As a point of comparison, Microsoft ships its OS across a variety of manufacturers and largely keeps it maintained across them (give or take some exceptions like enterprise environments & the like).

Even unlocked Android phones purchased independently of carriers have inconsistent lengths of support, so it doesn’t seem to be entirely a result of carriers, so…What happened here?

    • ribbooEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I mean an iPad mini 2 would obviously struggle with iOS today due to hardware limitations.

      And you’re very much free to use it, problem is app developers do not find it worthwhile their time supporting older devices (we are talking devices that’s a minimum of five years old, more likely 7-8) so few use them and it impacts what they can and cannot do. Thus it becomes unusable.

      But all Apple apps will obviously still work.

        • ribbooEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          My 10 year old Thinkpad barely qualifies as “running” windows 10, not Ubuntu for that matter. Haven’t bothered trying 11. I do partly agree with you, especially moving forward. But an iPad mini 2 has 1 gb of ram and 16 gb of space, both rather huge limitations for a mobile OS of today.

            • ribbooEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Did a computer bought to run windows 95 run XP? Did a computer bought for 98 run Vista? That’s a more fair comparison, as mobile operating systems are very young. And mobile devices from 10 years ago have hardware that could not really be compared to computers.

              Sure, processors at peak capacity where good. But forcing a 10 year old processor running todays software would drain the battery - that was also in no way comparable to today - to fast. And that is even if you could install the OS, as there is so little device space on many of them. Then you open one app and you’re out of ram potentially causing crashes all over the place, because mobile apps are rarely built for efficiency.

              It would be a horrid experience.

                • ribbooEnglish
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  XP was based on the NT kernel while 95 was using DOS. You’re just plain wrong. Spec wise it would not have worked.

                  And a computer built for 98 sure as hell did not reach the requirements to run Vista. Hell, many XP computers struggled and were not allowed to upgrade.

                  You’re just plain wrong.