The iPad 1

4th generation iPod touch is 960 x 640 = 614,400

1st generation iPad is 1024 × 768 = 786,432

Those extra 172,032 pixels could have been enough to prevent something from performing adequately.

That kind of short-term thinking is what gets companies into trouble. No, it won't help the bottom line now, but when the next purchase rolls around, don't you think premature obsolescence (or the lack thereof) of the device being upgraded will factor into what replacement to get? It's certainly a major reason I won't buy an android device (at least one not made by google, which tend to get long term support like apple)

Drastically ?

The core of iOS is fundamentally the same as OSX and there are shared components. If Apple could figure out how to dramatically reduce memory usage they would have done it by now.

I was fed up with Android bloatware enough to finally switch to iOS a few weeks ago, but the lock-in on both platforms (non-stock Android + iOS) is beyond aggravating and feels more like a shakedown at some points.

So, I asked her to be careful of her iPad recharging strategy, but recharge the III S at will. BTW, both devices seem to have about 10 hours of active use time between charges. Also with the III S's higher resolution screen I have started using it for watching Netflix, TED talks, etc., etc., so the battery life of my iPad may not be an issue.

I think it's safe to assume that iOS devices aren't going to come with upgradeable internal components. They've got models at different price points and their 3rd party hardware ecosystems - which they plan satisfying the consumers use-cases until the next version rolls around again.

Unfortunately for Apple, Steve Jobs is dead and the magic is gone. Now I hear those same users say they are "tired of the iPhone" and want something new. If Apple's competitors can deliver good Android experiences, they are going to get to keep those new users for a while.

FWIW, that's what I thought about my iPad1 when iPad2 came out, and again when New iPad came out. I'm perfectly happy to upgrade when needed (I bought mine early on when they launched here in Australia, so it's over 2 years old now, which is a fairly acceptable lifespan for tech gadgets for me), but so far I've still not bumped into any app I want to run but can't, at least not anything compelling enough to push me to spend money to upgrade. I suspect if I were more of a gamer, I'd be running into performance problems, but for all my use cases, iPad1 seems to be perfectly happy to run that apps I want - and short of some category-changing new app idea, I'm pretty sure all the apps I use will continue to work for quite some time yet, even if they get updated with new versions which require iOS6 which I'll miss out on.

I'm strongly suspecting now that the battery will need replacing before the device becomes unusable due to newer OS and/or software requirements.

Steam is a centralized game store, but it doesn't necessarily lock you in. You can buy individual games from retail or from competitors. But you come to Steam, and it's comforting at least to know the choice is there if you choose to exercise it.

Also, the strange thing is that it still runs as well as the day I bought it, and still does everything it did from Day 1, as well as new things that came with updates to iOS.

I forget, why am I supposed to be angry at Apple?

I'm an iPad 1 user bought when it launched on USA (imported, I'm on Europe) and I use it every day. From RSS (Reeder) to video streaming (Plex) and SSH (Prompt).

It's running iOS5 good enough, iOS6 is out but my iPad 1 hasn't imploded and it's still working. There may be some Apps that won't work on it in the near future, but I doubt it will bother me enough to upgrade or switch to a worse platform. Most apps still target 4.2.

Mine is ~28 months old now. Personally I'm not all that unhappy with that sort of support lifespan for what to me was pretty much bought as a "tech toy", admittedly and expensive one, but I never expected decades of support for it… (I've got a friend who bought her iPad1 about 5 weeks before the iPad2 came out, she's somewhat less happy than I am…)

So that's nearly two and a half years. You would hope the Nexus could do everything the iPad could at a substantially cheaper price.

I mean... they did release a device that's basically just a huge screen...

Oh yeah ? Apple has always skimped out on ram on every single device and made you pay a premium to get more. That wasn't a real problem on macs in the past because it wasn't difficult to add ram yourself, but now with tablets and the new macbook air and macbook pro retina.. that's kind of a problem.

I bought one of the first macbook air that had the ram soldered to the board without thinking. If I had known that Mac OS Lion and Mountain Lion would've become so bloated I wouldn't have bought the 2gb model that I sold for a measly 200 euros recently. This piece of shit couldn't browse the web with multiple tabs open without swapping even though the same task was okay in the past with Windows XP and 512mb of ram. (I probably could have gotten more but I didn't WANT to sell it for more because I would have felt like I'd be robbing someone by selling them a defective device for a premium) By the way, there wasn't a single PC vendor selling laptops with less than 4gb of ram, when I bought my MBA, even el cheapo laptops that sold for $400 had 4gb of ram (what does it says about Apple ?). I was kind of retarded to buy the 2gb MBA, and I should've spent a little more for the 4gb, but I don't really regret it either since I opened my eyes and sold all my Apple devices, and will never buy anything from apple again.

It was obvious to a LOT of people that the first iPad was way too lacking in power and would be prone to something akin to planned obsolescence. Even me, who got fucked by the Macbook air, knew that the first iPad was indecent (I waited for the iPad 2 before I got my first tablet.)

Look at the top of the line in the android world : the (tablet) Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which has a much lower resolution than the iPad Retina (and thus less hefty memory needs for the apps), has 2gb of ram inside, future proofing it a bit against future applications. The (phone) Galaxy Note 2 also has 2gb of ram, as do some of the variants of the Galaxy S3, now that's a real top of the line phone. When I saw the retina iPad for the first time, my first impressions, after the initial "wow" you get for the screen, was, the specs are underwhelming for this kind of device.

Apple is all about the shiny. The 13" Macbook Pro still has 4gb of ram as a standard in the entry level, even though it sells for 1249 euros. I've seen PC laptops under 999 euros sold with 8gb of ram, 1TB hard drives, core i7 and a nvidia chip inside (rather than the shitty intel graphic chip that's included in the entry MBP).

I'm done getting ripped off by Apple.

Most developers are still going to be targeting iOS4+ for a while to come.

The point is that lack updates hurts consumers. This is no less true when Apple does it than when Android OEMs and carriers do.

I use an iPad 1 and haven't used any new one for more than 5 minutes and the iPad 1 feels exactly as fast as when I first bought it.

I think the same thing happens in computers. I run a hackintosh machine with an SSD and pretty good hardware and the other day I was putting together an old PC to run MAME (I'm building an arcade cabinet) and god, the thing is slow as hell. I'm sure it was just as slow then I was using it (Pentium D with 3 Gigs of RAM), it just that we are used to be faster now.

EDIT: Note that new app versions probably ARE slower than older ones in old hardware. If the developer is using the last iPad available to test and neglecting older hardware is what happens. Back when I did native apps we used the best hardware available to develop and low-medium end to test in order to avoid this and optimize our code for speed on not-so-new hardware.