[johnward]

Just for the record the iPad2 still updates. Though the hardware can barely handle iOS8. It's almost unusable. It seems crazy to think there would not be an end of support for something that old. Maybe Apple doesn't allow updates because they don't want the original iPad to become completely unusable?

[wang_li]

The old devices become effectively unusable as new bugs are discovered and patches are not created, tested and distributed.

It should be possible to fix bugs without having to add in new features. E.g. I shouldn't need to upgrade to floating icons with a parallax background to get a fix for PDF parsing problems.