“Apple has announced that it expects your £500 iPhones, iPads and Apple Watches to last only three years and Mac computers only four,” Samuel Gibbs reports for The Guardian.
“As part of the company’s new environmental push, which includes its new Apps for Earth campaign with the WWF, Apple has listed how long it expects its products to last for their ‘first owners’ and therefore how much they contribute to the greenhouse gas lifecycle,” Gibbs reports. “Within a new question and answer section Apple said: ‘Years of use, which are based on first owners, are assumed to be four years for OS X and tvOS devices and three years for iOS and watchOS devices.'”
“Until recently the company only provided software support for an iPhone or iPad for around three years, typically providing two major iOS version updates from the moment they were released. The launch of iOS 8 and then iOS 9, which still supports the iPhone 4S released in October 2011, changed that,” Gibbs reports. “Mac computers, however, have much longer software support lives. The latest version of Apple’s computer software OS X 10.11 El Capitan still supports computers from 2007, despite Apple expecting Mac computers to last four years.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The longest period during which we’ve used an iPhone? About a year. But, we still have our original iPhones from June 29, 2007 and they still work. We also have an iPad 2, purchased on March 11, 2011, still used daily by a family member! The longest for a Mac? One of our Macs still in daily use is an iMac (27-inch, Mid 2011). That might be one of the, if not the, longest. Also, we still have a Mac 128K, released January 24, 1984, and – we just checked – it still boots up and works just fine, over 32 years later!
How ’bout you?