[gambiting]

I'm not an Apple user, so I couldn't possibly care any less, but like....come on. Maintaining old hardware platforms costs time and money.

"There is no non-evil reason"

The reason is that someone needs to sit down, open up Xcode, and compile it for the old hardware, fix all the compilation issues that crop up, and then that OS needs to be tested on every variation of that hardware that was ever released anywhere in the world.

If you don't want to do that because the userbase is dwindling and you aren't running a charity and/or open source project.....how is that evil??? Cheap, maybe even greedy - but evil??

[Someone]

Also, that hardware may be able to walk the new code, but not run it.

So, you’ll have to choose between cutting some features and releasing underperforming software (likely severely underperforming, for older devices)

Hacking on the code for months or even years may alleviate that somewhat (look at what the hacker scene can get out of computers from the 1980’s), but that isn’t a certainty and if you do that, you either have to release later, or release later for so devices.

Either way, your users won’t be happy. They’ll get less, get it later, and/or it won’t perform.