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All Devices iOS 13 Minimum System Requirements Speculation
- Thread starter Yebubbleman
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There's so many smart tables and reasonings in this thread and based on the numbers (the A8's GPU is much faster than the A7 SoC) and the fact that Apple markets its devices based on the SoC and not RAM, it seems fair to say that A7 will most likely be dropped and A8 will remain for another year.
That’s exactly what I said. I’d like to see everything including the A7 supported but I guarantee they won’t drop A8 this year.
Probably.
I do wonder though if A8X will be supported or dropped next year, since A8X and A9 perform very similarly (outside of HEVC). A8X is a very different beast from A8.
I ponder that too. It seems unreasonable to drop A8X at the same time as A8 unless there is some other reason behind it. According to your excellent table, it might be because of its lack of hardware HEVC/HEIF decoding. Who knows?
What I think will happen as smartphone sales decline is, Apple will support older hardware for longer like they do with the Mac. I have an old Macbook Air 2011 laying around and it was supported for 7 years all the way from OS X Lion up to macOS High Sierra. In addition, it will receive extended support up until September 2020 and iTunes will be supported until September 2021. So all in all, around 9-10 years of support. This is what I think we will come to expect from smartphone software support as we hold on to our devices longer. Therefore, A8 may well be supported for a longer time span than any earlier SoC. We will have to wait and see.
Actually, for iPads, A8 with 2 GB would be the perfect cutoff for iOS 13, if Apple introduces Sidecar in macOS 10.15.
My guess is no A7 devices will be supported in iOS 13. However, I also think all A8 devices could get supported, although there is a possibility that they would kill off the iPhone 6/6 Plus and iPod touch too while keeping the iPad mini 4 and iPad Air 2. It’s also possible that Apple would make hardware HEVC/HEIF support a hard requirement (outside of HomePod), meaning they would kill off all A8/A8X devices, but that seems rather drastic.
Underlying OS design notwithstanding, personally I think a reasonable cutoff (outside of HomePod) for iOS 13 would be 2 GB RAM. From a performance and stability standpoint, that would make sense. I do note that some more complex apps are crashy on 1 GB iDevices, but are stable on 2 GB iDevices.
The iPad mini 4 and iPad Air 2 have proper Metal support with A8/A8X (that is many times faster than Metal with A7) and both have 2 GB RAM (as opposed to the 1 GB RAM with A7 iPads).
https://9to5mac.com/2019/04/16/mac-ipad-display-feature/
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Part of me does wonder if the A8/A8x devices with 2 GB of RAM will receive support for longer than the devices with 1 GB of RAM. The last couple generations of chips that were dropped (A5 & A6) were dropped all at once, but all A5 devices had 512 MB and all A6 devices had 1 GB of RAM. A4 devices were dropped over 3 years (original iPad with 256 MB of RAM didn't receive iOS 6, iPod Touch 4 with 256 MB of RAM didn't receive iOS 7 and iPhone 4 with 512 MB of RAM didn't receive iOS 8) so it's not unheard of.
I have an iPad Air and i'm not expecting it to receive iOS 13. It runs really well on iOS 12 and it wouldn't bother me the least if it's cutoff. At least I can say it wasn't taken down to it's knees like the iPad 2 or iPad 3 with iOS 9.3.5
If it's the (1st gen) iPad Air I definitely agree with you. I don't think any A7 devices are coming along for the ride. Based on the rumors about the iPad features coming to iOS 13 I suspect it wouldn't run well on iPads with only 1 GB if RAM.
Not like any of the old devices are struggling with iOS 12 so I'm pretty sure they'll all get iOS 13.
I have an iPhone SE with A9 and 2 GB RAM running iOS 12.2 and an iPhone 5 with A6 and 1 GB RAM running iOS 10.3.3.
Not hugely surprising, but the SE with iOS 12 runs circles around the iPhone 5 with iOS 10. Although I can feel it starting to lag, from a performance standpoint, I could use the SE as a daily driver. Well, that is if the screen were not so small. In contrast, the iPhone 5 would continually annoy me, because of its lagginess in iOS 10.
The iPhone SE feels just like my iPad Air 2 in terms of UI performance.
Sure, iOS 13 might introduce more lag on older devices, but the iPad Air 2 is already fast enough that it could withstand a bit more lag and still be acceptable to most people IMO.
As for the iPhone 6 Plus with A8 and 1 GB RAM, I’m not sure though, since I’ve never used it in iOS 12. I’ve used it in older iOS versions though and I was not impressed. The 6 Plus started to lag even in iOS 9, so perhaps it’s a good time to cut it loose.
One thing to note is the iPhone 6 Plus was discontinued in 2016, whereas the iPad Air 2 was discontinued in 2017, and the iPad mini 4 was discontinued in 2019.
Not hugely surprising, but the SE with iOS 12 runs circles around the iPhone 5 with iOS 10. Although I can feel it starting to lag, from a performance standpoint, I could use the SE as a daily driver. Well, that is if the screen were not so small. In contrast, the iPhone 5 would continually annoy me, because of its lagginess in iOS 10.
The iPhone SE feels just like my iPad Air 2 in terms of UI performance.
Sure, iOS 13 might introduce more lag on older devices, but the iPad Air 2 is already fast enough that it could withstand a bit more lag and still be acceptable to most people IMO.
As for the iPhone 6 Plus with A8 and 1 GB RAM, I’m not sure though, since I’ve never used it in iOS 12. I’ve used it in older iOS versions though and I was not impressed. The 6 Plus started to lag even in iOS 9, so perhaps it’s a good time to cut it loose.
One thing to note is the iPhone 6 Plus was discontinued in 2016, whereas the iPad Air 2 was discontinued in 2017, and the iPad mini 4 was discontinued in 2019.
I’m pretty sure several currently supported iDevices will no longer be supported in iOS 13. All A7 devices will be killled off for sure, but possibly even the 1 GB A8 iPhones, although to be honest I’m not convinced they will kill off the iPhone 6 line just yet.
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Any leaks on the new Home Screen in iOS 13? I bet that'll take up some resources away from the older devices.
Probably upto iPhone SE and iPad Mini 4. The latter has a good replacement and this summer Apple may announce the XM.
I can’t see the iPod Touch going and especially not if the successor isn’t released in say June, before the cut. That would keep the iPhone 6 for sure, also an A8, 1GB device. Mini 4 isn’t going anywhere. They’ve never dropped an iPad so soon after discontinuing it, even the RAM starved 1st Gen. iPads cost more than iPods and to an extent I see Apple considering device cost in the amount of support it should receive/how long it should remain usable for. A device is unusable in my opinion when you can’t get growing numbers of apps to run on it. Lag or not, later software gives you an option.
A7 devices is my vote.
Later down the line I can see the 9.7 1st Gen Pro going before its 12.9 counterpart, maybe with the 5th Gen as being the older device will already have given the Pro extra support. The 2GB RAM makes it feel like something of a bodged release, even if nothing will beat the iPad 3 or iPhone 5 (some frequencies being omitted which meant it only got 4G with certain UK carriers) in that regard. The Air 2 it replaced already had 2GB so there was nothing Pro about that and every other model has at least double that amount.
A7 devices is my vote.
Later down the line I can see the 9.7 1st Gen Pro going before its 12.9 counterpart, maybe with the 5th Gen as being the older device will already have given the Pro extra support. The 2GB RAM makes it feel like something of a bodged release, even if nothing will beat the iPad 3 or iPhone 5 (some frequencies being omitted which meant it only got 4G with certain UK carriers) in that regard. The Air 2 it replaced already had 2GB so there was nothing Pro about that and every other model has at least double that amount.
I’m not sure it’s fair to call the A8X equivalent to the A9. The single core performance in the A9 is significantly better and that tends to show in the simpler real-world scenarios. Afaik all A9 devices also came with much faster flash storage meaning app switching to software that had been unloaded from RAM came with a leaner time penalty.
I think there are still reasons for them to continue killing off support for older devices. A7 sticks out with its pretty basic Metal support and could possibly be set aside if a new UI design requires more juice. A8 could survive for longer but it being included in the Homepod or ATV4 doesn’t mean much as their software is branched off from iOS anyway.
I think there are still reasons for them to continue killing off support for older devices. A7 sticks out with its pretty basic Metal support and could possibly be set aside if a new UI design requires more juice. A8 could survive for longer but it being included in the Homepod or ATV4 doesn’t mean much as their software is branched off from iOS anyway.
Sure would love to see the same requirements as iOS 12. That iPhone 5s sure runs smoothly. It will probably be added to the list of devices that got dropped too soon though. (Thinking of the iPhone 5/5C and A6 iPad here...)
Another possibility is that they cut all the A7’s this year, then they do iOS 14 with a minimal cut (kind of like iOS 8 which only left behind the single core iPhone 4) and cut the remaining 1GB devices, which would also give a decent level of updates to recently purchased Mini 4’s with 2GB. Then it gets interesting with A9(X) (decode only, but if they dropped all such devices at the same time, they would also be dropping a model with 4GB RAM.)
No, if you look at actual benchmarks, the iPhone 6 series performs 10-20% faster than iPhone 5s in system benchmarks and GFX, regardless of display resolution. NAND read/write speeds were also significantly increased.
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Again, no. The iPhone 6 series introduced the barometer, NFC, Apple Pay, and VoLTE.
Yup you are right, but i PRETENDED to agree with those people that cannot tell the difference in system benchmark by just looking at the number. So they will KNOW, be aware and notice NOW the difference between those specs and features after all.
But, that isn't a problem because iOS 13 isn't announced yet. or whether what iOS 13 will actually support.
In my opinion
A10 Devices are 100% getting iOS 13, i cannot give percentage for those A9 and below because base on rumors that a9 and below will be dropped and as i watched in youtube videos.