AppleInsider has an excellent and comprehensive look at how Apple has supported iPhone 3GS owners by including them in the latest iOS6 update:
Three years and three months later, and despite being discontinued from Apple’s iPhone lineup, the iPhone 3GS is still supported by the newly released iOS 6, making it officially the longest supported smartphone capable of running a modern OS.
This is in stark contrast to rival smartphones introduced alongside it just over three years ago: the entire range of Windows Mobile 6.x devices, Palm’s webOS Pre and Pixi, RIM’s Blackberry 5.x lineup and all hardware running Google’s Android 2.0 Eclair are not just unsupported today by those platforms’ latest releases, but were in all cases not even supported through the first two years’ contract life of those devices. That situation isn’t changing either, with Google, Microsoft and RIM’s platforms all gearing up to provide their new releases exclusively on new devices.
If you buy a Nokia Lumia today, you won’t get an update to the Windows Phone 8 operating system coming this fall. But if you bought an iPhone 3GS in July 2009? You have latest iOS 6. That’s an extreme example, but as AppleInsider points out, the situation isn’t that much better with Android phones.
With that kind of customer support, it’s amazing that competitors mock how loyal Apple users are in their ads.
