Have an old iPhone? No dark mode for you.
On Monday, Apple finally unveiled iOS 13. The new mobile OS brings a veritable bounty of new features, the most flashy of which might be a system-wide dark mode for your iPhone.
That's right, you can enable dark mode on your iPhone, making everything more pleasing to the eye in low-light situations. If you have an iPhone, you can definitely use dark mode when it launches later this year, right?
Well, not exactly. Apple buried a juicy little nugget in the fine print of its iOS 13 press release on Monday: it will only work on the iPhone 6S and beyond. For the first time, the iPhone 6 has been left out of the fold.
That means if you still use the 2014 edition of the iPhone, it's unfortunately time to upgrade. At least, that's what Apple thinks. Apple hasn't sold the iPhone 6 in quite a while. Still, last year's iOS 12 update was compatible with the phone.
Now, the unfortunate inevitability of progress has rendered the iPhone 6 obsolete. That, or planned obsolescence. Either way, the software death of the iPhone 6 actually foreshadows a much more terrifying future for iPhone owners: one without the 6S.
The iPhone 6S is still supported for now, but one has to assume it's hanging on by a thread at this point. It will be almost five years old by the time Apple unveils the next version of iOS in 2020. It and the iPhone SE were both officially discontinued last year, and those were the last two iPhones with headphone jacks.
The 6S and SE still have software compatibility, but for how long? Maybe a year, probably not much more. Once Apple pulls the plug on new versions of iOS for those phones, you'll be forced to use a phone without a headphone jack if you want the newest software features.
At that point, you'll have to use the new iPod Touch to listen to music.
Alex Perry is a tech reporter at Mashable who primarily covers video games and consumer tech. Alex has spent most of the last decade reviewing games, smartphones, headphones, and laptops, and he doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. He is also a Pisces, a cat lover, and a Kansas City sports fan. Alex can be found on Bluesky at yelix.bsky.social.
