Campaigners urge EU to mandate 15 years of OS updates

This comes after e-waste watchers revealed that 75 million iPhones could be rendered obsolete – tipping the scales at around 1.2 million kilograms of e-waste – following the release of iOS 26.

Not strictly true because the phones they counted here will still get security updates for 2-3 years AFAIK. 7 year old phones, mind you. But yeah, no more feature updates. Which are so meaningless these days anyway.

The security updates for old iOS versions are a sleight of hand. Most companies only support the three latest versions of iOS, so soon that will be iOS 17 as the minimum. I had a device stuck on iOS 15, which was released in 2016, and banks and other major apps dropped support. So while the phone did get security updates, it can’t run the apps I needed.

Hmmm, I don’t agree. The trend is in the opposite direction. Microsoft Windows used to have a larger market share and supported hardware indefinitely. Now that their market share has shrunk, they are also limiting support for older hardware. This only shows correlation, not causation, but it does show that more competition has not improved the issue and that we need laws to do that instead. MacOS, the primary competitor to Microsoft Windows which also has Microsoft Office available, only supports their hardware for 6-8 years as well.

Edit: just to add, if anything, this actually shows that more competition and reduced market share probably increases the pressure to cut support for older hardware because it probably becomes less profitable to do so.

I have no sympathy for anyone using microsoft products.

They made their bed, now they get to sleep in it.

That’s the app devs being idiots.

My two local banks that I use support 15.1 and 16. My two globally useful neobanks support 13 and 16. None of them have any features that the one on 13 doesn’t have (in fact, that gets the most updates and has the most features of them all).

So iOS 16, which most apps still seem to support, at least ones that I use, supports devices as far back as the 6s, which came out in 2015. It also still gets security updates for now.

I just don’t get why Apple gets the most shit for generating e-waste on their phones when they actually have the longest lasting phones (barring tech enthusiasts flashing custom ROMs to old Androids, which is what, 1% of the population?)

What Apple REALLY should be getting shit for is software support for their Macbooks, particularly considering that with the Apple Silicon ones, the Linux drivers are still iffy for most things. They need to figure out a way to offer at LEAST 10 years, ideally 15 years of security updates for any device sold, since these devices are only meant to be used with their software, and one expects a computer to last longer than a smartphone, or at least how that’s how it was a few years ago still, when smartphones were still somewhat getting better year over year.

Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?

I think Apple is responsible by releasing new APIs that are only available on the specific iOS version. Rarely have they back ported functionality to older iOS versions. Apple draggles shinny new APIs in front of developers causing them to update the minimum version.

Yeah Apple rapidly dropping support with Intel Macs is really terrible. I have a 2018 Mac mini that is already obsolete, what a joke. That was the last Mac I buy.

Should OS makers, like Microsoft, be legally required to provide 15 years of security updates?

This seems backwards. Let’s just assume we’re always going to be willingly beholden to tech giants, and so we’re going to pass a law to make our masters treat us well.

Maybe instead campaign for a law that says all publicly funded computer resources must be reliably usable for 15 years. So you either go FOSS and save money too, or you get guarantees in writing before you hand over your hand over money to the people who won’t even let you see what their code is doing on your hardware.

I didnt my finance and IT team did.

If you ever want to create a google fan, make them use M365

15 years is too long, it doesn’t match the state of the industry or technological progress.

If anything this slows down innovation which leads me to suspect the 15 year idea was though of by someone who dislikes any technical changes.

You can already patch windows as much as you want.

Yep, exactly this. You can bypass the TPM and Processor requirements, but at some point it will come back to bite someone in the butt.

Microsoft with the 24H2 update broke Windows 11 for older systems (like Core2Duo, which are already ancient) due to a lack of required processor instructions. I’ve seen systems running under QEMU, and also on newer systems like the AMD Ryzen Zen1 platform experience “Unsupported Processor” BSODs preventing the system from booting.

Even outside of that, Microsoft doesn’t deploy the yearly feature roll-ups to systems with unsupported hardware, even if Windows 11 is already installed. I’ve seen many unsupported systems end up stuck 1-2 builds behind, and they never see the update. They have to be manually updated using the same mechanisms that got Windows 11 installed in the first place.

Microsoft I believe, expects Windows 11 to be running on a minimum set of hardware, and that’s all they are qualifying it for. So older systems are going to eat it at some point if they are used in production.

The TPM checks are for security but, certainly not required if someone is willing to drop system security for some reason.

You can? How do you do that?

By replacing it with something better.

I didn’t go into the specifics but I was thinking more in line with prosumer friendly linux distributions that can be dropped in to replace win 10. I know stuff like linux mint exists for that case.

You start high and negotiate down. If you start low, you’ll get even less