You're certainly familiar with expiration dates. From the milk in your fridge to the Twinkies in your kitchen (yes, even those can end)-- however what about your phone?
It's not like your phone starts to grow mold or odor funny after you've had it for a while. It may be difficult to even tell how old your phone is from a range if you can avoid splitting the screen and keep it clean.
However yes, in a sense, it can "expire.".
If you have an older iPhone, you might have actually experienced this already. Take, for example, the last major iPhone upgrade Apple pushed out in September, iOS 17. While it presented a bevy of new features for iPhone users, not everyone was able to get the upgrade.
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Apple made the enormous update available to choose models, dating just as far back as the iPhone XR and XS models (both launched in 2018). If you have an iPhone 8 (released in 2017) or earlier, you don't have iOS 17 and you'll never ever have access to it. (Following the trend, that implies the same will likely occur to XR and XS designs when iOS 18 becomes available.).
For Google Pixel users, the most recent upgrade is Android 14, which was released in October. That update was just available for Pixel gadgets dating as far back as Pixel 4a, which was launched in 2020. Just the 5G version of that design was qualified, indicating other Pixel 4 versions and anything earlier (like the Pixel 3 released in 2018) could not get the upgrade.
Both updates, as well as updates from other phone software application business, include more than just new functions. The primary releases, as well as subsequent updates (iPhones are on iOS 17.1.1 as of mid-November), regularly include bug fixes and security improvements for phones. That implies if your phone is too old to get updates, it may be losing out on those fixes and improvements.
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Phones that are too old can even be visited company. Verizon, for example, no longer supports iPhone 4, 4s, 5, 5c, or 5s designs. Verizon also stopped supporting first-generation Google Pixels. (You can see a complete list of apps, devices, and services Verizon no longer supports here.).
In addition to missing out on out on updates and being dropped by your service provider, your phone's battery can suffer. You've likely experienced this, regardless of how old your phone is.
There is a database, endoflife.date, that aggregates the "end-of-life"-- when a gadget is no longer supported or getting security updates-- across numerous brands. Remember previously when we discussed the Google Pixel 3 wasn't able to get the most current update?
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So will your iPhone truly turn to dust after a specific date? Not exactly. It's more that it'll end up being out-of-date. However, unlike expired milk or stagnant Twinkies, there is an excellent opportunity you could continue to use your phone for a prolonged time period.
Google even lists how long Pixel phones will get updates. The Pixel 8, for instance, is ensured to receive updates till a minimum of October 2030. The Pixel 5a with 5G is only guaranteed Android version updates and security updates up until August 2024.
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