New iOS download

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Not bugs...Apple purposely neglects its old hardware. They need you to hate the slow old equipment to force you to buy new stuff.

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The whole “planned obsolescence” thing — started by New York Times economics columnist Catherine Rampell, but promulgated by Mims himself after the ball got rolling — was a pile of horseshite. No company in the computer/mobile industry makes products that hold their value longer than Apple’s. Used two-year-old iPhone 4S’s can be sold for $300; three-year-old iPhone 4’s still sell for $200 or more. What other companies make cell phones that retain any value at all after two years?

Which release of iOS was it that caused no problems whatsoever for some number of users upgrading older iPhones? Where is the mobile operating system that does a better job supporting older hardware than iOS?

It’s a throwaway line, Mims’s description of iOS 7 as having “crippled many older iPhones and led to complaints of planned obsolescence”, but it — along with the general “Apple Trap” narrative spawned by Rampell’s piece in The New York Times Magazine — exemplifies everything wrong with how Apple is covered by the technology press.

It begins with a pernicious lie: that Apple somehow booby-traps its devices to malfunction after a certain too-brief period to spur upgrades to brand-new products. The lie is most easily disproven, objectively, by the aforementioned high resale value of used Apple products, including the iPhone 4 at the core of Rampell’s personal tale of upgrade woe.

iOS 7 did cause real problems, some quite severe, for some users upgrading older iPhones (and I have no reason to doubt that Rampell was one of them). This happens with every major update to every operating system. Were the upgrade problems with iOS 7 any worse than previous versions of iOS? If so, not by much, from what I’ve seen. And even so, is this not an obvious possible consequence of the magnitude of the changes in iOS 7? On the one hand, the tech press clamors for more innovation at a faster pace from Apple; on the other, when the company redesigns every single visual element in the entire OS, bugs are held up as evidence of a deliberate conspiracy rather than honest (and as anyone who has ever worked on software would understand, inevitable) mistakes.

It’s a damned if they do, damned if they don’t scenario for Apple. If a three-year-old device doesn’t qualify for an iOS upgrade, one could argue that Apple is excluding it out of spite, to pressure the user to buy a new device just so they can run the latest software. But if Apple does provide an update for a three-year-old phone, and the upgrade proves problematic for some of them, then they’re accused of booby-trapping it, suckering users into upgrading their iPhones to a version of iOS that makes them run worse, so that the users will run out and buy a new iPhone.

What sense does this conspiracy theory make, though? There certainly is some lock-in to any platform, but can we not all agree there is less lock-in in mobile than anything else? Everyone is a recent switcher — iOS and Android are both relatively new platforms. Just a few years ago BlackBerry was riding high. In some ways, it’s easier to switch from an iPhone to an Android phone than it is to switch to an iPhone on a different carrier.

If older iPhones suffer upon being updated to iOS 7 — getting slower, or worse battery life, or losing Wi-Fi — to such a degree that the users conclude they now need to buy a new phone, would not the most likely and logical result be that it would inspire many of them to switch to Android (or Windows Phone, or anything) rather than to buy another iPhone?

If your car breaks down after just a few years, are you not more likely to replace it with a different brand? To posit that Apple customers are somehow different, that when they feel screwed by Apple their response is to go back for more, is “Cult of Mac” logic — the supposition that most Apple customers are irrational zealots or trend followers who just mindlessly buy anything with an Apple logo on it. The truth is the opposite: Apple’s business is making customers happy, and keeping them happy. They make products for discriminating people who have higher standards and less tolerance for design flaws or problems.

Android devices are famously slow to receive major software updates, and tend to get none at all. The carriers control the updates for Android phones, and the carriers really do want you to buy a new phone as soon as your two-year contract is up. Even with Google’s Nexus phones — for which Google, not the carriers, issues software updates, like Apple does — they only support an 18-month window for OS updates. Thus their own Galaxy Nexus phone, released in November 2011, did not qualify for the Android 4.4 update released a few months ago.

Apple supports four generations of iPhone with iOS 7, Google just two generations of Nexus phone with Android 4.4 — but it’s Apple that has widely been accused of devious “planned obsolescence”.

A few weeks ago, I read a piece by Sean Hollister for The Verge, on the rapid decline of hardware keyboards for smartphones (Hollister is a fan). What caught my eye, though was this passage at the outset:

I bought a Droid 4 twenty-one months ago.

As a devout user of physical QWERTY keyboards, I’m pretty sure I’m screwed.

My two-year contract expires in just three more months, but I don’t know if my phone will make it. I touch-type all my interviews into my Droid, but it’s simply not reliable anymore. There isn’t a day that goes by without some app experiencing crippling slowdown. The phone just can’t seem to hold a charge.

He seems neither outraged nor surprised that his phone, well under two years old, experiences “crippling slowdowns” every single day and “just can’t seem to hold a charge”. His only concern is that he can’t replace it with a top-tier new phone equipped with a keyboard.1

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There are two ways to avoid the kind of obsolescence Rampell talks about here. Neither of them is pretty.

The first method is to future-proof your smartphone, pumping it so full of guts that it'll be ready for whatever comes next. Motorola tried this when it gave the Droid MAXX a 3,300 mAh superbattery. But the Droid MAXX also costs 50% more on-contract than the iPhone, and that's with lesser specs in nearly every other regard.

This kind of future-proof iPhone would be terrible for Apple; it would send the price of an already premium product into the stratosphere, with little to no immediate (or even near-term) benefit to its customers. It would be like putting rocket engines on a car that can only go 60 miles per hour.

The other option would be not to innovate on the software side. At all. Just freeze iOS in time, freeze the million apps in the App Store. No new RAM-intensive features, no better camera that takes larger file-size pictures, no new game levels that take up valuable storage space. Your phone would work much better, sure. But after a year, no one would buy it, because everyone else, in the meantime, would do the one thing technology is supposed to do: innovate.

Oh, also, your battery would die anyway.

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my iphone will not let me download the update to 8.0. Says I don't have room.

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Any detriment if I just don't do it?

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