Exactly! I installed this on my original iPhone at one point, and it was a complete waste of time. Apple's goal is to ensure that old iDevices are 100% useless by refusing to update them, and this project does absolutely nothing to rectify that.
iPhone 4 (06-2010) received it's last (?) update in 06-2014, 4 years of support, other devices have had similar durations of support.
Compare that to Google: Nexus One (01-2010) never received 4.0 (10-2011): less than 2 years, Nexus S 11-2010 to 10-2012: 2 years, Nexus S 10-2011 to 07-2013: less than 2 years.
If you take an modern game and run it on an '07 PC it will be very slow at max settings.
Back in 06-07 it you needed a 15x15K drives and a controller with 256 MB of cache RAM to hit 800 MB/sec random read/write. Now you can drop in two $200 SSDs
1) You pay for Windows, and part of that cost is specifically to ensure backwards compatibility. iOS is free.
2) The performance of smartphones in 2008 vs. smartphones in 2014 is very different than the performance of PCs in 2008 vs. PCs in 2014.
In 2008 smartphones and mobile ARM platforms were in their infancy. The latest smartphones (Android, iOS, or otherwise) are easily 100x faster than those old phones. This is why I'm personally skeptical that these guys can get the iOS7-blur effect on an original iPhone1.
You'd see incompatibilities galore, too, if PCs advanced by a factor of 100 in 6 years. In fact, we did see that in the mid-late 90s when PC performance was exploding - the upgrade cycle back then was way, way shorter than it is today.
But it doesn't matter that your argument is flawed. Supporting 4yo hardware is a waste of time from any hardware vendor POV if there were 2 new generations of devices released since. It's not a gaming console with a lifespan of 5-10 years for people to expect support after half a decade.
What about updates? The cost of the device has nothing to do with the 2-4 software updates an average user can expect.
Phones at full retail price have sat comfortably at the $600ish price point for quite a while.
Search for "Apple subscription accounting" for more information.
In this way: Dos 5.0 Installes windows 1.0 -> windows 2.0 -> windows 3.0 -> windows 3.1 -> windows 95 -> windows 98 -> windows 2000 -> windows xp -> windows vista -> windows 7.
He skipped ME because he couldn't update ME to 2000. All through this he had Doom installed and it ran successfully on vista without modification.
or alternately
'Windows 7 is so full of old outdated code that you can still run software from 1993.'
In 2008 the 2nd gen (3G) iPhone launched. It had the same 400mhz 32-bit processor, 128MB of RAM, and 480x320 px screen as the 1st gen iPhone, so it basically represents the very beginning of what is now a six-year explosion in phone performance. iOS had seen a total of one year's public use. The App Store launched alongside the 3G -- outside of the tiny jailbreak community, no one had ever tried to write and sell apps for iOS before.
The iPhone 5S, released five years later, is roughly 50 times as fast,[1] meaning performance more than doubled each year from that starting point.
Give it another few years and your complaint will make sense. But right now, it would be a tremendous waste of time and potential to limit apps, APIs and OSes to what can run on the first round of iPhone hardware. Especially since, as far as I can tell, that hardware represents somewhere less than 1% of iOS phones in use.
[1] http://gabrieltomescu.com/blog/2013/10/25/how-accurate-is-th...
That may be true, but the iPhone 3G when it came out launched and ran the phone app very quickly and reliably. By the time it received its last supported OS update, it could barely even run the phone app.
As a "normal user", my expectation would be that the latest and greatest supported OS for my device lets me run the core apps at a decent speed, and to everything else to be slower. That wasn't really the case during the Forstall era of iOS.
I don't expect Apple to support phones forever, but why does something like texting/inputting into a keyboard get worse and worse as the life of the phone goes? Doesn't seem to make sense.
Also, I guess I'm spoilt by the PC and Android world where you can install new software on old devices.
For now.
Long term, as things stabilize, I think we all can agree we want more from these gadgets.
I would much rather have Apple flat-out refuse to provide updates for devices which are unable to handle the new bloated software.
Man, I would pay a small fee to Apple to be able to do that. I bought a maxed out iPad 1 when it was released and it was basically unusable in 24 months. I expected to be able to use it for 3y.
Well, it seems there is some variability on this, so the better response may be "YMMV".
iOS7 on my iPhone 4 (including the latest updates) -- just made it unusable -- and keep in mind, most of what I do are just the core apps, Safari, RSS and Read Later. I basically had the same issues with the last supported iOS versions on the original iPad and iPhone 3G.
The pattern I notice is that Apple tends to offer one OS upgrade too many on older devices, which is basically what led me to leave iOS.
The refreshing pattern I've experienced on Android is that most of the upgrades have featured performance improvements.
Note that it's not a given that a new OS release must run slower. Mac OS X had many releases that got successively faster. The trend only stopped with 10.7 or so.
Anyway, you certainly could build something that really can't run on older stuff, or can't run well. My point is merely that the dilemma you propose is wrong: there are at least three options (don't support old stuff, support old stuff badly, support old stuff well), not just two.
So I guess they have three options:
* Release upgrade, people complain
* Don't release upgrade, people complain
* Allow any random OS release to be installed, people complain
Every single one of these options have their own pros and cons. Apple seems to have just selected the first one.
Android's fractured version numbers have nothing to do with forced upgrades or any inability to downgrade. They're simply a result of Android upgrades being the responsibility of individual phone manufacturers, and those manufacturers having little incentive to ship upgrades.
At this point, I'd wager that iOS would see better uptake of new versions if they allowed downgrading. As it stands, if you merely suspect that the new version will make your phone suck, you need to stay with the old version, because once you upgrade there's no going back. If they let people downgrade, then you could try the new version with no worries.
when friends with 4 and 4s with ios7 show up i like to ridicule then on how they have a phone worse and 10x shower then the previous generation. oh apple. you're so funny when you try to nickel and dime your customers.
they take some 2min to load the first screen on maps. it's hilarious.
But, I have experienced something quite the opposite. Apple keeps pushing updates that cripple older devices.
In the last few years I have had a number of my devices and those of my friends rendered useless because of updates pushed by Apple.
I have seen a variety of issues the most common and annoying of those include: 1. Battery Failure - Immediately after an update (happened to my iPhone 4, my cousins and two friends in the same week, immediately after the update) 2. Extreme lag/slowdown when receiving calls/typing 3. Front camera stops working or more accurately hangs the application making use of it.
I am not a conspiracy theorists. But in all cases I have seen people including myself upgrade soon after, at times to android devices, but most often to iDevices.
Don't know if it is a deliberate goal. But it truly sucks.