iPhone News And Rumors: Phone Longevity Expected To Be At Most Three Years

By Jenn Loro - 19 Apr '16 10:41AM

Silicon Valley giant Apple has recently exclaimed that iPhones only have a maximum life expectancy of three years which confirmed what many customers have long speculated. Like its smartphone cousin, Apple Watch is only good for three years while Apple TV is expected to last in up to four years of service.

This frank admission comes as Apple updates its environmental policy and boost its green credentials with an 'environment' tab recently added to its website.

As iPhone's productive life cycle gets exhausted after a three-year mark, so does the smartphone's iOS and watchOS. The OS X and tvOS developed by the company on other much larger devices like the Mac series and Apple TV will be get a 12-month extension.

"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," Apple said in a statement as quoted by News.com.au.

How does Apple calculate the life expectancy of its famed devices?

"To model customer use, we measure the power consumed by a product while it is running in a simulated scenario," Apple was quoted as saying according to a report by Business Standard.

Apple further noted, "Daily usage patterns are specific to each product and are a mixture of actual and modelled customer-use data."

The product life cycle is an integral element in the Cupertino-based giant's market strategy of releasing fresh OS updates to its aging devices largely based on the their hardware specs and capabilities. This means that older handsets simply can't support new features that come with more recent software updates.

"The iPhone 5S, which is roughly three years old, won't be able to support the iOS updates after three years as compared to the updated iPhone SE," Deccan Chronicle reported.

"The gap between the iPhone 5S'release and the SE is also roughly three years. And even if Apple provides the software updates to 5S users after three years, it will be a painstaking task for the device to support it."