And just in case time hasnt broken it.. locking it out from future updates certainly ensures it.
Seriously, this is pretty ridiculous. Not only is a 2012 iPad five times slower than a five year old Intel laptop, it's far less than 1/10th as fast as the
slowest iPad that's supported by the current version of iPad OS. (17, which supports most iPad hardware introduced since 2017). iPads as old as
2014 (iPad Air 2) have received bugfix updates to iOS 15 and 16 this year. That's 7 to 10 years of support for most devices, which means by broad strokes Apple has actually been extremely good *lately* about not cutting off hardware that's pretty darn old by mobile device standards.
I mean, sure, I get being somewhat butthurt that your particular iPad was cut off from new OS releases after only three years, but in response:
A: You *do* understand how crap your average Android vendor is, right? My 2012 Samsung Galaxy Note got *one* operating system update about a year and a half after release.
One. My first Android phone, the *absolutely wonderful for the time* 2010 HTC Droid Incredible was updated from Android 2.1 to... 2.2, a few months later. That's it. An abortive attempt to get it to 2.3 came out a year later, but some people never got it.(* this is what got me into jailbreaking and third party OSes for a while) This was absolutely typical in the Android ecosystem for a long time, and for lower end devices from more obscure vendors is still a huge problem.
B: The last version of iOS that 2012 iPad runs actually at least got a security update in 2019, again,
seven years after the hardware was introduced. Again, every android from that period? Hell no. Google *kind* of worked around some of this by integrating a lot of security libraries into the Google Play store so you could at least *kind* of get some security fixes direct from Google years after your vendor had abandoned you, but it was far from perfect and wouldn't fix OS-level problems. Again, Apple looks positively saintly here compared to the average for this space.
C: There are, unfortunately, some really good reasons why the lifespans of some of these devices were so short. The technology and performance of mobile devices were improving at a ridiculous super-charged rate for most of the first decade after the first iPhone came out. there are legit reasons why Apple's iOS releases were aggressively cutting off older hardware so quickly for a while; the newer devices just couldn't meaningfully handle them. The longer support windows Apple has now in large part reflect the maturation of mobile platforms as a whole. The CPU (and GPU) speeds are certainly still ramping up at a decent pace, but you're seeing less in the way of fundamental feature changes between generations now than there were then.
Re: point C, you know that 2008 Dell you're so excited about still being able to use? Sure, it's great you're able to use a 16 year old laptop in 2024. That's only possible because that PC is still technically "modern" according to the mature/stagnant baselines that the Intel/x86 world operates within. Now just imagine it was 16 years ago, 2008, and you're trying to use a 2008 OS to access the 2008 Internet on a
1992 vintage laptop. I'm sorry, but no, Linux isn't going to save you here. If you're lucky that laptop's going to be a 486, but realistically it's more likely to be a 386SX, and
Absolutely nothing is going to work. If you split the 17 years between the introduction of the first iPhone in 2007 and today in half, just like we split that 32 years between today and 1992 into two 16 year periods, and chart out the kind of technological leaps there were in mobile devices between 2007 and 2015-ish verses between 2015-ish and now you'll see a very similar kind of technological gulf between the stuff in the first period verses the second. IE, if the first iPhone was a 386 your 2012 iPad is something like a Pentium II, and the last 32 bit IOS devices from 2014-ish were like 32 bit Pentium 4s. An iPad 5th gen or iPad Air2, by contrast, is the equivalent of your Core Duo 2 laptop; trailing edge but, yes, fundamentally different from from the hardware that preceeded them. And that's why they're still viable while your iPad just isn't.
In short, even if Apple *wanted* to put the current iPad OS on your 2012 iPad they couldn't. And, ultimately:
Not at all. And to clear things up that statement wasnt meant to be anything against Apple. Im just not Naive enough to think any company today really cares about thier customers...
Reasonably, how long do you expect a company to support a dingus they're not making a dime on? So far as I'm aware the longest extended warranty they'd sell you in 2012 was three years. In 2012 an iPad cost about as much as a TV set, with those you're probably lucky if the manufacturer's warranty is even a year. And, sure, it sucks that the things that an iPad is built to consume (IE, the Internet and an "app" ecosystem) isn't even remotely as stable and eternal as, well, NTSC broadcast standards were (IE, sure, up as late as the early 2000's you certainly could reasonably expect to roll out the Philco from 1955 and be able to tune in a football game on it. Whether you'd actually enjoy watching it on that verses a newer set is a separate question.) and is therefore certain to become obsolete within (insert random timespan here) after the manufacturer stops coughing up software updates, but... that's life, sorry. If you buy an iPad for $600 and you get six years of use out of it you've paid $8 a month for it. I don't mean to sound elitist, but, well, for a piece of machinery as complex as an iPad a combined hardware purchase+support cost of one farging Starbucks a month doesn't seem that unreasonable.
