And yet they have the longest software support for smartphones in the industry by a large margin. Plus they offer consumers the ability to replace the battery for a fee.
> And yet they have the longest software support for smartphones in the industry by a large margin.
No, that would be the various libre phones that have in-tree kernel drivers and correspondingly support updates to the latest system indefinitely.
The default in the industry prior to Apple was for software to be independent from hardware. You can install the latest Windows on hardware going back to the earliest x64 processors and Linux or BSD on hardware going back more than 20 years.
If random community-supported Linux distributions can support hardware from the previous millennium, Apple could support all the iPhone hardware ever made, but they don't. So that's just another instance of them doing something user-hostile so you have to buy a newer iPhone and Samsung et al following them.
Offering battery replacements in that context is just another way for them to stick it to you -- you have a four year old iPhone with a flat battery, they take your money to put in a new one and then stop issuing it software updates a year later so you have to buy a new one regardless.
In the formative years of PCs the support life was really low because of the fast pace of hardware improvement. Now support times are much longer because hardware performance grows much slower.
The same is true for smartphones. The original iPhone didn't have a very long support life but the iPhone 6S from 2015 is supported in iOS 14 giving it at least a 6 year lifespan.
