When they ask me what Android phones to get, I always say a Pixel, because they will at least get the latest OS support in a timely fashion.
They are also excellent phones.
I did that for a while, depending on some random guy in a forum to maintain a working image for my device. He bought a new phone, and that was the end of the updates.
Given the emergency call issue that has plagued the series for years and are seemingly still unresolved I would think twice about this.
Tbf some pixel models have proven reliable, my mom's pixel 4 lasted long enough to be out of support and then it got owned and her bank accounts got taken over.
The downside of reliable HW I guess.
I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.
Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.
The only apps that get installed nowadays are the ones that must be for a specific service, or gaming.
Many people even turn updates off due to the way companies get creative changing the application on every update.
In the old days before the iOS/Android duopoly there were no updates at all, and the few times they happened to be supported, it required the developer SDK to update the firmware.
Outside communities like HN, regular people hardly care about updates.
You can also install e.g. GrapheneOS after Google stops supporting them. https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
Both were abandoned within two years of me buying… never buying a phone from Google again
I'm glad you had a good experience with it, but I had the Pixel 7 Pro and it was the single worst phone I have ever used. Utterly dogshit, to a point where I swore a blood oath to never purchase another Pixel ever again. I've heard that the later Pixels are better but I guess I'll never know.
It's possible that I had a defective unit, but regardless of the reason it was a laggy mess, that got terrible battery life, and sometimes simply wouldn't finish turning on (it would just stay on a black screen indefinitely). I bought it in July of 2023 and I ended up giving it to a family member and buying a refurb iPhone 13 Pro Max, which I still have and it has been considerably better.
It's not like I'm this huge Apple fanboy (feel free to look at my history complaining about my time working there), but if the Pixel 7 was 2023's flagship Android phone, then I have very little interest in using Android anymore.
I busted my wife's old iPhone 8 out when I found it digging for other things ... still runs nice.
My android devices over the year I use for development, most just up and die or performance just degrades over time until it is unusable.
The battery, after ailing for a little while, had eventually just given up. I'd gone skiing a couple of times, with the last trip being just before lockdown, and I think it was the cold exposure of the second trip that dealt the mortal blow, and it died shortly after I returned.
I liked that phone a lot. It did, at the time, everything I needed, and it was a really nice size, but that period in 2020 was a bad time to try to get a phone repaired. I did attempt to replace the battery myself using the guide on iFixit but, sadly, that did not go well due to some contradictory/out of order instructions, and all I succeeded in doing was damaging the phone, I think, beyond repair.
Really good to see that Apple are still supporting them though.
A few years ago I bought a replacement battery kit that came with everything needed for probably something like $10 from aliexpress. I never actually got around to doing the replacement yet but maybe this update will give me the excuse to dig it up and replace the battery too ha!
Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.
I'd assume the legal hourly costs for handling 10 cases probably equals the cost of pushing this cert, even if the cases can be successfully defended.
I remember people complaining that the design of the 5 was already outdated when it was new and they needed to have bigger screens and be thinner to compete with Samsung...
My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.
Performance-wise, it can stutter a bit on modern websites and sometimes in some apps, but otherwise works reasonably well. A few weeks ago I noticed it was struggling more than usual and chewing up more battery, but then I cleared up some disk space and it's been running fine.
The minimum supported iOS version for some of my must-have apps (e.g. WhatsApp, my banking app) is currently iOS 15, so I imagine when that changes I'll need to finally upgrade my phone. Feels like its days are numbered.
Was hoping for the new iPhone Fold (with Touch ID even) to be small but looks like it’s going to be a really weird ratio when folded.
Of course there are caveats: - Spotify not getting app updates anymore (but still playing fine)
- some websites do not support the Safari version, e.g. GitHub
- most banking apps are not supported
Instills great confidence.
AMD drops support as soon as it possibly can for "old" GPUs.
AMD might not be doing the work, but they set the world up to be able to support their chips. I'd take that over crossing my fingers for ok Windows driver support to hold out any day.
Top range of these cards had (only 8GB) of 0.3TB/s memory, which is what a modern 9060xt can do. Double that for the 9070xt, but still not bad. 4->~48 (fp32) TFLOPS though, wow! Especially with a modern driver stack. With the accelerators all using much older architectures I wonder if they stand to get any benefit, not that they're getting used for graphics much.
Has anyone gotten hold of a newer ios 18 for phones more recent than 5s?
Wake me when old versions of OS X can access the App Store again.
Also, I've barely ever used the OSX/MacOS app store anyway, and from what little I've heard from other people, it's not really all that great nor popular a place to get your software from.
Of course this is completely opaque to people who have to do this, it just ends up prompting you to login and things like that.
I think newer MacOS avoids this stuff by not having OS updates be linked to the App Store
Thanks for the advice.
