The ax has fallen, the iPhone 6s, after setting longevity records in the world of mobile telephony, will have to retire. They will not be compatible with the future version of iOS, unveiled by Apple at WWDC. A little too old, they mostly lack… intelligence.
Hands clenched on the armrest, ready to pounce and kiss, like a game night two minutes from victory, we waited to see if Apple would set a new benchmark for software support longevity.
The end of a long race…
The iPhone 6s, launched in 2015, were about to reclaim the throne as the dean of the small world of smartphones. Last year again, when they passed the bar of iOS 15, they had made a good figure, brushing it without moving it, and we thought that Apple was going to show the world that a smartphone can take advantage of a major update of an operating system seven years after its arrival.
We will have to put the colorful wigs back in the closet, put away the champagne: the iPhone 6s is not compatible with iOS 16. It will therefore remain forever under iOS 15, even if at Apple we take the trouble to specify that the updates Security updates will continue to be carefully enforced.
But it is also interesting to note that the iPhone 7, although a little younger, is also fixed. To be able to benefit from iOS 16, it will be necessary to have at least an iPhone 8. The second generation iPhone SE is also on the good side of the barrier.
A choice motivated by “intelligence”
How to explain this decision? Is it justified by the sole concern of guaranteeing a user experience of a good level and worthy of these premium smartphones? Probably yes. But we can also see in the choice of the iPhone 8 a technologically considered decision, which fits perfectly with a reality that is growing in iOS: the use of functions based on machine learning.
Live Text, introduced last year and which can recognize text in an image and now in a video, is based on such algorithms. The most impressive photography features in recent years in iPhones also rely heavily on facial recognition, depth-of-field analysis of an environment, and more. Without them, no cinematic mode, no portrait mode, no computational photography… No little dog clipped on the fly so that its photo is then integrated into a Messages conversation, as we saw during the opening Keynote of the WWDC. No smart sharing of your photos with family members who are in the snaps etc. One could almost say, without it, no modern iOS.
For several years, Apple has been building a set of essential functions for the user experience, which differentiate the iPhone from the competition or which guarantee fluidity of use. And this small revolution was only made possible by the integration into the Axx SoCs of a chip dedicated to this kind of calculation, which Apple calls the Neural engine.
However, the first Neural engine, designed by the teams of the Cupertino giant – with a certain modesty, and a desire to see what it would give, according to what was entrusted to us at the time – appeared in a chip , the A11 Bionic. A SoC that entered the world by taking place… in the iPhone 8, 8 Plus and iPhone X.
No wonder, then, that when drawing in the sand of the arena the limit of support for its iPhones for iOS 16, the border passed through these models. At a time when the chip dedicated to artificial intelligence calculations is increasingly in demand, it is difficult to find a satisfactory functional balance by keeping smartphones in the race that do not have what it takes to hold up. However, Apple did not abandon them cowardly, they had a good life. A record life.