> Not really, and definitely not with more modern ones. I have an iPhone 11 from 2019. It was released with iOS 13. It is now running iOS 16.1.1. It is as snappy as the day I bought it.

I mean.. that is (on average) roughly 2.5 years old. If your phone was expensive and is still fairly new, then it's not going to be affected by the stuff that pertains old, mid-tier phones, before it gets even older than those.

That's not an Apple/iPhone property but I find it fascinating, that they are able to sell it as such.

I bought mine at release, to replace an iPhone 6 (which itself replaced an Android device of higher spec because I was tired of the treadmill and a friend sold it to me used). So mine's closer to 3.5 years old than to 2.5.

And when you slot that against Android options, 3.5 years is a lot for a usable, secure life of a mobile device. I can safely assume I'll get five years of good, secure perf out of any Apple device from the last five years and another 2-3 years (at minimum) of tolerable performance, and that's pretty hard to argue with in this market.

Don't get me wrong, it's not enough and I'd like it to be better; I'd like all hardware reusability to be better. I'm pretty big on it; I still have an iPad 3 and a Nexus 7 in use as house kiosks (which sidesteps the security issue that phones necessarily have). But if I am maximizing useful life, buying Apple devices has been less fraught for most, if not all, of my adult life.

I wasn't talking about the modern ones, naturally they still aren't old enough to suffer from that.

As you tell yourself, the iPhone 8 isn't its former self with its original iOS version.

It's also six years old and where it's pokey tends to be apps, not the OS. The browser, mostly. Turns out we all like to write a lot of JavaScript, I guess?

Even if that weren't the case, a six-year-old iPhone 8 has out-survived the useful, secure life of, what, every Android device not made directly by Google? Hell, a 3.5-year-old iPhone 11 has out-survived the useful, secure life of the overwhelming majority of Android devices, too. And, further, given that A11->A13 was the most significant period of perf improvement and energy reductions (the A14/A15 are moderately faster but the tail certainly appears to be here), that bodes well for its continuing usefulness.

80% of the world doesn't care about those performance enhancements at the price of a laptop replacement.

Apps or OS doesn't matter, they are interwined.

I have bad news for you about the performance of flagship Android devices from 2017, man.

I am all ears, given the devices I have around here.

I’m now to the point where I frequently have first party apps crash on my iPhone 7, plus the screen has phantom touch issues. I really don’t want to replace it though.

See my comments elsewhere but this is handset damage (flash and DRAM wear and battery performance leading to processor throttling) and would go away if you had your handset replaced with another 7. It's not the hardware spec that's the problem, it's your particular unit.

You're definitely right that some of the slowdown is due to physical wear. I have had the battery replaced once, about 2 years ago back when Apple was offering it at a reduced price, but it's back to "significantly degraded" status. I have a hard time thinking that the system software load increasing over time doesn't also have a significant impact, though.