[dpearson]

Apple is already killing off device support, sometimes (seemingly) for marketing reasons. With iOS 6, Apple dropped support for the first-generation iPad, but continued to support the iPhone 3GS (which I cannot imagine being much faster [edit: see Xuzz's reply to this comment]). The obvious reason, from my layman's perspective, is sales: the iPhone 3GS was on the market more recently, so the (newer) iPad got the ax.

Apple also tied app support for the iPhone 5, and future iPhones, to ending support for the iPhone 3G and its ilk; I understand that long build times are far from desirable, but this move seems like a great way to encourage upgrades.

Then again, maybe I'm just a cynic.

Edit: I've not used an iPhone 3GS on a day-to-day basis, but I've seen better performance out of my first gen iPad (and maybe it's just me) just before it was EOL'd than I ever saw with the iPhone 3G/iPod touch 2G family, both of which were truly awful performance-wise before Apple pulled the plug. I'm guessing the real reason for keeping support for the iPhone 3GS but not the iPad 1G was, as coob mentioned, the fact that it was on sale when iOS 6 was released.

[Xuzz]

The iPhone 3GS is much faster than the original iPad. On the iPhone 3GS, you have a reasonably slow CPU and GPU, but you also only have 320x480 pixels to deal with. On the iPad, you have a slightly faster CPU and GPU (but still single core), but have to render to 1024x760 — way more pixels. You also don't have any extra RAM on the iPad, but your images and framebuffer still have to cover that extra area.

The net result is that the iPhone 3GS is much faster in practice than the original iPad (or the iPod touch 4G, which has similar issues to a lesser extent — but which they still sell, so can't drop support for). Another similarly underpowered device is the iPad 3, so I'd expect them to drop support for that even before the older iPad 2.

[barredo]

Original iPad is even faster than iPhone 4

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/1635302/16...

So it's faster than a 3GS http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench2/compare/1634913/16...

[Xuzz]

Yes, and you will note I said "slightly faster CPU and GPU". The point is that the whole device is much more resource constrained, as what needs to be done with the CPU and GPU on the original iPad is more than on the iPhone 3GS, but the CPU and GPU are not faster enough to create the same effective performance.

Yes, raw performance may be better on the original iPad. But raw performance is irrelevant if you can't get the same effective performance for the user.

[barredo]

I see

[StringyBob]

I find safari on an original iPad almost unusable; after upgrading from iOS4 to 5, it crashed regularly - I presume due to not having enough free memory. Support stopped at 5.1, just under 2 years after its international release, and only 1 year after it was replaced by ipad2.

Seems like they already have a handle on deprecation.

[coob]

The 3GS supported iOS6 because Apple were still selling it at the time. They were not selling the original iPad.

[shurcooL]

In other words, they had to support iOS 6 on 3GS, but for iPad 1 it was optional. Hence they didn't support iPad 1.

It's mostly strange because iOS 6 didn't really add any performance-critical changes, it was mostly changes to iCloud. Unlike iOS 4 that added multitasking, for example. Well, the new Maps.app is likely more demanding than old one, so perhaps they kept back the entire iOS 6 because of that.

[reaperhulk]

It's not particularly random. Apple supported the iPad 1, iPhone, and iPhone 3G with 2 major software updates + all minors within those major releases. That pattern is now breaking because Apple has continued to sell the iPad 2 and iPhone 3GS for much longer than those other products were available. A more interesting argument might be: given the technical constraints of the 3GS and the fact that it continued to be sold until September 2012, will Apple support it in iOS 7? It seems unlikely, but maybe we'll all be pleasantly surprised. Certainly their choice to go downmarket by selling the 2 previous models has forced them to support those devices for longer timeframes than they may have originally envisioned.

[hyko]

The excellent iOS support matrix makes the decision more obvious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/89549358@N02/8454676411/sizes/l... As you can see, the geekbench score for the iPad is indeed higher than the 3GS but the 256MB system memory coupled with the display size likely meant performance wasn't acceptable. Since there's no paging on iOS, Apps are killed when they consume too much memory. Since the iPad already has less system memory available (because more is being used for graphics) it would lead to instability in existing Apps, and be harder to support.

[ajross]

Yeah, it was memory. Apple undershot the onboard DRAM pretty badly on that device. Really it was a design mistake, not a deliberate support termination.

[myko]

I assumed dropping the iPad had more to do with pushing all those extra pixels and low memory problems.