iOS 17 Compatible With iPhone XS and Newer, Available in Beta Today

[mat1696]

A11 to A12 was a pretty big jump. The A11’s neural engine was pretty gimped with only 2 cores, didn’t even support 3rd party apps. It was only used for I think Photo facial recognition, Face ID, and those Animojis.

A12’s neural engine was the real deal. It had 8 cores, could run over 8X the speed of the A11’s, and fully supported 3rd party apps.

A13 was an incremental improvement over A12, and even A14 was another incremental improvement over A13.

I hope you are right and they just don’t plan on dropping one gen each year… Hope iOS 18 will keep the same compatibility list as iOS 17 then…

 

[Populus]

I hope you are right and they just don’t plan on dropping one gen each year… Hope iOS 18 will keep the same compatibility list as iOS 17 then…

At some point (and I think we’re almost there), smartphones will become so powerful that they will be cut from support not by technical reasons, but just to keep pushing the sales of newer models. Because, let’s be real, the current iPhone 14, the base model, has a powerful A15 (almost as powerful as the new A16) and 6GB of RAM. Do you think there will be a software release this machine cannot handle? We’ll see in 5 years from now if they cut the support for the 14.

And why I’m so pessimistic about this? Well, in the macOS side is already happening. Don’t tell me that 2017 MacBook Pro isn’t powerful enough to run Sonoma. It is, even if it’s without the machine learning based features. But they are already cutting the support and probably the 2018 macs will lose support as well next year. Here the change of architecture (x86 to ARM) is a big factor, not gonna lie, but I suspect they are approaching that point of stop supporting perfectly capable machines because they already have 5 or 6 years, pushing you to buy a new one -which is bad news for the environment they apparently care so much-.

 

[bniu]

At some point (and I think we’re almost there), smartphones will become so powerful that they will be cut from support not by technical reasons, but just to keep pushing the sales of newer models. Because, let’s be real, the current iPhone 14, the base model, has a powerful A15 (almost as powerful as the new A16) and 6GB of RAM. Do you think there will be a software release this machine cannot handle? We’ll see in 5 years from now if they cut the support for the 14.

And why I’m so pessimistic about this? Well, in the macOS side is already happening. Don’t tell me that 2017 MacBook Pro isn’t powerful enough to run Sonoma. It is, even if it’s without the machine learning based features. But they are already cutting the support and probably the 2018 macs will lose support as well next year. Here the change of architecture (x86 to ARM) is a big factor, not gonna lie, but I suspect they are approaching that point of stop supporting perfectly capable machines because they already have 5 or 6 years, pushing you to buy a new one -which is bad news for the environment they apparently care so much-.

Supporting older phones also means having to accommodate older phones’ characteristics. With iOS 16, there has to be code that deals with iPhone 8 Plus’ internal resolution rendering that is different from its 1080p screen, there is code that has to make exceptions for A11 CPUs as much of the machine learning stuff isn’t capable of being run on those chips.
Cutting off iPhone 8 also means not needing to deal with 2GB ram limitations. Now going forward, all iPhones have at least 3GB RAM.

Recently, we’ve seen the iOS minimums go from A7 with iOS 11 to A9 with iOS 13 to A11 with iOS 15 and now A12 with iOS 16.

A12 is still plenty fast, it seems to be able to handle a majority of the capabilities of iOS 17. I still use my iPhone XS as my work phone and it continues to work like a champ.

 

[Torty]

Supporting older phones also means having to accommodate older phones’ characteristics. With iOS 16, there has to be code that deals with iPhone 8 Plus’ internal resolution rendering that is different from its 1080p screen, there is code that has to make exceptions for A11 CPUs as much of the machine learning stuff isn’t capable of being run on those chips.
Cutting off iPhone 8 also means not needing to deal with 2GB ram limitations. Now going forward, all iPhones have at least 3GB RAM.

Recently, we’ve seen the iOS minimums go from A7 with iOS 11 to A9 with iOS 13 to A11 with iOS 15 and now A12 with iOS 16.

A12 is still plenty fast, it seems to be able to handle a majority of the capabilities of iOS 17. I still use my iPhone XS as my work phone and it continues to work like a champ.

Agree the more devices are supported the more expensive and longer the development/testing cycles take. But with iPadOS older SOCa are still supported.
I see quite a lot of people using older iPhones, especially younger people.
So this strategy might result in bigger iOS fragmentation in future because iPhones getting much more expensive every year, at least in Europe. People will stick longer with their devices.
Maybe in future apple charges us for iOS releases.

 

[Juanj]

Anyone seeing this?

During the day the color of the icons of wifi/vpn/bluetooth varies van light to dark blue in the Settings