My 7 plus I got in spring 2017 is good enough. 
Nope, it was and is a great phone, loved the external design the best!I still use my iPhone 4s, shame on me.
A lot of the carriers hid the remaining cost of the subsidy in the price of your plan. By the time the two years were up you'd paid the rest of the cost of the phone in the price of your plan.It was much easier to upgrade more often back then when you could sell an iPhone for $400 and a new one only cost $200 on contract. Nowadays you have to pay the full price of the phone, or rent it for near the full cost of the phone (broken up into monthly payments of course!), to upgrade more often.
I have a 4s.I still use my iPhone 4s, shame on me.
Never was a big fan of that stainless steel band. Still not a fan.Nope, it was and is a great phone, loved the external design the best!
A lot of the carriers hid the remaining cost of the subsidy in the price of your plan. By the time the two years were up you'd paid the rest of the cost of the phone in the price of your plan.
What the carriers did was separate the true cost of the phone from the plan, which is why the price of cellular plans are inexpensive now and the true price of the phone is no longer hidden.
Should I be concerned that my iPhone 5 running iOS 10.3.3 doesn't have any problems?
Any suggestion on how best to force all this to happen to my phone since it refuses to do anything but just work?
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Oh that's an easy one!!!
Apple wants to prevent you from jailbreaking. Nagging you to update and preventing you from downgrading means you stay on firmware that hasn't been jailbroken yet.
Whether or not you WOULD jailbreak isn't relevant. Apple wants to remove all possibility of it occuring.
2007 to 2012 on the iOS side, you generally only want to update to one major firmware version (so 2 years usage) as firmware updates slowed down the device too much if you went longer.Not really understanding the "you really had to have the latest iPhone or at the very least one that was only a generation old" part here.
From 2009 to 2012 I used an HTC Touch Pro. That was Windows Mobile. And I was laughing at my iPhone friends because I had cut and paste and MMS and they didn't.
From 2012 to 2015 I had an iPhone 5.
For nine months in 2015 I had a 6+. I only upgraded because we left our carrier so I took the opportunity to upgrade since I was turning my 6+ in.
From 2015 to now (now being current and ongoing) I have a 6s+.
Nothing I do has changed since 2009. I don't need a bigger camera with more megapixels. I don't need a faster processor. I don't need mega amounts of ram - all the things presumably that are included in that statement of yours about really having to have the latest iPhone.
Hell, I did very well with phone calls, email, SMS and light web browsing on my old Sanyo Katana. And that's what I used my Touch Pro, my 5, my 6+ and my 6s+ for. Calls, email, texts and light web browsing.
So having to have the latest has never been a thing for me.
PS. I've had zero incentive to upgrade beyond my 6+ in 2015 due to that fugly camera bump on every iPhone (except the SE) made since then.
I still use my iPhone 4s, shame on me.
My 7 plus I got in spring 2017 is good enough.![]()
Larger smartphones are impractical for you maybe. But I am very happy with the size of my iPhone 6s Plus, and presumably the future iPhone X Plus.Upgrade cycles are getting longer nowadays, it certainly isn’t what it used to be like back in the 2010-13 period when you really had to have the latest iPhone or at the very least one that was only a generation old.
Now, probably starting with the 6S and especially with the 7, there seems very little incentive to upgrade as these phones are essentially “good enough”, which must be why fewer people are upgrading as often. We are way past the point of an iPhone being a status symbol now
If the upcoming 6.1 inch iPhone turns out to be an updated 5C, then surely that is cool with all the new colours. But apart from that there is ultimately very little reason to upgrade, not to mention the huge elephant in the room that all the new iPhones will be giant, completely impractical phablets and this will surely make people hold onto their 6S or 7 longer
True for a time when it came to 4+ line family plans. 1-3 lines, the new plans were sometimes more expensive even when you calculate TCO. Alas, carriers have increased the rates again with the recent unlimited plans.A lot of the carriers hid the remaining cost of the subsidy in the price of your plan. By the time the two years were up you'd paid the rest of the cost of the phone in the price of your plan.
What the carriers did was separate the true cost of the phone from the plan, which is why the price of cellular plans are inexpensive now and the true price of the phone is no longer hidden.
But hey, turns out people liked the smoke and mirrors that give them the illusion of only paying half the cost of a valuable device.
You obviously didn't hear Apple admitted to slow old iPhones through updates.Should I be concerned that my iPhone 5 running iOS 10.3.3 doesn't have any problems?
Any suggestion on how best to force all this to happen to my phone since it refuses to do anything but just work?
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Oh that's an easy one!!!
Apple wants to prevent you from jailbreaking. Nagging you to update and preventing you from downgrading means you stay on firmware that hasn't been jailbroken yet.
Whether or not you WOULD jailbreak isn't relevant. Apple wants to remove all possibility of it occuring.
I never said they promote forced obsolescence. That was someone else.So Apple as a company promotes forced obsolescence of their products because of the 5 or 10 people in the world who jailbreak their phones?
The percentage of people who jailbreak is negligible. Besides what negative effect does a jailbroken phone have on the Apple eco system as a whole that they have to prevent it en masse? Makes no sense.
Maybe I should tell my iPhone 5?You obviously didn't hear Apple admitted to slow old iPhones through updates.
Don't worry. There you go.
I never said they promote forced obsolescence. That was someone else.
As to the percentage of jailbreakers to non-jailbreakers I can't argue that; it's a fact that there are less of one than the other. But I doubt the number is 5 or 6.
Apple is all about control and they want total control of the iPhone. That means stopping people from jailbreaking because doing that allows you to control your device and not Apple.
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Maybe I should tell my iPhone 5?
It refuses to slow down. Sorry…
The 7 is still very powerful. At this point all phones from 3 years ago are powerful enough.
I had the 7 Plus and got the X. But to be honest I would have been fine with the 7 Plus. Besides the gestures and the OLED screen they do exactly the same things. I still have my iPad Air 2 that works very nice on IOS 12 beta. I have zero incentive to upgrade my iPad Air 2.
Valid points. Every year the iPhone increasingly becomes more powerful, but does that really change the consumers perspective on iPhone because it slightly faster? Likely not. What they look for is exactly what Apple markets the iPhone for, such as the camera, features like 3D Touch, Live Photos, Portrait mode or Portrait Lighting, , Animoji‘s, etc. Those are the things that they try to persuade the consumer on why they would _want_ the iPhone, not the processor or ram upgrades. (Even those are also good considerations as well.)
You could also argue that anomojis are manifestations of advanced software features not possible without a Faceid type of technology.You could argue that a lot of the software features nowadays (regardless of manufacturer) are not exactly anywhere near as innovative as something like going from a potato quality camera to a really nice one or when retina displays appeared. Phones have become so homogenous that software is the main differentiator.
In the last few years a lot of the new software features have been silly stuff like animojis that will mainly appeal to the younger Snapchat crowd. They don't make the experience of using the phone better. By comparison UI improvements have been a lot less interesting, especially if you don't care for some of the stock apps.