Apple's phones have about 7 years of first-party support / guaranteed useful life, compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2. Yeah I'd never buy a car that will only be good for 7 years, but let's see what they ship.
I'm pretty sure there is no such "guarantee". You can definitely Apple has a track record of supporting 7 years and I have absolutely no problem with that. Samsung and Google actually say they are committed to 7 years of support for the latest phones in their official document.
Also the rest of the industry is not 2. 3 years is very common these days for phones, 5 getting more common. And for computers... Many business computers are supported for a long time, and Windows is famous for its backwards compatibility and support (Windows 10 is supported till 2025, 10 years from its release).
Yes, I speculate and draw my conclusions based on my most recent experience (2017-2019) with Android. I'm glad it's improving, but I'm not in a hurry to "experience" Android again.
The batteries don't have 7 years of useful life, though. And replacing them is made intentionally difficult to encourage people to just upgrade instead.
A lot of people don't live near an Apple store, and few people are prepared to be without their phone while mailing it off for a battery swap.
They have a program for independent repair companies. It doesn't pass Louis Rossmann's bar since it doesn't let him do board-level repair, but none of the "fix your screen/replace your battery" shops I've ever seen do that anyway, so it would be fine for them.
Well, I'm yet to buy a car in my life (viva la public transport), so there's a realistic chance I don't know what I'm talking about, but I can imagine the 4-5 years cycle largely depends on the resale value.
Apple products can have a hit&miss resale value; I think the 2015-2019 line of MacBooks were bad value at any time and any price point, and will be avoided well into the future. Hence my speculation: let's see what they ship this time.
Well I guess that's one reason why I seem to be incompatible with car ownership. When COVID hit, I continued to pay for my public transport ticket even while I couldn't even use it, because I wanted to throw in my share towards keeping the system alive and as good as it is.
> compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2.
You're just making up facts to protect your beloved brand/cult. C'mon. All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
You're talking about different things. Apple officially supports / provides software updates for its iPhones for 7 years. Other phone manufacturers' durations of support vary, but they're usually much less. Until fairly recently, Google provided 3 years of software updates for Pixels, for example. [1]
Samsung accounts for the vast majority of Android phones in actual use. Their current policy is also 7 years, as is Google's. You're right that historically this was different, but things change.
Here's objective facts and my experiences that I used to draw my conclusions.
My final Android phones were: [1] a Samsung A7 (2017), which included a non-replaceable battery, shipped with Android 6 (2015), officially supported Android 8 (2017; theoretical first-party security patches which it never received were offered until 2021), no longer receives updates even from LineageOS, and never ran postmarketOS; and [2] a Nokia 3 (2017), which had pretty much the same story (support ended on Android 9).
In 2019, someone gave me an old, smashed [3] iPhone 7 (2016), and the phone literally worked better than any Android phone I've owned before, including either of the two above. Since it was already physically falling apart, I took the liberty of getting [4] an iPhone SE (2020), which is still with me; the 7 continued to serve in the family for a couple more years.
> All my non-Mac computers I'm using here have been around way longer than two years.
I have a 2002 TiBook, which, believe me or not, continues to outlive my T61 and X200. My MBP (2017) had a spicy pillow though (which Apple repaired for free, outside of warranty).
> [...] to protect your beloved brand/cult.
I'm not a cultist, I'm a pragmatist. I used to believe in things - I had a [5] Jolla (2013) for the longest time, because I believed in Free Software and Open Source and all that stuff, until I realized suffering for your values is not necessarily the healthiest thing to do, and that freedom is not strictly a function of a software license, but of things the hardware+software enables you to do with it.
You refer to your smart phone as a non-mac computer? Because nobody is talking about Mac's besides you. Or PC's. Or "computers" outside of smart phones in general.
Apple's phones have about 7 years of first-party support / guaranteed useful life, compared with the rest of the industry's standard of maybe 2. Yeah I'd never buy a car that will only be good for 7 years, but let's see what they ship.