In case you purchase a brand-new iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Professional, or iPhone 15 Professional Max you may anticipate it to obtain a minimum of 5 years of safety updates — and for the primary time, that is official.
Apple confirmed the information as a part of a submission to handle a brand new authorized requirement in the UK underneath the brand new Product Safety and Telecommunications Infrastructure (PSTI) laws. These laws require that firms affirm how lengthy {hardware} consumers can anticipate to obtain software program updates.
Within the case of Apple, it says that iPhone consumers can anticipate to obtain new software program updates for 5 years after their iPhone went on sale. On this case, the submitting pertains to Apple’s greatest iPhone, the iPhone 15 Professional Max which was first launched on September 22, 2023. Nevertheless, previous historical past exhibits that consumers can seemingly anticipate safety updates for for much longer.
5 years (or extra)
Apple’s submitting was first reported by Android Authority with the regulation requiring firms to submit the “minimal size of time, expressed as a time period with an finish date, for which safety updates might be supplied.” It additionally defines a safety replace as a “software program replace that protects or enhances the safety of a product, together with a software program replace that addresses safety points which have been found by or reported to the producer.”
Apple’s five-year timeframe is not lengthy in comparison with seven years of safety updates that Google guarantees that consumers of Pixel gadgets can anticipate. Nevertheless, homeowners of older iPhones have traditionally discovered that they proceed to obtain essential safety updates for a lot of extra years — latest safety updates have been utilized to gadgets as previous because the iPhone 6s, a cellphone that first went on sale method again in 2015 — an entire 9 years in the past.
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