Ipad 1?

prowla

jaybeetoo wrote: »

For example?

The Mac mini 2006 Core2Duo version, for instance; a perfectly viable machine for which Apple decided not to support newer versions of both EFI (BIOS) and OS X, but they can both be made to work (OS X Lion just needs a line added into a config text file) - ref. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1600749

The early 2006 mini officially supports 2 GB, but in reality can run 3 GB, after the EFI upgrade is applied.

Apple then removed the graphics drivers from the subsequent OS releases (Mountain Lion onwards), which prevents them running on the 2006 Mac minis.

(I happen to know about that particular one, because I have an early 2006 one; I upgraded the CPU from a Core Duo to a Core2Duo, so its hardware is capable.

jaybeetoo

So rather than Apple deliberately obsoleting their products it is they have decided not to update and test drivers needed to support old graphics chips. I can understand why they would want to do this. There is an overhead (and cost) in supporting all old hardware. At some stage they have to draw a line.

Microsoft does the same. Probably the worst are Android and Windows phone producers - my current phone only received OS updates for 6 months after I bought it. My son's phone got even less.

prowla

jaybeetoo wrote: »

So rather than Apple deliberately obsoleting their products it is they have decided not to update and test drivers needed to support old graphics chips. I can understand why they would want to do this. There is an overhead (and cost) in supporting all old hardware. At some stage they have to draw a line.

Microsoft does the same. Probably the worst are Android and Windows phone producers - my current phone only received OS updates for 6 months after I bought it. My son's phone got even less.

As I said, it only needs a line of text to enable Lion on a 2006 Mac.

And it wasn't updating their drivers; it was removing them.

As far as the overheads of supporting old(er) kit, Apple don't have quite the same challenges and costs as Microsoft; there have been a handful of Mac models all manufactured by the one company, so the support overhead is not in the same ball-park.

The only technological justification is in moving the OS to 64-bit, and based on that the logical line would have been to obsolete non 64-bit processors (ie. support Core2Duo onwards).

StuC75

The main reasons I upgraded from my ipad first gen to the more recent one were..

1 - The absence of camera - so couldn't use with Skype \ facetime..
2 - 1st model wasn't designed with Multitasking in Mind, so did start slowing down on the later IOS versions when more apps were running.