ios 6 not compatible for ipad 1?, ios 6 not compatible for ipad 1?

Solutions ? How about this:

Have a standard upgrade policy -

3GS is still supported after 3+ years ?

Then ipad1 should also have 3+ years.

Be upfront about the planned discontinuation cycle, so people can better evaluate whether a product is worth the asking price.

Why the vehemence ? Apart from emotion - my ipad just lost a good bit of resale value. How is that for a good reason ?

Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

I can really get behind that Volker.

You got my vote.

I bought my first Sonos equipment back in 2005 and that company is still upgrading it after six years. I can run Windows 7 on a machine that was designed for Windows XP, although it runs like a work horse rather than a race horse. My view is that upgrades should be available for free for a period (say for minor upgrades such as 5.0 to 5.9, and then paid for, for major upgrades. This is what happens with Windows and Mac OS (although the latter charges a nominal fee for 10.6 to 10.7 and 10.8 etc). This way, users can chose what they want the use, and how much speed and functionality they are prepared to accept and pay for. However, what I cannot abide is forced and somewhat unnecessary planned redundancy...if nothing else, it is not good for the Planet to be using resources in such a wasteful way: the order is reduce, reuse, then recycle. Keeping a machine working while it still has useful life is contributing to reducing resource usage, but I do admit to the detriment of Corporate profits.

Are you for real? Do you know ANY manufacturer of ANY product which announces in advance when a product they make will become obsolete and unsupported? Have you ever worked in the business world?

Your best clue about obsolesence is when Apple quits selling a product. The iPad 1 has not been sold by Apple for some time.

But announce a planned obsolecense program? How old are you - 12?

Hey, I work in an office that is sticking to Windows XP. You want perpetual backwards compatibility? Windows has a better track record there. However, that gives virus writers a long time to focus on the old, compromised systems. Their backward compatibility has made Windows a rat's nest.

But it's not really that backwards compatible. If you have a system older than four or five years, you're pretty much stuck with the old software.

Or go to Android, where a tiny percentage of the phones get any updates at all.

If you want something that will work for 20 years or more without an upgrade, buy a house.

While I will neither respond to your questioning my age nor my professional credentials because i consider it poor debating style i will say this:

Many companies guarantee certain support times for their product, or assign expiry dates.

What would stop Apple from saying : Your ixxx is guaranteed to be up to date for x months ?

Call it stupid or customer centric, I leave that up to you......

Meg St._Clair wrote:

What is your basis for believing that "Apple surely would have told us" if there was a technical reason? Apple is a legendarily secretive company.

Companies do decisions – what to do or avoid, what to inform or not – based on what's good for their revenues and profit. Tim Cook apologized problems in Maps app (http://www.apple.com/letter-from-tim-cook-on-maps/), because telling it was thought to be good for business. It's stupid management to irritate loyal customers if you have a good reason but just don't care to tell them.

I have a statement which may change your views...

You all have some... Interesting arguments but it all comes down to this...

I put this to both all of you and Mr Timothy Cook sitting in his posh suede/leather/SOLID GOLD throne with his pocket full of moolah and my question for him is... WOULD STEVEN PAUL JOBS, FOUNDER AND CREATOR OF APPLE AND IPAD EFFECTIVELY KICK ALL OF HIS CLIENTS OUT THE BACK DOOR INTO THE COLD AND RAIN, by Jove no he would not, because unlike others, Steve saw it from the clients point of view, because, as a child, he wasn't the richest of rich and knew that neither are most people. However, this is the best point in my argument, Steve said that 'Eventually iPads processor and chip and all of that mumbo jumbo WILL go out of date and also promised iPad customers, basically, his most loyal customers, with him from the get go a basic version that iPad one will be capable of handling smoothly but as soon as he was out of the picture, what happens.. ALL OF HIS PLANS GET TOSSED OUT OF THE WINDOW!!

Apple needs to think loooooooooong and HARD about it's customer care skills

Dear Very Annoyed,

This is a functional iPad1 that we are talking about. I'm not sure of the clock speeds of the iPad 1 and 2, or what exactly the hindrance is -- I believe that the presence of absence of any number of elements in the hardware might affect this. I presume it's a combination of things that make the iPad 1 very sluggish, and not likely to perform well, or not at all able if one improvement was made to iOS6 -- and Apple has ALWAYS chosen to make the improvment, even if it impacts the users of older machines. Buying the first of anything always carries a risk. This worked so well for a first-of-its-kind that people bought in in large numbers. There weren't any big imperfections in the 1 -- oh, but it didn't have a camera, it wasn't really HD, and any number of "crippling" traits that you could hear tech reporters bleating on about. Apple's first models are usually short of features, since most of the extra work done to get the iPad out the door was in the user experience -- do the windows just fly open? do buttons respond immediately? And so on.

You address the problem with complete emotion, but almost no content. But you're not talking about Steve: you was always leaving things out, and dropping products if they didn't work out. Even a great app like the earlier iMovie are redesigned sometimes, and they're incompatible with older versions. You should listen to the Final Cut Pro X storm. Those professionals just go nuts.

But here's the problem. Technology itself is moving so fast, and the competition is very tough too, that after two models different enough to make it "new", the two- or three-models-ago iPad is simply not going to be able to do everything that the iPad 3 or the iPhone 5 can do. It can't. Plus, now the iPad 1 doesn't have the Lightning connector. So, the company can do its best to give updates for software for as long as possible. Eventually, though, progress pulls you forward faster than some of the user base would want it. To keep up with the competition, Apple is moving its chip manufacturing forward very fast. The A6 on the iPhone 5 is the fastest in the world, even though phones like Samsung makes has a four-core chip bought off the shelf.

So, Apple has a choice: when someone bought the iPad 1, Apple had no idea what the 3 and 4 would be like. They couldn't. You got, what did you start with? iOS 3? Then you got 4 and 5. It is now a fully-functional pad that can still do all the stuff you could before, and you can still run a lot of new apps. But to artificially tie the progress of the platform to the person least liable to update says he's ready, that's a one-way ticket to stagnation.

You could go to an Apple Store and talk to a genius, and I'm sure they'd talk about the issue with you. Phone up Apple Care if you have it. When you buy an electronic digital device, don't you want state of the art for a cheap price? Well, that means in a few years, if the company doesn't do something to make your iPad a little obsolete, then I'd be more worried about the iPad five years down the line, that slavishly continued all the functionality of iPad 1.

James, all your argumentation looks very reasonable, but there's one thing you're missing: iPhone 3GS gets the update! If they managed to squeeze it into 3GS, then they could have done it for iPad! There's no significant hardware difference between the two, the only difference is that they were selling 3GS until very recently.

You can't have different standards for different people: you either care for user experience (in this case, you should say the hardware in iPad, and therefore in 3GS is too old to handle the new iOS, and don't release an update), or you find a way to run at least a limited version of the new iOS on older devices -- in that case all devices of the same generation get update. Apple chosen the 3rd way, which compromised it's values: ok, user experience of the iOS 6 on older devices is sluggish, but we can't dump people who just bought 3GS, because we were still selling this crap few months ago, they will be angry on us, the media will pick it up, it will be "no-iOS6-update-for-3GS-gate", "Apple support for its devices is shorter than that of some on Android" -- it's less trouble just to give them an update. What about iPad 1 users? Ah, who cares, they'll chew it, too much trouble making it work on yet another device. We have new Maps so bad anyway so they will be thankful they've got no update))

So, why I'm complaining, it's double standard from Apple -- for iPad 1 not having update, the only good explanations are that 1) the device is outdated; 2) iOS 6 on that device would make the user experience worse. I don't see why these arguments don't apply to 3GS which has almost the same hardware and is few months older then iPad 1. If they can make it for 3GS, then why it's not possible to do it for iPad 1? Why 3GS customers are more valuable for Apple than those of iPad 1? Just because the former folks would complain louder if not updated? Why did Apple continued selling such an outdated hardware as 3GS? It's greed, they just wanted to take more market share with new 3GS users. And now they're paying for this, by practicing double standard. But if you as a company declare customer satisfaction a priority, you can't say to good millions of your customers that technically you could have provided support for them, but you think that it doesn't worth the trouble, because you kindly suggest that your customers better pay you for a new device please (those who got 3GS for free with a contract are not likely to buy iPhone 5 anyway, but are likely to protest very loud, so they better get an update to be able at least buying new apps).

As a developer, the 3GS is actually a better performing device than the iPad. The iPad has too much hardware to power with too little power to spare. I wrote on this issue just this week on this exact thread. Here were my exact words:

"

The iPad has an A4 chip, coupled with the same graphics card that is shared with both the 3GS and iPhone 4. The A4 chip is basically a Cortex-A8, repackaged differently. So it isn't much of a performance improvement. Also, the iPad has an even higher resolution than the iPhone 4, so that graphics card is under much higher stress than what is going inside the 3GS. The 3GS has the best of both worlds, powering a low-graphics screen, with a highly-capable graphics card. Because the 3GS and the iPhone 4 share the same graphics card, the 3GS is actually faster than the 4 in graphic intensive games.

But the main killer is RAM, if the chipset argument isn't good enough. The iPad has a mere 256 mb of ram while the iPhone 4 has 512. The 3GS also has 256, but it's display has 4 times less pixels, so applications use less ram. The 3GS thus has adequate RAM to sustain itself (although it is still seemingly tight at times), but the iPad simply doesn't have enough RAM. Infact, at launch, some reviewers noticed the iPad's inability to be able to keep Safari webpages saved in memory, simply because it didn't have enough RAM.

So while it might seem that the iPad's internals are powerful, for a tablet, the chipset and RAM is weak, and is suitable only for a low-end smartphone like the 3GS. The argument that the iPad can't sustain iOS 6 due to hardware seems legit to me, especially as a developer. While I may not be the best developer in the world, I try to do a good job in optimizing my apps, and even then, on my tester iPad running iOS 5, it always seems to be the first device (alongside the iPod touch 4th gen, another device with a high resolution, and only 256 mb of ram) that gets a low memory warning."

tpulak, thanks for that repeated explanation. I read your post a few days ago, but the additions to this most recent made it much clearer (or perhaps it was my second reading of it). I see the point now, and can understand that the hardware is quite limited. That said, surely this could be a decision made by users. As I previously stated, I can run Windows 7 on a machine designed for Windows XP, and accept the performance hit...why not for my iPad 1?

tpulak, this is the second time you're quoting yourself, but your reasoning can be easily argued. Please consider my reply here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4021938?answerId=20043363022#20043363022

Even more, here's the benchmark performance data to back up my statement that original iPad is faster than 3GS (you can easily google more reports like that):

http://furbo.org/2010/04/03/benchmarking-in-your-lap/

http://www.intomobile.com/2010/04/05/apple-ipad-benchmark-shows-massive-boost-in -performance-over-the-iphone-3gs/

So there's no technical reason for not providing an upgrade.

There is no noticeable stress in the iPad running iOS 6 in terms of graphics demanded by the OS. I quoted the iPad's graphical weakness in due part that now large amounts of developers (mainly starting with game developers, and complex work application developers) are now reluctant to support the iPad due to it's sluggish nature to run these apps.

As I said, the main killer was RAM. Since iOS 4, iOS has demanded much more RAM for use in it's operating system. The iPad originally shipped with OS 3, which was not a very RAM demanding OS, due to it's lack of multitasking. iOS 4 nearly doubled the RAM usage of all iOS devices across the board. Even since iOS 4, there have been reports from owners from the iPad not being able to multitask as well as the 3GS or the 4 due in part of it's lack of free RAM.

I hope you are joking about the 28% argument. The iPad has more than quadruple the pixels of the 3GS. It has a higher resolution than the iPhone 4, which itself has quadruple the pixels of the 3GS (again, all three devices use the same basic graphics processor, just clocked at different speeds). Just for the record, iPad has a 1024x768, while the 3GS has a mere 480x320. Multiply the numbers and divide, and you'll see that it's quite much more.

The iPad is actually a lower end product that the iPhone. An unlocked iPhone costs more than the iPad does of similar configuration. So to expect even equal support as an iPhone shouldn't be expected, but Apple does anyways. Didn't the iPhone 3G get OS 3 and 4, and stop there? You iPad user's have got OS3, iOS 4, and 5. You show that the Galaxy S3 is 19 months old...well the iPad 1 is just over 2 years old, and is not Apple's flagship product, unlike the Galaxy S3. If you want to see support for more OS upgrades and tweaks, then just jailbreak your product (your warranty is over anyways). All those mods you talk of the Galaxy devices are all done through rooting/modding your phone(I myself own a Galaxy S3, with a custom OS).

Compare this iPad to other tablets of THAT time, and you will see why suddenly Apple looks much more accomodating that others.