“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?
The headline should read “Apple expects your iPhone and Apple Watch to last for [at least] three years, your Mac for [at least] four”
These are not average lifetimes, these are the minimum use times after which Apple expects to see them START showing up in recycling streams in any significant numbers.
Actually a company even Apple expects you computer, watch, TV ect to last at least as long as the warranty. I actually had a car dealer (Honda) try and tell me that they were changing there warranty from 5 Years to 3 Years because thats what customers want. I told him no one wants less, you are setting the date to 3 Years because your internal tests have told you that parts under warranty will start needing to be repaired or replaced after 3 years.
It is obvious that, up to now, most Macs have lasted far longer than four years. Is Apple really saying that they expect their current and future Macintosh computers to last for only fours years? If so, this suggests that planned obsolescence is now part of their product “design” philosophy.
If, on the other hand, Apple is saying that they expect the original owners of Mac computers to keep their computers for only four years, that is a totally different statement and a totally different message.
My Early 2011 MacBook Pro is still going strong (with a new 1TB SSD installed) and I expect it to continue to be my main computer for another 5 years.
I’m currently using a 15″ MacBook Pro late 2008 and a 1st gen iPad. I upgrade my iPhone every other year though. Before that I had a 1.2 Ghz G4 Mac Pro for 8 years. It was still working when I upgraded to a new Mac.
There is a beautiful piece of work called the “Cube” (2000 G4) that i had a video card fan failure on, so i set it up then yanked the card and use it headless as a music server accessible from every computer and iDevice in the house, upgraded the RAM to 4GB and put in a 2TB hard drive, as well as external drives to hold movies and files i share on the WAN
I usually upgrade my iPhone once every 2 years. I still use my 2008 Macbook from time to time. I can’t upgrade past Lion, but my 2013 iMac still runs like buttah. My iPad Air 2 still runs great as well, and I certainly anticipate a lifespan greater than 3 years for it.
The 4 year figure was decided to give Mac Pro users an expectation of how long it will take for a refresh, so December 2017 it is.
– I used the original iPhone daily as my main phone for 8 years.
– I had a G5 tower (dual 2 GHz) that ran for 10 years before the internal power supply died–and I bought it refurb from Apple.
– I worked at a business that ran a website receiving about a million page views per month and we ran the entire site on the same 450 MHz G4 using OS X Server for 10 years. It stayed on 24/7 serving webpages. It never died. The company was bought-out and the site moved.
– The databases served on the website were run on old beige G3s with FileMaker and OS 9. They too stayed on 24/7 for 10 years and never died.
– I still have the original MacBook Pro and it still runs fine. That’s 11 years. I rarely use it, but it does serve as a backup if my primary machine goes down.