Why Apple's making your old iPhone better than ever
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Plus, it’s doing things it never did before. When I connect it with my car, for example, and start up CarPlay, I can now choose to see Google Maps on the dashboard, not Apple’s proprietary and, in my view, inferior mapping system. Allowing me to make that choice is the mark of a confident company.
A lot of other things are possible with my iPhone now. Searching for photos of family members is now staggeringly easy. Most important, the phone’s internal capacity seems to have been enlarged: I can read a book, switch to a magazine, start an audiobook app, return to The New York Times website, check my heartbeat and see how many miles I jogged this morning, all without crashing the phone.
Moderating this kind of addictive overuse is easier, too, thanks to functions that make it simpler to turn off annoying messages for extended periods. It’s like having a new, speedy phone, without having to buy one.
What’s the upside for Apple? By supporting my aging iPhone years after what might have been its sell-by date, the company has increased the odds that — when I do actually need a new phone — I will remain in the Apple universe, expensive as it may be to live there. My old phone, which cost almost $1000 new, seems like a much better deal now, considering all the use I’m getting out of it.
Even before the latest changes, many people had been delaying buying a new phone. In Apple-speak, the iPhone replacement cycle has lengthened, and annual sales have not yet returned to the 2015 peak of 231 million units sold.
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