Well, not quite two years, but you get the idea.

Round here, I’m gearing up for the launch of the next Apple iPhone, and planning to pass my two-year-old 5 on to my oldest daughter. That means she’ll be able to pass the venerable 4 onto her younger sister. This is starting to seem a bit harsh on the younger one, but the actual handset of the 4 is only a year old (whole thing replaced when screen on old one died), and the big question is, of course, is a 4-year-old iPhone better than a 2-year-old Nokia?
No contest.
Two years ago, I wrote about the experience of receiving, unboxing, and configuring two phones in one week. The state of those two phones now, as I think about upgrading, is instructive.
My 5 is fully functional, on iOS 7, and capable of being upgraded to the forthcoming iOS 8. It has had a new screen (after I dropped it at Xmas), and a replacement battery (free of charge, and it would have qualified for the current battery replacement programme). For the two repairs, I made an appointment at the Milton Keynes Apple store, and picked up the fixed phone an hour or so later.
The Nokia 710 has never had a software upgrade. It was on Windows Phone 7 when I bought it, and almost immediately Windows Phone 7.5 came out — but the Nokia wasn’t qualified for the upgrade, and that was it. Meanwhile, even the 4-year-old iPhone 4 is on iOS 7.
The Windows Phone synch app, which I used in setting it up, has also stopped working, so we can’t reset or restore the phone in any way. Talking to my daughter, who doesn’t complain much but has a lot to complain about, it seems that most of the software on her Nokia has stopped working. She has deleted all her games to save space (because we can’t get the pictures off it and she doesn’t want to delete them). The music she downloads keeps deleting itself so she has to start again. Internet Explorer generally crashes on launch. But she can still use Twitter, so that’s a thing.
In terms of the hardware, the headphone socket stopped working some time ago, so she can only listen to music through the phone’s tiny speaker or via Bluetooth. And the screen is cracked, of course, but has never been fixed because what’s the equivalent of making a Genius Bar appointment, and it’s hardly worth it, given how non-functional the rest of the phone is.
So, there you are. This is why people pay a bit more for Apple kit.