Lifespan

An important component of every tablet purchase is how long will the product last. A $700 tablet with 5 years of life is a much better value than a $300 tablet with 2 years of life.

I started digging into this today and decided to word-vomit my conclusions. Please correct anything you disagree with in the comments below.

For the purpose of this write-up, lifespan is the useful life of the product. This is the time period during which the device is safe and tolerable to use.

Physical Lifespan

A well cared for tablet will outlast its security updates, provided the user pays for a battery replacement at 4 to 6 years.

If you don't need software updates, then physical lifespan is what you need to look for. Examples would be a tablet dedicated to reading pdf documents or interfacing with a piece of hardware (such as an OBD2 Can-Bus analyzer). Take care to set the software up in a static mode, block updates, backup APKs of critical apps, and ideally you should disable internet access.

Based on some iPads and the Surface Pro 2, I think it is fair to say the physical lifespan of a well constructed tablet is around 8 to 12 years, depending on how much you use it. A daily use tablet will fail much more quickly than a tablet that spends 95% of its life turned off.

Software Lifespan

Each company only pushes software updates to their devices for a specific period of time. Unfortunately, the software update window is not broadly advertised, and in some cases it isn't closely followed.

There is a difference between "feature" updates and "security" updates. Feature updates fix bugs in non-critical systems and maintain compatibility with the ecosystem. Security updates close off avenues of attack for malicious software. Feature updates aren't all that important, but once feature updates have ended for a few years you will run into issues running newer software.

ChromeOS

ChromeOS devices get updates until they reach their "Auto Update Expiration (AUE)." You can find many AUE dates here. The general rule for ChromeOS devices is they get 5 years of support.

Android

Android device manufacturers provide highly variable durations of software support.

• Samsung: Promises 3 years from original manufacture date, but popular products have had updates for as long as 5 years. I feel comfortable saying their products have a lifespan of 4 years for flagship devices and 3 years for their economy line-up.

• OnePlus is pretty famous for providing better-than-average software support. Their oldest supported device is the OnePlus3. Software is listed here and the device was released in June 2016. That gives us 3.5 years of support.

• Blu: This is a bottom tier brand, and they have literally released phones that never got a software update. As a general rule, if you get a cheap POS phone, I expect you will be updating it yourself by installing a community built ROM.

My conclusion on android devices is you can expect 3 years of service from a respectable brand, or 4 years for top-of-the-line Samsung devices. If you buy trash, I assume you are okay with missing out on software updates, which actually means your usable life will be pretty long. You just shouldn't install any banking apps.

iOS

iOS is the king of software updates for mobile devices. The iPad2 (released in 2011) has received feature updates to iOS 9 and recieved a security update last year. From an updates perspective, this device has a lifespan of 9 years!

Of course, they aren't actually useful for that long. The average user keeps their apple devices for just 4 years. Eventually the software updates make the device undesirable, and people want something new.

To be fair, you don't have to update just because your device is slow. My opinion is that apple devices are generally useful for about 6 or 7 years before they become too slow to function. Apple devices are a little unique in that they throttle down the CPU as the battery starts to fail. If you have a slow device at 5 years or so, you can swap out the battery for around $100 at a sketchy mall kiosk and get a big performance bump.

For my further analysis, I am going to arbitrarily pick a lifespan of 6.5 years, because that splits the difference between 4 years and 9 years.

Windows

People don't often consider Windows devices as "mobile" devices, but Microsoft is trying!

The software lifespan for Windows devices is truly monumental. The Surface Pro 2 was released in Oct 2013 with Windows 8.1. It can be updated to Windows 10, where it will likely continue to get updates until about 2030. (Officially, Windows 10 is forever, but unofficially Microsoft pushes a new OS about every decade.) I'd estimate that as a software support lifespan of 17 friggin years!

We can't make broad generalizations about the physical lifespan of Windows devices. As long as you are careful and you keep swapping out the battery, the device should serve you until a critical electrolytic capacitor fails, which will take 8 to 12 years. This is highly variable based on factors like how much you use the device, your environment, and how lucky you were with the capacitors you got.

Okay, so with a software support life of 17 years and a physical life of up to 12 years, we have to come up with a different metric for the useful lifespan of Windows tablets. I have a feeling that the CPU and RAM performance will fall below a useful threshold in some period of time. This period of time will vary based on whether you get a top-of-the-line device or a budget device. To come up with this number, I looked backwards to the last laptop that can actually run windows 10 and has at least 4GB of RAM, because there is no way I'd use a Windows device with less than 4GB of RAM.

I found several laptops from 2009 that fit this description. So, for the sake of fairness, I'm going to give Windows tablets a lifespan of about 10 years for high end devices, 8 years for "mid-level" devices, and 6 years for "low-end" devices.

There are obviously going to be exceptions to this. I've seen trash windows laptops and tablets that weren't really usable from day 1.

Conclusions

• The useful lifespan of a product is a critical part of deciding whether it is a good purchase.

• ChromeOS devices generally have a lifespan of 5 years from the date of original manufacture, after which the user will no longer have security updates.

• Android devices generally have a lifespan of 3 years. Flagship products get a little more, cheap-o devices get less.

• iOS devices generally have a useful lifespan of 6.5 years, though the average user will only tolerate their device to 4 years.

• Windows devices have a shockingly long useable life. High end devices can be useable for 10 years, lower end devices will stop being useable after 6 to 8 years. Of course, with the variety of Windows devices available, there are some bottom-of-the-barrel devices that will become unusable long before that.

• Any device with a lifespan of more than about 5 years will likely need a battery replacement, so factor that into your decision making. Some tablets (like the surface pro lineup) are notoriously difficult to open without breaking.

• Any device that will be used for a narrow set of purposes and does not require internet connectivity will be usable for its physical lifespan, which is likely 8 to 12 years.