[jeffd]

The Reminders and Events panels both use EventKit which only added reminders support in iOS 6. Also the high adoption rate of iOS 6 makes it not worth while to support older versions.

I've spent many hours on other applications, mostly Mac, where the time spent making something backwards compatible was never really worth it. Example: I worked on getting fancy animations in an app that had to support Panther, which didn't even have NSAnimation support. However at this time Leopard had just came out and had all the new Core Animation hotness. Needless to say I would have saved countless hours if I didn't try back porting new features to older OSes no longer supported by Apple.

[oneeyedpigeon]

Thanks for the answer - I fully appreciate what you say. I'm just a bitter iPad1 owner whose £400 toy became obsolete barely a year after purchase. It's a shame there isn't a native equivalent of progressive enhancement.

[jeffd]

I feel your pain, I too have an iPad 1 that I'd like to use more things on, like dashboards. :-P

I guess this is just what we get when we buy Apple products. They are damn good at making last year's awesome product look obsolete the next year.

[interpol_p]

To be fair the iPad shipped with iOS 3.2 and has seen upgrades through 4.x and 5.x. My iPad 1 from 2010 saw a good few years of use, rather than just barely a year.