The iPhone 5S Is Now Officially Obsolete

The inexorable march toward the grave continues for all of us, though at the very least, we don’t have a capricious deity named Apple deciding our fate. For those still holding on to your iPhone 5S, you should know Apple has officially put the old phone out to pasture by sticking it in its official obsolete list. Also, if you’re holding onto an older 21.5-inch iMac or 6th-gen iPod Touch, know those old products are also taking one more step toward retirement.

The 7th-gen iPhone launched in 2013 as an improvement over the 2013 iPhone 5. That old, 4-inch phone had a fingerprint scanner, whereas the original 5 didn’t. Apple also tried to promote the 5S as twice as powerful as its predecessor. MacRumors first noticed the changes to the list of obsolete products, including the iPhone 5c and the iPhone 6 Plus. It also joins the likes of the original iPad Air in gadget heaven.

The original iPhone 5, iPhone 6, 6S, and 6S Plus remain on the vintage list. An obsolete product stopped shipping at least seven years ago and is entirely defunct, and you won’t get any service for it from an Apple store. Vintage products, on the other hand, are out of production but may still get servicing.

That 6th-gen iPod Touch came out in 2015, so it’s had a rather good run, considering Apple likes to start sticking products on the vintage list after they’re between five and seven years out of production. All the past iPod Touch models from the 3rd generation and before are obsolete. Apple officially discontinued the iPod Touch line back in 2022. The 21.5-inch iMac (a screen that, come to think of it, seems miniscule by today’s standards) first arrived in late 2015. It now sits alongside the 27.5-inch Retina 5K iMacs from 2015 on the road to Elysium.

If you still had your iPhone 5S in use, you wouldn’t get much in the way of OS or security updates. Only those iPhone models back to the second-gen iPhone SE, along with the iPhone Xs or later, have access to iOS 17.

We can instead remember the iPhone 5s as a different time for Apple, back when it was keen to release updated iPhones after a year instead of creating a whole new model every year, year after year. We have the iPhone 15 now. That’s a fine phone, though it came with only moderate upgrades from the iPhone 14.

From what we’ve seen so far, the iPhone 16 seems like another incremental step with better performance and perhaps a better zoom. The real difference with this year’s phone will likely be in software, with iOS 18 including a pretty big shakeup with more generative AI features. We’ll know more in just a week at WWDC 2024.

Want more of Gizmodo’s consumer electronics picks? Check out our guides to the best laptops, best TVs, and best headphones. If you want to learn about the next big thing, see our guide to everything we know about the iPhone 16.