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Apple's upgrade dilemma

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Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#21

Post by adamjernst »

melvinram wrote: post #19
Bud wrote: post #11

Sloppy, content-free article that is basically half a dollop of pure speculation and little else. "However, it won’t be long until it becomes an attractive option to increase sales." Seriously? Um, it's already an attractive option. Always has been, if you are a lazy, sloppy company. Apple's eschewed this option approximately forever, and there's no evidence of anything different.

Agree with most of what you said except "Apple's eschewed this option approximately forever". Siri for only iPhone 4S when iPhone 4 hardware could support it was one chink in their impecable reputation for supporting older hardware as long as possible.

This is because the iPhone 4 is missing a newer version of the crucial noise reduction chip:

http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/06/siri-may-be-iphone-4s-only-be...

The fact that Apple supported iOS 6 on the 3GS is proof that they're pretty serious about backwards compatibility.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#22

Post by StringyBob »

barredo wrote: post #12
Xuzz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The iPhone 3GS is much faster than the original iPad. On the iPhone 3GS, you have a reasonably slow CPU and GPU, but you also only have 320x480 pixels to deal with. On the iPad, you have a slightly faster CPU and GPU (but still single core), but have to render to 1024x760 — way more pixels. You also don't have any extra RAM on the iPad, but your images and framebuffer still have to cover that extra area. The net resu…

Original iPad is even faster than iPhone 4 http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/1635302/16... So it's faster than a 3GS http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/1634913/16...

I find safari on an original iPad almost unusable; after upgrading from iOS4 to 5, it crashed regularly - I presume due to not having enough free memory. Support stopped at 5.1, just under 2 years after its international release, and only 1 year after it was replaced by ipad2.

Seems like they already have a handle on deprecation.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#23

Post by richardwhiuk »

chrisdevereux wrote: post #15

The one thing I can think of that has effectively EOL-ed older iPhones is dropping support for ARM v6 codegen from recent versions of Xcode. It is not possible to build against the iOS 6 SDK (which is needed to access newer APIs) and support the 3G & below. I'm no expert on compilers, but I find it hard to see how that isn't deliberate, or what other benefits it provides.

It was entirely deliberate. You can't write an app to support both iPhone 5 (with full height support) and iPhone 3G and put it on the AppStore, and use the normal compiler. Apple don't support the large image with < iOS 6 SDK, and they don't support armv6 with the iOS 6 SDK.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#24

Post by ajross »

hyko wrote: post #18
dpearson wrote: post #4

Apple is already killing off device support, sometimes (seemingly) for marketing reasons. With iOS 6, Apple dropped support for the first-generation iPad, but continued to support the iPhone 3GS (which I cannot imagine being much faster [edit: see Xuzz's reply to this comment]). The obvious reason, from my layman's perspective, is sales: the iPhone 3GS was on the market more recently, so the (newer) iPad got the ax.…

The excellent iOS support matrix makes the decision more obvious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/89549358@N02/8454676411/sizes/l... As you can see, the geekbench score for the iPad is indeed higher than the 3GS but the 256MB system memory coupled with the display size likely meant performance wasn't acceptable. Since there's no paging on iOS, Apps are killed when they consume too much memory. Since the iPad already has…

Yeah, it was memory. Apple undershot the onboard DRAM pretty badly on that device. Really it was a design mistake, not a deliberate support termination.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#25

Post by melvinram »

adamjernst wrote: post #21
melvinram wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with most of what you said except "Apple's eschewed this option approximately forever". Siri for only iPhone 4S when iPhone 4 hardware could support it was one chink in their impecable reputation for supporting older hardware as long as possible.

This is because the iPhone 4 is missing a newer version of the crucial noise reduction chip: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/06/siri-may-be-iphone-4s-only-be... The fact that Apple supported iOS 6 on the 3GS is proof that they're pretty serious about backwards compatibility.

If this was the case, they should have communicated it.

As an iPhone 4 user, I chose not to upgrade to iPhone 5 when my contract expired because I feel like whatever gets released this coming year (5S/6) might not be compatible with iPhone 5 software wise.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#26

Post by bruceboughton »

melvinram wrote: post #25
adamjernst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because the iPhone 4 is missing a newer version of the crucial noise reduction chip: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/06/siri-may-be-iphone-4s-only-be... The fact that Apple supported iOS 6 on the 3GS is proof that they're pretty serious about backwards compatibility.

If this was the case, they should have communicated it. As an iPhone 4 user, I chose not to upgrade to iPhone 5 when my contract expired because I feel like whatever gets released this coming year (5S/6) might not be compatible with iPhone 5 software wise.

They did.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#27

Post by smoyer »

My almost two year-old HTC Thunderbolt was supposed to be the "next big thing" when I bought it. It finally got upgraded to ICS Saturday (yes ... 2/9/2013) morning. It takes an effort to support the hardware you produce, but if you're putting people into two year contracts, it's pretty pathetic that the upgrade finally occurred within two months of my renewal (OTOH, I won't be trading this for another HTC phone as I've learned my lesson).

I'm another person that's perfectly content with my iPad 1, I have a laptop that's working great (with Ubuntu) after 6 years and I tend to wear things out before I upgrade. I was disappointed with Apple's "throw-away" chassis on the new MacBook Pro and it seems like the trend is only getting worse.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#29

Post by sigzero »

melvinram wrote: post #25
adamjernst wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is because the iPhone 4 is missing a newer version of the crucial noise reduction chip: http://www.tuaw.com/2012/02/06/siri-may-be-iphone-4s-only-be... The fact that Apple supported iOS 6 on the 3GS is proof that they're pretty serious about backwards compatibility.

If this was the case, they should have communicated it. As an iPhone 4 user, I chose not to upgrade to iPhone 5 when my contract expired because I feel like whatever gets released this coming year (5S/6) might not be compatible with iPhone 5 software wise.

They did communicate it. They have communicated it for a couple years now.

Re: Apple's upgrade dilemma

#30

Post by TsiCClawOfLight »

yareally wrote: post #14
zdw wrote: post #10

Everyone does this - it's not unique to Apple. How many single core phones run Android 4 from the factory? It's probably less about upgrade revenue than the new opportunities in the SoC space which, unlike desktop/server CPU's, are increasing in performance/W at a much greater clip. Software tends to expand to fit hardware capabilities, so as newer hardware comes out, software is written to use, then require the adde…

> Everyone does this - it's not unique to Apple. Definitely. Just look at the Android OEMs (HTC, Samsung, etc). They're always at an impasse to whether they should continue to update their devices to the latest Android version (and avoid angering customers) or stop updating to boost more new phone sales. On average though, it seems the assumption they can sell more devices seems to win out for Android OEMs than updat…

impasse is spelled without the accent ;)
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