Why did Apple just declare a 12-year-old iPhone obsolete?

The bad news is that Apple just ended all hardware servicing for one of its most popular products. The good news is that the product is the iPhone 5, which was discontinued more than 12 years ago, and it’s frankly amazing that it lasted this long.

Apple has three categories for products that it has stopped selling and are no longer covered by warranty: discontinued, vintage, and obsolete.

For a minimum of five years after they are discontinued, the products are still relatively easy to get repaired because servicing and replacement parts continue to be available from Apple service providers. At this point, products are declared vintage, at which point servicing may still be available, but it depends on whether the provider still has the parts. And around the seven-year mark, they are declared obsolete, and all hardware servicing ends.

It’s important to note that those timeframes are only minimums, and they are sometimes stretched. And based on the device declared obsolete this week, Apple just stretched the definition of obsolete by an astonishing margin.

As spotted by MacRumors, the iPhone 5 this week moved from the vintage to the obsolete category on Apple’s official list. The fact that it’s on the list is indisputable, but it’s hard to know for sure whether it definitely made the transition this week. Apple just quietly updates the list; it doesn’t make announcements. But MacRumors seems sure it moved on March 16, and a quick trip to the Wayback Machine confirms that the iPhone 5 was on the vintage list, not the obsolete one, as recently as March 12.

This is pretty amazing. The iPhone 5 was launched in September 2012 and lasted only one year: it was discontinued in September 2013, when the iPhone 5c and 5s came out. So it’s been off the market, not for seven years, but for more than 12. The iPhone 5c and 5s (discontinued in 2014) were already on the obsolete list, as were the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus (2016) and the 32GB versions of the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus (2018). Even the 1st-gen iPhone SE, which came out in 2016 and was killed off in 2018, is on the list.

So why has the iPhone 5 only just made it on there? Perhaps the stockpile of parts just held out longer than expected; perhaps service providers were able to reuse parts from the iPhone 5s and iPhone SE, which followed largely the same design… although that doesn’t really explain why they were declared obsolete. Did Apple forget? Were there so many people using the iPhone 5 that it had to keep it technically repairable until now? Does someone at Apple just really like that phone?

Ultimately, it’s a bit of a mystery, but if you own one, it just got a bit harder to repair.