iPhones are the only device sold by Apple that are only rated for 500 charge cycles before degradation starts. Macbook, iPads and Apple Watches are rated for 1000 cycles. In the case of the Apple Watch I'd guess it's because despite being tiny, the SOC also doesn't ask for as much peak voltage as the phone SOC.

I've had the Honor 8 for a year. It's still holding a great amount of charge and running fine and as fast as the day I bought it. And unlike my 5s, no phone update is coming to turn it into a slow crawl.

The iPhone battery problem with regards to the topic, spontaneous shutdown at 30% and less battery remaining, is probably exacerbated since the evolutions that made those SOC more powerful than before. There wasn't a large wave of 5s owners having spontaneous shutdown requiring an OS update to throttle the CPU. That only started with the iPhone 6. A combination of paltry battery and modern SOCs having peak power usage that stress such battery more than before.

The iPhone 5s should have hardware that is much faster than what's in a Moto G2. Yet, my friend's Moto G2 feels smoother in use, transitioning between apps and the like, than the 5s. I bought the Honor 8 to replace it, a somewhat cheap, midrange android device. Everything on it feels so fast I probably won't replace it until its battery gives out completely. On the paper, the hardware of the Honor 8 is not as fast as modern iPhones. In practice when I open apps it's pretty much instantaneous. The device has enough RAM to keep everything running.

People keep complaining android manufacturers aren't updating the OS fast enough. I'd say good on them to make sure they only give us an OS build that's actually usable on said hardware. Apple doesn't even let you install previous iOS versions. Unlike iOS, most of Android's platform APIs are updated through the Play Store. Things like your web browser are also updated through the play store. So unlike iPhones where refusing new iOS updates means being stuck with browser engines that can't keep up with the web, your android handset stuck on older android is not actually becoming obsolete.

No matter how much nicer Apple's hardware looks and feels in the hands, I ain't ever giving them more of my money again. Premium prices should command more durability in time than this. Chosing to stay on an old iOS means you can't install new apps built on newer SDKs or get newer browsers and so on, so you really have to suffer the slow down treadmill with Apple. You don't have to on Android.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/FelipePepe/20150423/241730/N...

Basically, if you play video games from the DOS era on a modern computer without correcting their aspect ratio they look stretched, and that was not how they were supposed to look.

So, the same goes for fonts. They look weird if you look at it with your current resolution and aspect ratio. They would look more condensed/thinner on the CRT monitors of the DOS era.

> The thing is, most MS-DOS games were actually rendered in 320x200, which is a 16:10 aspect ratio and thus widescreen – but they weren't displayed that way. I won't pretend I know all the technical details – there are way better sources for that – simply put, the CRT monitors back then stretched images to fit the screen.

> The 320x200 image was stretched to fit the entire 4:3 screen, to something close to 320x240. What today we see as a sharp, square pixel was actually a blurry rectangle back then, about 20% taller than wider (the Amiga, Apple II, Atari ST and other home computers all had different resolutions, but the principle is quite similar).

Even if you're lowering your current monitor resolution you're not actually seeing those fonts the way they were meant to be rendered. That's because your monitor will display a native DOS resolution as widescreen. When CRT monitors of the time took that widescreen resolution and turned it square.

There's a lot of understanding about old rendering methods that has been lost in the mainstream. The article I linked also showed how people exploited scanlines to make water look transparent in a very smoothed way. Your LCD pixel grid just doesn't show things the way old low resolution CRTs did.

Compare this shot of Windows 2000 to the one of NT4 they feature on their page :

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/full/win2000ad...

See any major change? right.

Windows XP is missing but in a way it might not count as retro enough because it has lived and been with us for far, far longer than most OS usually do.