When they ask me what Android phones to get, I always say a Pixel, because they will at least get the latest OS support in a timely fashion.
They are also excellent phones.
I did that for a while, depending on some random guy in a forum to maintain a working image for my device. He bought a new phone, and that was the end of the updates.
Tbf some pixel models have proven reliable, my mom's pixel 4 lasted long enough to be out of support and then it got owned and her bank accounts got taken over.
The downside of reliable HW I guess.
I had to replace it because it only has 5 years of support. Samsung offers 7 years of support but only on their top tier phones.
Google offer 7 years, even on their A series phones so I chose a pixel 9a. It's fine, I don't love it or hate it, but it's not doing anything I care about better than my last phone.
You can also install e.g. GrapheneOS after Google stops supporting them. https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
The battery, after ailing for a little while, had eventually just given up. I'd gone skiing a couple of times, with the last trip being just before lockdown, and I think it was the cold exposure of the second trip that dealt the mortal blow, and it died shortly after I returned.
I liked that phone a lot. It did, at the time, everything I needed, and it was a really nice size, but that period in 2020 was a bad time to try to get a phone repaired. I did attempt to replace the battery myself using the guide on iFixit but, sadly, that did not go well due to some contradictory/out of order instructions, and all I succeeded in doing was damaging the phone, I think, beyond repair.
Really good to see that Apple are still supporting them though.
A few years ago I bought a replacement battery kit that came with everything needed for probably something like $10 from aliexpress. I never actually got around to doing the replacement yet but maybe this update will give me the excuse to dig it up and replace the battery too ha!
My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.
Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.
Instills great confidence.
AMD drops support as soon as it possibly can for "old" GPUs.
AMD might not be doing the work, but they set the world up to be able to support their chips. I'd take that over crossing my fingers for ok Windows driver support to hold out any day.
Top range of these cards had (only 8GB) of 0.3TB/s memory, which is what a modern 9060xt can do. Double that for the 9070xt, but still not bad. 4->~48 (fp32) TFLOPS though, wow! Especially with a modern driver stack. With the accelerators all using much older architectures I wonder if they stand to get any benefit, not that they're getting used for graphics much.
I remember people complaining that the design of the 5 was already outdated when it was new and they needed to have bigger screens and be thinner to compete with Samsung...
Wake me when old versions of OS X can access the App Store again.
Also, I've barely ever used the OSX/MacOS app store anyway, and from what little I've heard from other people, it's not really all that great nor popular a place to get your software from.
Of course this is completely opaque to people who have to do this, it just ends up prompting you to login and things like that.
I think newer MacOS avoids this stuff by not having OS updates be linked to the App Store
Thanks for the advice.