As an example, in Jan 2026, Apple published iOS 12.5.8 which provides updates for iPhone 5s which released in Sept 2013. That's 12.5 years ago. The equivalent would be to connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086, 512 kb of RAM and expecting an update for your DOS operating system.
The updates for ios 12 are all security updates, not feature updates, so your comparison to "connect to the internet using ADSL in Jan 2000 with your IBM PS/2 rocking in intel 8086" doesn't really make sense. The phones stuck on ios 15 are basically unusable because many apps don't support it anymore. At best you can download an older version from a few years ago, but that depends on whether the backend servers were updated. Apps that insist you use the latest version (eg. banking/finance apps) basically unusable.
(I never had a PS/2, or ADSL, but I was goofing around with a low-memory 8088 box back then for fun. It had no hard drive. It bootstrapped from floppy, loaded the rest over the LAN with its built-in 10base2 Ethernet jack from my Linux box, and connected to dual-channel ISDN for Internet access. It worked. It even had a graphical web browser.
Being clever with an old iPhone is a very different thing.)
BTW: DOS was supported until 2001, and Win95 could boot DOS standalone.
Nowadays they are doubling in performance every... 5 years?
Could you be anymore specific about what part of this is the loophole that Motorola allegedly found?
I'll admit it's a little annoying that I have to pay a hundred bucks to get the battery replaced, but the phone is otherwise fine and still gets updates, so I don't know that I buy that it's "planned obsolescence".
$100 is worth it, but you can get a good discount by going to that one mall kiosk instead of the Apple Store.
Apple actively impeded third-party repair shops though. Oregon had to outlaw parts pairing for them to change that practice.
It says
* replaceable with 'commercially available tools' (which means: Apple could just sell you a 'iphone battery replacment tool kit for 1000 Euros)
* has excemptions for high-cycle / long-lived batteries
* ... nothing about the price of the battery (which can be 1000 Euros)
* ... or that the battery/the battery's form factor can't be trademarked, essentially locking you into 'Apple batteries' and preventing aftermarket ones.
Also, I'd rather have a less bulky phone with fewer mechanical parts that can break as compared to a more user-maintainable. Because of 'high-security' software (think: banking apps, or - I assume - the soon-to-be-released EUId wallet), the thing is basically worthless after four years anyways and needs replacement.
I'd wager that ... nothing at all will change in 2027.
They already are. 5 years of updates is now the legal minimum in the EU. https://www.osnews.com/story/142500/new-eu-rules-mandate-fiv...
Note that early phones had replaceable batteries and it was later phones that dropped that feature. The idea wasn't that making the phone impossible to open would compel people to replace their phone faster; it was that given that people didn't keep their phones long enough to wear out the battery, there was no need to make the battery accessible.
1) battery dying / not lasting enough
2) shattered glasses whose replacement costs 35-40% of the cost of the phone new (for budget/mid-range phones, not everybody has iPhones)
distant 3rd) not enough free internal storage
Are non-premium new cars a scam too?
sure on highest end phones you have very good cameras since a long time by now, but even there they find improvements here and there (e.g. zoom, low light pictures, even better image stabilization)
but middle to lower end phones are still have major improvements in every generation of a certain brand/line/price category. And you might be satisfied with a "acceptable" quality camera, until everyone around you has way nicer photos, or you now have a reason to make photes you didn't had in the past, or you get older and your hands a bit unsteady etc.
This is also reflected in the increasing support durations from major manufacturers.
Secondly, what you said may have been true in the past, when smartphones were rapidly evolving and upgrade cycles were short, but people are holding on to their devices for longer now, so its possible its becoming a problem again.
Not sure how comparable that is when considering that the devices are also commonly required as ticket on public transport with no offline fallback (going so far as to include animations on the screen so you can't send a screenshot to a friend or print it out -- no, I have no idea why they think you can't send a video to a friend). Having 10 minutes of use time is simply not on the table, and GP was probably not talking about that class of phones (pre-"smart" phone) in the first place
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/external-battery-packs/usb-c-po...
Now that this doesn't happen, the driver of obsolescence is the battery, which is much less defensible because you can swap it much more easily than "the whole internals of the phone".