolescence that manufacturers use to force consumers to buy new phones and recycle or discard the old one. Truly a tragedy given the nature of scarce non renewable resources like rare earths from third world countries with broken governments.
But fundamentally this misses the point. As long as a phone, computer or other device continues to serve the need that it was intended to serve I see no need in replacing it.
So it makes sense to get a new phone every three years because they forcibly slow down your old one despite the fact that it always worked just fine.
Makes sense.
My thoughts, exactly. I don't care if there's newer-and-better-and-faster out there. My 6-yo iPhone on the same iOS it came with are more than enough for my mobile computing and communication needs.
'Why spend more energy to replace what I don't need to' is my argument for not upgrading. This applies to myriad items, such as cars, clothes, etc.
MY advice: spend your extra money on excellent-quality food.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Not intentionally slow down as a design though, it is rather feature creep and lack of control over impulse app installs. I use an iPhone 4S, have for the past two years (first smart phone) with minimal apps, and in fact one of the most recent iOS updates added a great feature that doubled my functional battery life (low power mode). I got through a college environment fine with that, but now starting graduate school and full-time work my battery demands (16+ hours) are beyond what the 4S can support without mid-day recharging. That is the only reason I'll have to update in the next year or so, barring any accidents or theft.
Your 17" MacBook Pro had a 1920x1200 screen. The current 15" MacBook Pro can be set to use that resolution.
I'll be impressed when you tell me how to set a 15" MacBook Pro to have a 17" screen.
Why?
Unless it breaks, I see no reason to replace my phone.
I read this data driven: people DO this, not they want people to do this. They WANT people to buy a new one every year. So, for one reason or another people choose to replace their smart phone within 3 years. This seems right to me, by the 2nd year most of my smartphones have either been obsolete by OS (orig Moto Droid) or the battery life has decayed into impossibility (My Samsung Galaxy Something, or my wife's LG Google Nexus). My iPhone is going strong after 2 years, but I will probably replace it when iPhone++ comes out because I suspect there will be enough new features to justify, and the GPU is getting dated.
Other people find reasons. They want a faster CPU, new OS features, a better camera, more storage, access to new LTE channels, a better screen, longer battery life, maybe even a new color. These are reasons to upgrade. You don't have to if you don't want to. Other people do want to. Ok?
Posts on this topic are very strange.
Do you (and the rest of the "no upgrades, yuck!" crowd) experience physical pain when other people get a new phone because they want new features? No? So ... what's the problem?
The AMOLED on my Nexus One still works perfectly and it's over 6 years old**, still boots up and still functions.
**If not for cell tower incompatibility I'd still be using it; a phone is a phone. My newer phone works fine all around and has an IPS LCD screen that looks great from most angles, but I miss the true blacks and absolute viewing angle of my AMOLED -- which has a lower brightness setting and looks better in low-light than any of my LCD displays.
This is exactly the problem. I still use a first gen iPad and have had 2 iPhones over the course of the last 5 years as well. They don't "slow down" when using the Apple apps and other well-designed apps although some of the apps (especially games) simply "update" their games by putting in things like bigger textures without (the well documented feature) gracefully downgrading textures for older devices causing the older devices to slow down while playing the 'same' game. Same goes for online stuff, the websites are getting heavier by the day, even this site is guilty of it. There used to be just a single self-hosted tracker, now there are ~10 of them and libraries loaded from a dozen or so CDN's, an older device is not quite as fast as parsing JS to byte code when it takes ~500ms simply in network time to load everything.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Exactly. I have a 7 year old Mac, and it still works great. Apple has done nothing to force me to buy a new one. I'm sure they would like it if I did, but they're continuing to support it with OS upgrades and the like. Contrast that with my 3 year old Android phone that already has been abandoned for OS upgrades.
It's probably true that on average, their customers buy a new computer every four years and a new phone every three. But that's usually because they want the newest technology, not because their old device has stopped working.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
I really doubt you built it yourself. On the other hand, I do imagine you have the requisite skills to assemble a computer. Most anyone with opposable thumbs can put a computer together. Very few of us, including myself, have the ability to build a computer worth a damn. Well, I can make a pretty mean abacus.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."