Apple's upgrade dilemma

Sloppy, content-free article that is basically half a dollop of pure speculation and little else.<p><i>"However, it won’t be long until it becomes an attractive option to increase sales."</i><p>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.

I have seen this argument applied to Dell, Microsoft, Apple and others over the years. It is really a straw man argument. Apple will not kill off old hardware just to boost new sales. Apple keeps their offerings fairly current in order to push the envelope. When Apple dropped the floppy drive they were not trying to screw over consumers, they were looking forward and realizing that documents would not fit on a 1.4mb storage medium for much longer and they were right.<p>It's a matter of leaning forward or leaning backward. Another strategy Apple will likely pursue is to continue to break into new markets. The TV from Apple is likely the next innovation and area of growth that will boost Apple's outlook and get stock values up again. And that may happen this year. And beyond the TV I think Apple will be exploring other areas. We know that smart cars are coming with iOS integration. That will generate a good deal of revenue for Apple. Products like Nest and Bluetooth LE devices will also become quite handy. Just look at the Nike Fuelband, Jawbone UP and Fitbit for examples of new opportunities for hardware which integrates with the iPhone and gives consumers new gadgets to buy which leverage Apple products. Also keep in mind products like Pebble which are smart watches which integrate with the iPhone and Apple may even create their own smart watch which would surely do well given how popular the idea is with Pebble.<p>Apple does not need to get people to buy new iPads more frequently. They can simply create more products we are willing to buy.

Everyone does this - it's not unique to Apple. How many single core phones run Android 4 from the factory?<p>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.<p>Software tends to expand to fit hardware capabilities, so as newer hardware comes out, software is written to use, then require the added performance.<p>If Apple could have shoehorned iOS 6 onto the original 256MB RAM iPad, they probably would have, but it probably performed so badly they avoided it.

Actually, continually providing upgrades to older iPhones is a wonderful way to push new hardware sales: the upgrades significantly degrade the user experience because the hardware isn't as capable.

I am completely behind the longer-term upgrading of your phone. But only once you find your match.<p>I have changed over 8 phones in 2 years and it has been actually rather frustrating. It was at the time when smartphones were coming out. Of course , as a geek, I had to have one. It was nightmare. Displays were unresponsive, phones were freezing etc. I end up using old keyboard-standard nokia for few years.<p>About a year ago, I have been using Galaxy for few months. The experience was much better then my first phones, but still not perfect. And then I bough my dream phone. Many of you might not know it, but its called XiaoMi (小米). It is chinese phone, but not some chinese garbage it is well thought-trough phone, performance much better then newest galaxy and armed with android and MIUI on top. Peope say that Xiomi company is like apple in china. I have to say I have never been so happy with phone.<p>XiaoMi now released version two of their phone. The phone has everything that first version is missing, and I am very temped to buy it, but there is a bit of fear if the phone wil let me down the same way my first phones did. And i am so happy with my current phone, why would I change? Maybe in few years....

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.<p>Apple also tied app support for the iPhone 5, and future iPhones, to ending support for the iPhone 3G and its ilk; I understand that long build times are far from desirable, but this move seems like a great way to encourage upgrades.<p>Then again, maybe I'm just a cynic.<p>Edit: I've not used an iPhone 3GS on a day-to-day basis, but I've seen better performance out of my first gen iPad (and maybe it's just me) just before it was EOL'd than I ever saw with the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2G family, both of which were truly awful performance-wise before Apple pulled the plug. I'm guessing the real reason for keeping support for the iPhone 3GS but not the iPad 1G was, as coob mentioned, the fact that it was on sale when iOS 6 was released.

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).<p>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.

Note that the iPhone/smart phone market is in no way saturated - there are many dumb/feature phone users to sell to. We only just passed 50% of the US market being smart phones. There are currently about 6.5 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide, but only about 1 billion smart phones. That leaves a market <i>five</i> times the size of the existing smart phone base, or in other words the smart phone market is only 16% saturated.

The one thing I can think of that <i>has</i> 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 &#38; below.<p>I'm no expert on compilers, but I find it hard to see how that isn't deliberate, or what other benefits it provides.