Latest iOS updates for older iPhones

What features would you leave out to make it LITE? No matter what you chose to leave out people would be unhappy with the choice. Another way to look at it is 12.4.6 already IS iOS 13 LITE.

As a professional developer (although not for Apple) I can give you a couple of reasons that there isn’t an iOS 13 LITE:

• There is no benefit to Apple, because Apple does not charge for updates
• It would mean running two different versions of iOS 13, which means double the work (as in twice as many developers, or twice as long between interim or “point” updates), because the LITE version would be just as complex but have a separate development fork. Actually it would MORE than double the work, because every time iOS 13 was updated the update would have to be coordinated with iOS 13 LITE, so that’s a different development effort to maintain compatibility between the two “forks” of the source code tree.

And no, iPhones don’t cost $10 to $20 to make. The markup on then is actually pretty small. You can find manufacturing cost analyses on the web.

Red.dwarf4ever wrote:

Even the very oldest PCs and laptops are able to accept the latest Microsoft operating system Windows 10,

Not really. This is a facetious statement to start the post with. There's a limit to how old a Pc can be and still be able to correctly run Windows 10. Yes Windows 10 is pretty light with its requirements, but that does not mean you can take a computer from 1995 and install Windows 10 on it.

Mobile devices by their very nature have shorter support spans since hardware is less powerful, and the OS requirements can quickly exceed what it can offer. An iPhone 6 is at this point almost 6 yea old hardware, that's around 15 to 20 years in computers

Apple does offer iOs updates for 5 or 6 years from release date., not form the moment you buy them. The iPhone 6 was released in 2014. If you buy a 20 year old computer its still 20 years old, it can't magically be made to run the newest operating systems simply because you bought it yesterday.

Apple is still the company that supports devices the longest. I've run into Android devices that cannot be updated right out of the box. Most have maybe 2 years of updates if that.

With that said, 12.4.6 is still a current iOS version recently updated and functionl, and most if not all developers still support it for their Apps. So it still functional and your iPhone still works and can be used with it. You only want iOS 13 because everybody else has it, not because your iPhone is useless with 12.4.6

Why do you need iOS 13? What can't you do on 12.4.6 that you think you can do on iOS 13?

Red.dwarf4ever wrote:

Even the very oldest PCs and laptops are able to accept the latest Microsoft operating system Windows 10, they may not run at ultra speed, but will,work.

False.

You obviously haven't been around the world of technology very long.

Red.dwarf4ever wrote:

Apple must know which parts of the IOS update is not comparable with older devices, so these parts can be omitted.....if IOS was developed in a modular fashion this would be possible, but if it’s written any thing like iTunes which is a mess, I doubt it could happen

They do, which is why incompatible devices stay at iOS 12. If you are going to have to remove so much from a version that it ends up being closer to the previous version in features then the new one, all you'd be getting there is a version number rather than an actually new operating system.

So what difference does it make, if its called iOS 13 Lite with less features than iOS 13, or iOS 12.4.6 with a few more features than 12.4.5.

What you want is a number, not an actual set of features of the operating system then, which renders the need pointless. If you just want to call it 13 lite but have the same features as 12 then there's no point in making it a new version.

The iPhone 6 was released in September 2014, so now it is 5 1/2 years old. It does not have the hardware capability to run an iOS version past iOS 12. It has lasted a long time.

Yes, and the parts they leave out would make it iOS 12 with a different name. The primary incompatibility is RAM. iOS 13 requires at least 2 GB RAM, and the iPhone 6 has only 1 GB.

You might take a look at the new iPhone SE...

Sure. Stay well!