Seriously? This feature makes it more convenient to buy stuff from Apple! It will not convince a single person to upgrade.
Again, I am talking about this specific feature, not the devious Apple conspiracy to force upgrades by choosing backward compatibility of features using a dartboard!
While it does make it easier to buy things at Apple, it is also likely a feature that people who want it are willing to pay for. If you care for the feature, you will upgrade. If you don't, you likely won't go out and say "well, not shopping at Apple anymore". Again, my point, and the point of this thread, I think, is showing that Apple is slowly stripping features, seemingly arbitrarily (and there is pretty good evidence in some, but not all, cases) from their older devices.
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Why wouldn't Apple want to deal with an annoying issue if it would theoretically make them more money?
Because this is a
convenient answer for why this feature is limited to the 4S and doesn't really put Apple at fault.
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Well, lets take the siri example. Apple's definition of working is likely different to the guy(s) who hacked it to work on the 4.
The 4s has a noise cancelling mic to improve voice recognition. Maybe they deemed the results on the 4 to be "not good enough" standard to support?
As to OS X - it looks the same, but under the covers there's a HELL of a lot of development re-writing going on there.
Much more than with Windows, in fact.
The windows NT kernel hasn't changed all that much since the days of Windows NT 4. They had a big jump with Vista but that's it. Scheduler tweaks, etc. Its mostly UI fluff.
OS X has had massive internal changes, new APIs developed for sandboxing, multithreading, etc.
It just looks the same, but that is becaue in apple's eyes they got the UI mostly right the first time. Much the same as IOS looking mostly the same back to version 1.
Well, We use Siri on my fiance's 4. I can tell you that it fails no more (or less) than it does on my 4S, which it obviously came with. This is anecdotal evidence, of course, but plenty of others seem to agree based on their own experiences. Does that mean you are wrong? No, but it certainly is a convenient "hardware limitation". I can certainly understand that Apple has "strict guidelines". They seem to have failed miserably with Siri though, a product that is just about the only feature advertised on the 4S in every commercial, is still in beta (something they aren't very public about, certainly NOT in the commercials anyway), and often doesn't work for many, MANY users, including myself. In my experience with Apple this is the first actual quality control issue that I have found to be borderline unacceptable. For the most part, I don't even use siri because I don't want to be let down. And that is not an exaggeration.
And what are the hardware limitations to maps and 3G over facetime?
As far as Windows, I was simply raising a point. By the time a huge upgrade pops up with features that most "joe blow" users need, you will end up having spent (about) the same on the two OSs. My intention wasn't to make the MS vs Apple. You brought it up, and that was my response. Apple gives us incremental upgrades to the OS that we can opt to purchase. Windows does their "overhaul" once every three or so years. I prefer Apple's model, but the point was they are charging relatively the same, it is just a different sales model. For what it's worth I would prefer if MS did something like Apple in a variety of ways, not the least of which being allowed to purchase one copy of the OS for up to five different computers (I believe those numbers are right). Though we only have one Mac currently, that's a huge savings over buying Windows for multiple machines.
