True, but I have not liked that recent trend of Apple supporting the iPads differently from the iPhones and it could easily be fixed in one year.
Stop listening to Gurman. He said that back when all the new Siri stuff was going to be in 26.4. He has been wrong about every timetable inside Apple for the past two years. The number of AI changes and multitasking changes for foldables are all-hands-on-deck. The only code cleanup we might get is a slimming to use less RAM, which will probably introduce NEW bugs and not live up to a Snow Leopard name at all.
To be fair snow leopard isn’t exactly a good comparison, seeing as leopard supported Macs from as early as 2001 and it was released in 2007, meanwhile, snow leopard was 2006 and later or absolutely nothing and it was only released two years later in 2009.
How long do you expect them to clog the operating system to support outdated hardware?
Not quite - the iPhone 11 and iPhone SE 2022 both have 4GB of RAM. I suspect the decision to drop A13 iPhones is mostly driven by the fact that they are going to be 7 years old rather than any technical deficiency of the A13 or amount of RAM since iPadOS 27 will likely still support the 9th gen iPad which has the A13 and 3GB of RAM.
The 2018 iPad Pros had A12x (4Gb RAM except for 1Tb models, 7 GPU cores) while the 2020 ones had A12z (6Gb RAM, 8 gpu cores).
People assume that old models get dropped primarily due to some technology gap. That's rarely the case. Most companies of which I'm aware (I'm a former tech product manager) have a support policy based on fully supporting a product for some specific time period after its official sales discontinuation date (which is not the date the "replacement" product was introduced-- usually the older product is sold for a while at a reduced price). In the current case, I would guess Apple's policy is to continue full support (that is, more than just security and critical bug fixes) for at least 3 years after official sales were discontinued, and only to drop support at the next major release announcement after the 3 year wait is up. The iPhone 11's last official sales date was Sept 7, 2022. iOS 27 will be the first major release to be announced after Sept 7, 2025.
The phone is 6.5 yrs old and has received 7 major OS upgrades free of charge.
The SE 3 was sold in Apple Stores early 2025.
Yeah, I do not understand this line of thinking.
You are overly optimistic if you think its gonna be a lean snow leopard update
As long as the hardware is still functionally useful. It's wasteful to do it any other way. At the very least security updates should be maintained for a long time, and any app that has to communicate with newer things like web browsers/email, etc. No need to add new features, but making sure the basic things people need computers to do stays up to date and secure would be great. I think moving to an Ubuntu style OS release schedule would help a lot. Alternating a Long Term Support release with more experimental/feature pushing releases would help a lot.
The company actually constantly talks about $, the rest is pure marketing.
