“I fully expect the oldest iPhone and iPad devices to face the chop come iOS 12, which means compatibility being dropped for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and iPad mini 2,” Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes for ZDNet. “All three devices were released in 2013 and all three devices are pretty long in the tooth now.”
“I expect the 6th generation iPod touch to survive this time around,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “While pretty old — first released 2015 — Apple is still selling this device, so I expect it to have a few years of life in it yet.”
“I expect all 4th generation Apple TV devices and later — which run tvOS 11 — will be all be upgradeable to tvOS 12,” Kingsley-Hughes writes. “On the watchOS front, given how much of a performance hit watchOS 4 had on the 1st generation Apple Watch, I think that support for it will be dropped this year.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: A lot of first gen. Apple Watch users will be looking to upgrade – and, even if just to Series 3, much less the forthcoming Series 4, they’ll find it’s a huge upgrade!
The A7 devices may face non support this year, but I don’t know. I think there may be one more year for them, and A8 devices have two more. The A7’s performance is good enough to run iOS 11 & 12, the only reason to get rid of them is that the iPad Air/Mini 2 don’t support Touch ID, and the SE is cheaper and more powerful than the 5s. Usually it’s 4 versions, so iOS 8 was A7, meaning iOS 12 should be their last version.
Well, things don’t last forever, as much as I want them to. Still trying to use my 1st Retina iPad…16GB, whew, I thought 16 would be enough… It’s had heavy usage daily since 2014 Christmas.
Watch Series 0 is the worst Apple experience I’ve ever had. Really terrible. The first device since return of Jobs. I don’t know why, but I persist with it.
If they drop support for the iPad mini 2, they should also drop support for iPad mini 3, which was identical save for Touch ID.
However, if iOS 12 winds up a Maintenance or “Snow Leopard”, it should run on everything iOS 11 does.
Original Watch with watchOS 3. Waited until watchOS 4.2.3 and saw many reports of speed boost for older watches.
Just upgraded to that OS a couple of weeks ago and see no difference in speed from version 3. Very happy.
I am having the exact same experience. When I was on watchOS 4.2.2 my battery was not lasting the day and my Original Watch was sloooooooow. Now it zips right along and my battery is usually at about 40% at the end of the day.
Adrian is the master of the OBVIOUS.
Thanks for telling us what any foo can guess just by using the thinking part of their brain.