Eventually, Apple (and 3p developers) will abandon you, and you'll need to throw away a perfectly good phone and take another step on the treadmill.
I'm still hanging on to my perfectly working iPhone 7, while app developers tell me to fuck off left and right. It does everything I want a phone to do, but developers consider "old phones" to be icky and stop supporting them.
Yup - it was the same for me with the 2016 SE. Still runs perfectly fine, we're still doing the same old CRUD web shit for apps, but apparently now our apps are so much more advanced that there's no possible way they could keep supporting that "legacy" hardware.
I'm totally with you, with that article. It is terrible how owners of slightly-old hardware are treated by software developers. Leaving potentially millions of users out in the cold because they just can't be bothered to keep a maintenance branch around and backport a few fixes to it. For apps that are by and large not complicated. So much waste sacrificed at the altar of developer comfort!
Ultimately, one of the cameras in my iPhone 7 failed, and I replaced it with an SE3 - which was indistinguishable from the 7 - but another issue was patches.
Eventually yes, but the 13 is less than 3.5 years old and will likely receive iOS updates for another 3.5 years. And most apps support one or two iOS versions into the past. I agree it’s not ideal, but ~8 years of use isn’t that bad either.
