I've said it before, but Apple are a big big company and they have a large amount of resources and money. I guess you don't give a damn about the environment or anything else, or the people who were buying the Mini 1 (in large numbers) up until 6 months ago. Arbitrary cut offs for devices is a terrible idea.
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Which devices will get iOS 10?
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I've said it before, but Apple are a big big company and they have a large amount of resources and money. I guess you don't give a damn about the environment or anything else, or the people who were buying the Mini 1 (in large numbers) up until 6 months ago. Arbitrary cut offs for devices is a terrible idea.
They still don't have enough of one resource: the human kind. Having buckets of cash hasn't stopped them from having 600+ openings on software engineering. And this isn't an arbitrary cutoff. This is them having already supported mobile devices more than any company out there.
Also, stop with the appeals to "but the environment". Human beings are having more of an impact eating beef than they ever will buying a phone or tablet every 2-4 years. This is becoming the new "but why doesn't anyone think of the children".
Lol. Stop with it because its inconvenient? Apple's whole business is built on a completely unsustainable (environmentally) model. The impact of A) recycling an old device AND B) Creating a new device is quite damaging, and when the time period that this occurs can be stretched out, it is to the benefit of the environment.
Eating beef is a stupid comparison to make, as consumption of food is essential to human survival. The iDevice life cycle is not essential and when the cycle is shortened makes a non essential move (made by greed) even worse.
It is an arbitrary cut off - You said it yourself "They've had enough updates already". If A5 devices are cut off for any other reason than it being technically impossible to even get a barebones version of iOS 10 running on them, then it is a arbitrary cut off. If Apple wants to be greedy by increasing margins selling 4 year old technology in 2014 and 2015, then they can pay the consequences and properly support those devices.
If not supporting a device that will be 5 years old is your frustration, you're welcome to find a company that sells mobile devices that they support indefinitely. Have fun trying.
The iPad Mini 1 was released in late 2012 and sold till last year. Same with the Touch 5. The iPad 2 was sold till 2014. Many of these installed devices are under a year old. If Apple didn't want to support them, they should have discontinued them much earlier.
If every complaint against every company was "go find one that does blah better", nothing would ever improve.
By 2014, it was sold cheaper. You're not getting the same support. We need to be able to let technology move forward. We need to stop holding technology back because a few people think they're entitled to support on a device that came out that long ago.
Then Apple should not have been selling them. They were still being sold as only $60 cheaper than the Mini 2 here in 2015.
Let me remind you that more people are on the iPad 2 than any other iPad, and the iPad Mini combined with the iPad 2 and iPad 3 reaches close to 50 percent of installed iPads.
And that stat you put is a great reason to cut support. As long as Apple continues to put updates on those ancient (in mobile terms) devices, a lot of people won't update. By constantly giving theme OS updates, they're artificially extending their life.
And environmentally that is a great reason to continue providing support where possible. There is nothing 'artificial' about continuing to support these devices as its Apple's fault the numbers are so high. They went for higher profit margins and continued to sell devices past their sell by date.
If you don't like it then don't pay attention. I can guess you don't own any of the devices in question.
The A5 series of processors are underpowered in today's terms. That alone is enough reason for them to kill it. As for whether or not I own any of the devices? I owned one of them about a year ago and saw how crap it ran and got a new device because I was under the impression that Apple was going to stop supporting it soon.
Also, stop pretending environmental is a reason to support them. I brought up beef, and it's a good example. You have to eat, sure, but you don't have to eat beef.
Doesn't matter how underpowered or not they are, what matters is whether or not Apple can get a very striped down version of iOS 10 running on these devices or not.
I'm not pretending anything. Longer support cycles are inherently better for the environment. You must not understand the devestating impact of device upgrades on the environment. Eating beef is a stupid example. As I said people have to eat, and yes they can eat something else but pretty much every single form of food production is detrimental to the environment.
Actually Apple are one of the greenest tech companies around. I don't see any 5 year android phone running the latest software and the iPhone is made out of highly recyclable materials with as least chemicals as possible. They also lead the way in using green energy and as little water as possible for both the manufacturing of the device and running of it (green datacentres for example). Please take a look at the full lifecycle environmental impact of one of apples products here:
https://www.apple.com/environment/reports/
As pointed out, beef production accounts for far more co2 emissions and this is becoming more well known and criticised recently.
Actually, beef is far more determental to the environments than most other food types. The amount of methane put out by cows, which are bred mostly for our consumption, has a worse effect on the ozone than all of the cars. The amount of grass needed to feed the cows is disproportionate to the amount of the food they produce. Yes, all food will hurt the planet a little. But you're seemingly obsessed with how much something hurts the planet and even just moving to chicken will diminish your environmental footprint a lot. But that isn't what this is about, anyway. This is about you coming up with whatever bull you can to try to ensure that Apple supports an obsolete device at the expense of the platform.
I'm told that we shouldn't compare companies to each other for whatever reason. Because if we don't demand that Apple supports a phone for five years and a tablet for four, we might as well not demand anything from them. Logic be damned.
Apple software dev here. Just want to clarify some things. I can't tell you what devices will support iOS 10 because I don't know. Apple is a rather secretive company even for employees. Even if I did know, I obviously can't say anything.
Yes, Apple has a lot of resources, but it does NOT have enough software developers, not even close. There is simply not enough good software developers to hire because there's too much demand for them. Operating system development is especially difficult to hire because the knowledge and experience requirements is much higher than most types of programming.
Second: If there were enough developers, Apple can optimize iOS 10 run perfectly smoothly, with all the features on at least iOS 9 (can't comment on iOS 10 features), even on the iPad 2, although there might be some hit on the battery life as more animations are moved to the GPU. I'm not confident to say iPad 1 is supported even with full optimization as the hardware is really limiting. There are ways to deal with low RAM, but it takes more CPU power, which the iPad 1 doesn't have. Windows 8 and on has a very good algorithm to deal with the RAM vs speed tradeoff, to the point it is possible to run the desktop version of Windows 8 on 64MB of RAM (but it is very very VERY slow, I've tried, but still very impressive nevertheless)
There is a lot of pressure to deliver new features for iOS, which really strains developer resources. Therefore, we take shortcuts to help push code faster. One way is to use frameworks, which is basically a package of code that does functions. For example, instead of writing an addition function (and trust me writing an efficient addition function is not a trivial task), I can import the math framework to do the addition for me. This is great, because I don't have to write the function, which means I save time, and less chance of bugs since someone already wrote and bug fixed the code in the framework and is known to work.
However, that math framework also has the code for calculating multiplication, trigonometry, log, etc which isn't necessary for my addition only program, but because I don't want to write an addition function, I import a framework that'll do it, but also have a bunch of stuff not needed for the program.
Now, the math framework might also be using another framework, call it detailed math, for trig functions for example, and that framework is a dependency for math, which means math needs the detailed math framework to be included. Detailed math might need some other frameworks to do its stuff. Now you see how there can easily be a chain of dependencies for a simple function. Even for a simple program, there can easily be thousands of dependencies. This is one reason how code gets bloated.
In an ideal world, Apple would just hire 10x more developers and we'll have time to really polish stuff. But unfortunately we don't have enough developers, and we gotta deal with marketing and their never ending feature requests, and something has got to give.
Yes, Apple has a lot of resources, but it does NOT have enough software developers, not even close. There is simply not enough good software developers to hire because there's too much demand for them. Operating system development is especially difficult to hire because the knowledge and experience requirements is much higher than most types of programming.
Second: If there were enough developers, Apple can optimize iOS 10 run perfectly smoothly, with all the features on at least iOS 9 (can't comment on iOS 10 features), even on the iPad 2, although there might be some hit on the battery life as more animations are moved to the GPU. I'm not confident to say iPad 1 is supported even with full optimization as the hardware is really limiting. There are ways to deal with low RAM, but it takes more CPU power, which the iPad 1 doesn't have. Windows 8 and on has a very good algorithm to deal with the RAM vs speed tradeoff, to the point it is possible to run the desktop version of Windows 8 on 64MB of RAM (but it is very very VERY slow, I've tried, but still very impressive nevertheless)
There is a lot of pressure to deliver new features for iOS, which really strains developer resources. Therefore, we take shortcuts to help push code faster. One way is to use frameworks, which is basically a package of code that does functions. For example, instead of writing an addition function (and trust me writing an efficient addition function is not a trivial task), I can import the math framework to do the addition for me. This is great, because I don't have to write the function, which means I save time, and less chance of bugs since someone already wrote and bug fixed the code in the framework and is known to work.
However, that math framework also has the code for calculating multiplication, trigonometry, log, etc which isn't necessary for my addition only program, but because I don't want to write an addition function, I import a framework that'll do it, but also have a bunch of stuff not needed for the program.
Now, the math framework might also be using another framework, call it detailed math, for trig functions for example, and that framework is a dependency for math, which means math needs the detailed math framework to be included. Detailed math might need some other frameworks to do its stuff. Now you see how there can easily be a chain of dependencies for a simple function. Even for a simple program, there can easily be thousands of dependencies. This is one reason how code gets bloated.
In an ideal world, Apple would just hire 10x more developers and we'll have time to really polish stuff. But unfortunately we don't have enough developers, and we gotta deal with marketing and their never ending feature requests, and something has got to give.
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Compatibly they are a green company. That doesn't mean they can't do a lot better. Doesn't really matter how recyclable the iPhone is, the fact remains that the faster an upgrade cycle is, the more CO2 that is put out in creating the replacement device, the more environmental destruction is caused through the mining of materials for the replacement device. Then you assume that all devices actually get recycled, the realty is that they don't. Many devices get incinerated/dumped/whatever - all of which damage ecosystems etc.
And what - do you know what my diet consists of or something? Have you heard of the concept of doing two things at once? Yes thats right, the world can both move towards consumption of food that is less environmentally damaging and also reduce the effects of discarded devices and the upgrade cycle on the environment. Just because something is damaging to the environment and something else is less so doesn't mean it is a good thing to ignore one.
https://www.getorchard.com/blog/iphone-environmental-impact/
Ensuring devices remain useful for the longest period possible is important environmentally and you'd be a fool to argue otherwise.
My interest in keeping A5 devices useable until it is no longer possible is for a number of reasons.
1. The environmental (as I have already discussed) impact of around 40 percent of installed iPads (A huge number) becoming obsolete due to a lack of security updates and therefore discarded of, and then the amount of energy and emissions caused through the creation of replacement devices.
2. Apple giving proper support to users of iPad Mini 1s and iPod Touch 5 users who purchased devices around 6 months ago. (And still to an extent iPad 2 users from 2014) Apple's greed in keeping these models for sale is part of the reason so many people are still on A5 devices, and thus those who purchases such devices should be able to update their devices for as long as it is technically possible to run even the most stripped down version of iOS on their devices. 12 months of support is not good enough for premium products. Otherwise apple should have sold the iPod Touch 5 (which was by the way their premium iPod till well into 2015) and the iPad Mini 1 (And even the iPad 2 back in 2014) clearly stating that those devices would not be essentially become obsolete less than a year after purchase.
3. While you find A5 devices 'obsolete' and whatever, that is a personal opinion. Many people find A5 iPads more than usable still, myself included. iOS 9 may have slowed them down, however for many these devices remain more than useful, thus if it can be done, there is no reason for Apple to arbitrarily cut them off from a very basic version of iOS 10.
There is plenty of Apple software that the majority of Apple users will never use. What about the effort put into 'Move to iPhone for Android' or Apple Music for Android. That is also 'At the expense of the platform'. Again Apple was more than happy to take large profit margins on older devices, so perhaps some of that money can go into further support.
And the platform is just as usable today as it will be in a year even if it doesn't get iOS 10.
512 Mb of RAM wont be enough to run IOS 10.we r not in IOS 6 anymore!! IOS 10 Will be compatible with devices that have at least 1GB of RAM..Apple didnt optimize Ipad 2, iPhone 4s to run IOS 9!.so , do u still think that those devices Will get IOS 10 just because most people own A5 devices? We need to value performance .and I predict that if the IPad 3 gets IOS 10 it Will be the slowest device To run IOS 10.
Don't need to. There is thing called custom ROM. when company drop the support, we flash with custom ROM.
And do give me the crap about people don't know how to do that. If there is 50M plus CM users, clearly people are flashing their devices.
i was wondering if anyone had any predictions on what devices are going to support ios 10 hope my ipad mini 1st gen and my ipad 2 still get supported. But i just wanted to see what your guys predictions will be for what devices get ios 10 let me know thanks
To put it simply:
But in the end, I don't see them supporting any A5/A5X devices. They're just too underpowered and will be five generations behind the upcoming A10 devices.
I'm also expecting OS X 10.12 to drop support for several macs, since they haven't done so since OS X 10.7.
- A5 devices = no
- A7 devices = yes
- A6 devices = maybe
But in the end, I don't see them supporting any A5/A5X devices. They're just too underpowered and will be five generations behind the upcoming A10 devices.
I'm also expecting OS X 10.12 to drop support for several macs, since they haven't done so since OS X 10.7.
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I also think Apple might drop everything below A7. They probably won't and might keep A6 in there but if iOS 10 doesn't go strictly 64bit I fairly confident iOS 11 will for sure (no reason to keep 32bit support by 2017 when they already don't even sell 32bit devices anymore currently.)
It has the same processor as the iPad 2, it's basically a mini version of it, they'll probably be dropped at the same time.