Thank the Lord iphones need to be "activated". That way if you steal mine you can't use it. If I wasn't interested in this kind of security I wouldn't buy an iphone: everybody has that choice.
Android also has activation lock, except it is implemented locally and you can still unlock the bootloader if you don't want that feature. You can complete the initial setup on a new device and get to the launcher all completely offline.
There are also zero technical obstacles to implementing the activation lock such that you can use your own server. All that this requires is little bit of non-volatile storage that is not cleared during factory reset. Which is what modern Android devices already have.
What you mean is the FRP lock and it's not local because you have to log into a Google account to complete activation of the phone. You can factory reset or change ROMs or do whatever you want and the phone will still refuse to work until you log in using the last Google account the device had.
That's not how it works. If the bootloader is unlocked, it won't work, obviously — and that's a prerequisite for flashing custom ROMs. Unlocking the bootloader on modern devices requires enabling the unlock in developer settings in the stock OS, and this requires unlocking the device.
what do you consider security here? you still lose the phone - the thief isn't going to return it to you, and he will still get some money for it from a fence.
A bricked iPhone is worth way less than a functional one, making the victim much less of a “juicy” target (lower odds of a violent mugging, broken car window, home burglary, etc). It’s a perfectly rational decision to want iPhones to be known as worth 5% of their retail value if stolen. Less funding for organized criminal cartels, too.
Of course they do. Until third party repair shops created a huge market for stolen iPhone parts, stealing them was significantly less attractive than other phones.
Well, they do. iPhones are still valuable after being parted out, although Apple has been combating this by requiring parts to be registered by them (and shamed for much of the same on HN)
Stolen parts are always going to be cheaper unless the cost of producing the parts is lower than the disassembly cost. That could happen for screws but it’s never going to happen for the advanced components which are why the devices are actually being stolen.
What does that look like? Stolen parts will always be cheaper.
The warehouses full of people in Shenzhen tearing down millions and millions of stolen iDevices would still be chugging along, inserting stolen parts into the supply chain.
Apple enforcing DRM on parts is very much a pro-consumer move, steadily taking us towards a world where a stolen iPhone will be worth nothing.
> he will still get some money for it from a fence.
From my understanding of the activation lock, the phone is effectively bricked - no-one can ever use it again. No fence is going to pay for a useless device.
Despite being an Android One phone, it was released with Android 7 but got stuck in Android 9 (Android 13 being the latest version). That makes it two years of updates. Yeah, the Android ecosystem is pathetic like that.
Apple discontinued support for 32-bit apps in iOS 11. There are a large number of apps that never got updated to 64-bit. Because Apple controls which iOS versions can be installed on a given phone at a given time, it's impossible to upgrade a phone from the OS version it shipped with to any other version besides the latest.
The crux of Hugh Jeffreys' argument is that sometimes, upgrading reduces the performance of the device. Therefore, a lot of people want to keep old devices on old versions of iOS, so as to maintain the "out-of-box experience" / performance.
I don't know that I have an opinion on this, but that's what Hugh Jeffreys' argument seems to be.
This is mostly superstition and anecdotes with no real data to back it up.
Yes, a fresh iOS install sometimes causes some slowdown for a day or two maybe when the local-only ML models go through your local-only data and recalculate the new stuff it now knows how to do in the background.
After that it's going to be as smooth as it ever was.
No, to prevent serious battery degradation due to overuse from changes in iOS, allegedly. And as if that's an excuse - if that was the real issue, they could have provided it as an option.
If a new update slows down your phone on purpose, for whatever reason, and hides that from you, people understandably might avoid new updates.
This part from the first paragraph is important for you to understand:
> slowed down the performance of older iPhones in order to stop them shutting down without warning
This didn’t affect someone whose phone was working perfectly. It changed it so your phone got slow instead of crashing.
The reason some people held off on updates was that a bunch of confidently wrong people went around saying this was planned obsolescence and never went back to apologize for giving false advice.
The battery was already shutting down when the processor was being overworked as the battery degraded. This is physics. The update tried to alleviate that. Would you rather your phone shut down or slow down?
I don’t care about the “2022 experience”, whatever that is supposed to mean, I care about having an experience as close as possible to the phone that I purchased (I think I bought this last one in 2018 or so).
Upgrading probably does reduce performance slightly, but is it a noticeable difference; or is it something people say because of degraded batteries and go "hurr durr update bad"?
It's somewhat perceptible. The worst, for me, is the search for apps, which visibly lags. My battery has been replaced and shows 99% capacity. This is an iphone 7 with the latest ios upgrade it can get, 15.6.something IIRC.
I think another issue is that apps do tend to get more sluggish, since they probably expect to be running on newer hardware. If you stick to an older ios version, if they're deemed incompatible, they won't update. But as soon as you're on the latest ios, you get the app updates, too, if you've left the default on.
Google maps, for example, is clearly more sluggish than before. Apple maps is practically unusable. Youtube crashes reliably (but works fine in the browser...)
I think there is a psychological aspect here as well due to confirmation bias — all caches will be wiped during an update so even due to that the first few hours/days may be slightly slower. If people make this assumption they can later easily find evidence for that (or its negative as well, if they would try to look for that)
I had a 3rd generation iPad which became borderline unusable after updating to iOS 7 or something like that (they added the custom keyboard function then and after that update the onscreen keyboard took seconds to appear)
That was before the battery went bad.
What apps are these? Have you considered paying the developers for continued support? They are obsolete! Surely there are alternatives, don’t let stuff drag you back to the past.
It’s a meditation app that works perfectly fine. I keep a device around just to run it.
No, I didn’t consider funding the developers to update the version as that’s a lot of money. Especially for something that completely meets my needs.
It’s not dragging me to the past, it’s a functional tool that I acquired in the past and works into the future. Is my socket set I bought 30 years ago dragging me into the past because it’s obsolete?
I avoid generalizations and extreme thinking when it’s inappropriate.
