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Comment by kennywinker | Hacker News Reader

The reason this is an issue at all is that in order to support te iPhone 5 screen you must drop support for everything before iOS 4.3. Many of the apps you see holding out are doing so because they have (or believe they have) a significant >4.3 user base.

This got better when iOS 6 got jailbroken, but it's still an annoying forced obsolescence. The reason they did it this way is unclear as well.

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The only devices that can’t run iOS 5 or newer are the original iPhone (2007), iPhone 3G (2008), 1st gen iPod touch (2007), and 2nd gen iPod touch (2008).

Compared to later models, their share of the total iOS devices sold is very low. About 30 million iPhones of the first two generations were sold. About 20 million iPods touch of the first two generations were sold. Out of 550 million total iOS devices, that’s under 10 percent. And of course, many of those older iPhones and iPods touch are not in use anymore.

Add first generation iPad to that list.

Nope. All iPads support iOS 5 or higher.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1162925/how_to_upgrade_your_...

Check your facts.

http://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/

Bottom of this page.

That's iOS 6, not iOS 5. The original iPad is EOL'd on iOS 5.

The list you were replying to was the list of devices from 2008 and earlier that are end-of-lifed on iOS 4. That is also the list of devices that you basically have to abandon if you begin targeting iOS 6 and iPhone 5.

That's for iOS 6. The first-generation iPad will still run iOS 5.1.1: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1521

http://giphy.com/gifs/njPdRtrrdyoVO

Reaction gifs are seriously discouraged here.

Thanks for letting me know, I’m new here.

This is debatable of course. Even though the 3GS can technically run iOS 6 even, whether it runs it well enough to be usable is sadly another question entirely. I do know I struggle to use my 3GS these days, though I wonder if that's in part due to App developers assuming people are running newer hardware as much as the OS itself...

Either way, many people with older devices choose to keep them on older OS versions for precisely this reason, so it will be an issue for some.

iOS 5 works great on iPhone 3G S. If you’re having performance issues, you might want to free some space on your iPhone 3G S; that has been known to work miracles.

Good to know. For some reason I didn't think iOS used the disk as a memory cache, so didn't think that would matter?

It doesn't use it to implement paging, but many things do use the disk as a cache (URL cache, keyboard cache, icon cache, Spotlight, app-specific caches, etc) and running low on disk space will cause the background cache cleaner daemon to run.

Anecdotal: I'm posting from a 3gs running iOS 6. I upgraded last year from 4.x, and performance has pretty much been a non-issue.

While my iPhone 3 could run 4.3, it runs like a dog, so I downgraded it to 3.1.3, jailbroken with Whited00r. It means I get some of the extras (root, folders, fast app switching, sharing menu, and video recorder), without the clunky bullshit that the iPhone 3 just isn't powerful enough to handle of the real iOS6. I can't download anything from the AppStore anymore though. It is all 4.3+. Apple are essentially trying to turn my perfectly reasonable device into a brick.

I think you mean you have an iPhone 3G, the 2nd generation iPhone. The ‘iPhone 3’ is the iPhone 3GS, which was released a year later.

The iPhone 3G is a 5 year old model. You can continue to use all the apps you’ve ever bought for it, you just won’t receive updates for them, as you’ve chosen to run 3 year old system software.

There's definitely room for bias in the stats I've seen but virtually everyone reports almost no iOS 4 devices.

http://stats.unity3d.com/mobile/index-ios.html (Below iOS 5/Other: 1.2%) http://david-smith.org/iosversionstats/ (4.3: 1.6%) https://mixpanel.com/trends/#report/ios_frag/

Support for the 5in screen only requires adding an extra default png file to signal support. default@2x~568.png. I don't see where the OS restriction comes in.

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