For the first time in a while, I’m comfortable recommending the latest version of iOS for the oldest-supported iPhone without major caveats or qualifications. Yes, newer iPhones are faster and can do more things, but if you’re still using an iPhone 5 or 5C (or if you’ve handed your old one down to someone else in your circle of family and friends), iOS 10 will treat the hardware about the same as iOS 9 did—not bad, given that the iPhone 5 is four years old.

I’ve always been frustrated by the “forced obsolescence” argument with respect to iPhones and iPads, and the fact that iOS 10 runs pretty well on the iPhone 5 makes it even more silly than it normally is. There is, to put it quite simply, no other company on Earth who is providing this kind of support for its phones. Not one. How many years has it been since Samsung even thought about the Galaxy S III? The HTC One X didn’t even make it two years. Microsoft ditched the Lumia 920 with the Windows 10 update despite promises that all Windows Phone 8 phones would be supported. Even Google won’t commit to keeping a phone around and up-to-date for more two years. And it’s getting to the point where any given Android phone maker couldn’t keep hardware updated for more than two or three years even if it wanted to.

iOS 10 treats the iPhone 5 pretty well, and I would expect this to gradually become the new “normal” as the gap between the newest, best iPhone and the slowest, oldest supported iPhone continues to narrow. Huge performance gains will get harder to come by as the smartphone settles into its boring middle age and as manufacturing smaller, more power-efficient chips becomes more difficult, and as a result your hardware should stop feeling old quite so quickly.