Apple: The End of Planned Obsolesence?

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Apple, particularly when it comes to the iOS platform, have always been thought to have been guilty of deliberately making their products obsolete. For years, iOS app updates have always removed compitibility for older devices running older versions of the mobile operating system, but now, users running older versions of iOS are able to install the last known compatible versions of apps.

I can confirm that this works on iOS 4, and others have reported that it works with iOS 3 as well. This seems to be a major turning point for Apple. Older devices that were once obsolete have suddenly became functional again. This is great for people on a very tight budget, because iPhone 3G once again has a wide selection of available apps for both productivity and recreation.

I do see some potential problems with this - users could give negative reviews to apps based on older versions which could very well be buggy. Apple should disallow users of older OS versions from rating or reviewing apps in my opinion.

It was wrong of Apple to engage in planned obsolecence in the first place, but this is a great step in the right direction. For several reasons, I've always preferred iOS to Android, and I'm thrilled that Apple is moving away from those shady practices.

All they did was move the mess. iOS7 is designed to be less processing intensive, as all smartphones regardless of platforms have had problems with power management. In a perfect world, development firms on this scale would write OS updates for all their hardware, in the case of the iPhones there's no question about requsite power, only memory. Independent devs got Android 4.04 running on the 528mhz HTC G1 quite some time ago. Nobody would really care about functionality inconsistencies if they just got the latest interface. As a dev I think iOS 7 is actually great for users, but more specifically when they recognize that they're inevitably being pushed towards newer devices, even if they only mean a changed housing.

I'll be buying another Nokia N9. I never said Samsung was any different...

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"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origin of the worlds."
-Georges Lemaitre
"I fly through hyperspace, in my green computer interface"
-Gem Tos