Even some Apple users are beginning to catch on to the fact that Apple doesn’t innovate.
Every year for several years, there’s been almost no changes to the iPhone, and Apple unveils another one with an incremented number as if they were making a major release. The thing is basically a “done product” where there are no real features to add.
The first rule of Capitalism is to make a spectacle out of everything, no matter how trivial, as if it’s a product they’ll wonder how they’ve ever lived without.
Apple has it down to, almost a science. To keep sales moving, they run spectacles where they unveil a new phone as if Jesus Christ came down from the Heavens.
This year, many people finally noticed when the only real difference in the iPhone 15 was about an ounce of weight and a very slightly better camera.
Naturally, people paying extra so they can trade in their iPhone every year have been had, and some of them are starting to realize it. Especially in this era of high inflation and lots of layoff and reduced work hours.
They throw away valuable Capital, that cost them hours of work, every month, only so they can get a very marginally better product.
Since “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”, it’s better, fiscally, to own the phone until the carrier throws you off because the modem is too old. If the battery dies, replace the battery. This is like most goods.
Apple fought right-to-repair, tooth and nail, with the same money people (over)paid them for their products.
I usually wear a pair of shoes for several years. If they get uncomfortable, I replace the insoles for $10. If the laces shred or break, I buy new laces for a few dollars.
Over that ~6 years I wear the same pair of shoes, I spend maybe $13 servicing them vs. $180 replacing them a couple of times. If they get dirty, wash them. There’s a concept.
We don’t make a ton of money, but due to not making lots and lots of unnecessary purchases, we are seldom faced with a situation where something that is actually important comes up and are pressured to go into lots of debt to handle it, so we can have the “iPhone for Life” plan.
Recently, one of my cats had major surgery to remove some tumors. I value my cat more than having some damned stupid iPhone, obviously. She is family, a phone is a lifeless object and a constant annoyance. The one I have is usually turned off so that people can’t bother me with it while I live my life. If it’s important, I’ll return their voicemail.
When the vet told me the bill would be $834, I said, “Well, that’s bad, but not a disaster.”, then she went into some speech about “Care Credit”, a medical credit card they throw at people in America who can’t afford to pay a dental bill or to help their sick pet. 27% compounding interest. You’ll never be able to pay it back. But since we had savings, I put it on a rewards credit card, and got $40 in points, and then I will pay it back immediately.
Apple products are good at crowding out your money, and the important things you could use said money for, so you can go into debt somewhere else down the road, and be pressured to do more work to earn more money than it would cost, if you had money instead of the Apple products.
Android phones continue to have new applications for years after the system updates stop. You may, at least, continue using it for as long as it physically works, with new Web browsers and such.
iPhones just pop up a message saying there’s no new apps and even the ones you already have are no longer allowed to run. It happened to my mother with her old iPhone and I laughed because there were people running Android Gingerbread for so long that it turned into the Windows XP of Android.
You just don’t get a lot for your money with Apple devices, which is no great secret, but increasingly they foist these “barely even an upgrade” devices on you, not by merit, but by dirty tricks.
Mac OS works like this too.
There is a hard cut off date, where Apple forces Mac OS to stop being allowed to upgrade over the last one on your existing computer, even though nothing about the OS has changed to make it incompatible.
Of course, the cynical (but realistic) take is that there’s a business strategy behind dropping software support for older devices. If Apple cuts off macOS support for your Mac, you’re much more likely to consider buying a new one than you would if you could enjoy the latest features and changes. This is definitely starting to change, as more and more people realize that their old tech is still good enough to hold onto, but that won’t help you if your Mac is already unsupported.
~Lifehacker
There is a project to trick later versions of Mac OS to run on unsupported Macs, which is actually important since Apple very quickly drops support for building new software for old releases, so that developers can’t even support you if they wanted to.
The compatibility matrix shows that you can run new Mac OS versions on surprisingly old hardware. Eventually, something important will not work quite right, but it’s better than having no support at all, and your browser complaining that it’s 48 releases behind, like what happened to my spouse’s 2008 Macbook.
By tricking it into installing a newer version of Mac OS, I was able to bring Chrome up to the then-current version until like 2021 when they finally released a version of the OS that was incompatible with the laptop.
But they cut off the laptop from OS upgrades, officially, in 2014, so another 7 years is how long it should have lasted, and the only reason to do this is to force e-waste into the landfills so that people are back in the Apple store buying new junk.
Many Apple users buy these things because they’re just not very handy with computers. By having so many obsolete versions with the browser screaming that it hasn’t had an update in years, which users like my spouse just keep clicking OK on and browsing with anyway, Apple is setting up its customers for a huge security disaster.
I also bought him a $129 Chromebook with 4 GB of RAM and a Celeron that ran rings around the Macbook, so as far as a replacement computer, we did NOT need another $2,000 Apple product that isn’t even going to be around 6 years later.
Chrome OS is not the OS I would have preferred, but my spouse is not a computer expert and the options were essentially trying to answer everything in that big brain of mine about Linux, dumping Windows on him and getting to deal with it whenever Microsoft ruined it with a broken update or he installed malware and brought it to me, unload thousands of dollars on another Mac so Apple could pull this shit again, or give him a Chromebook and sort of let him figure out Linux applications in a controlled environment.
At the very least, I was able to get him a serviceable and cost-effective computer that doesn’t put his security in danger.
It’s dangerous to run a currently-supported OS with a current Web browser, especially if you don’t do what I do and neuter Web sites with uBlock-Origin and NoScript and lots of custom settings to take away things like WASM, WebRTC, and WebGL. The more junk you don’t use that you can take away from the Web, the less of a weapons depot random potentially malicious Web sites have to hurt you with.
Apple products don’t get repeat business due to excellent advancements in computing, they get lots of repeat business because they’re not ruggedly built, they cut off software to prod you, and they bloat things up.
They’re not better than Microsoft. Just bad in somewhat different ways. ⬆