This article is one of the reasons I'm not a big fan of Apple products... their planned obsolescence for the product line is staggering! I dislike that if Apple keeps with it's current trend, there is a very real possibility that my iPad 2 will not be eligible for an upgrade to IOS7. This is the primary weakness in portable devices... it's made more acute by Apple. Before you flame on me.. I like my Apple products and I've been using them for a very, very long time (1977) and I still use my 1g iPod Touch.... but that said, there are some very seriously frustrating things about owning Apple products and this is one. From Apple's perspective... this is a very lucrative marketing model, but for John Q. Public... namely Me... I'm not a fan and I'm seriously rethinking my technology dollar. I'm an expert in the industry... it's what I do for a living. I've seen many Titans fall... they all misstep at some point. Keeping a loyal customer base is tricky but significantly hinges on the satisfaction that is perceived by the customer base. Something to think about Apple... I know I'm not alone in this sentiment... time will definitely tell... they've already lost some sales from me... if they keep it up... well...
It has to get iOS 7 because they are still selling the iPad 2 and should be selling it even when iOS 7 does come out.
As far as the article goes, it would certainly explain why they didn't replace the 16GB iPad 2 model with the third gen iPad. But, I guess we'll see next year what iOS 7 brings to the table. Plus, iPad mini, iPod touch 5g and iPhone 4S will all get iOS 7 with their A5 processors; so, it makes sense that iPad 2 will be supported too on iOS 7.
I have the iPad 1-3, iphone 4, ipod touch 4. My thought on this event is that this cycle of upgrade is a mess for consumers. Low end products abandoning the the $200 sweet price point, over flooding of products in a short period of time, people are confused on what to buy. One thing people don't notice is that one of way they plan product obsolescence is to give the device lowest possible ram for the current iOS version. Then when iOS upgrades comes around and gets bloated, new software start to starve for memory which can cause crashes. Like the current appstore running iOS 6, ipod touch 4 with only 256mb RAM crashes all the time. (I wish I can downgrade my ipod touch 4, but i didn't have the SHSH stored for downgrade) People generally pay attention to faster cpu, faster gfx, but those specs don't matter that much for most applications, if you have slow cpu, slow gfx, you just run the app slowly, if you don't have enough memory you cannot even run the app. This is one of the reason that apple don't specify the RAM in their product, and you have to find out from a third party source. A ipad 1 with 1GB ram would run pretty much anything. iPad 2 and iphone 4 have 512mb ram which is the next thing to be phase out. If the ipad mini that is based on the ipad 2 has the same 512 ram as the iPad 2, it would mean this product will have a short product life. For people who care about buying a product that last, this would be a really bad deal, especially the lowest price point is over $300 with the fire HD and nexus 7 at only $200 starting price..
That's a fantastic point, but frankly - I'd rather have planned obsolescence of products than unplanned obsolescence. In the Android world, it's not uncommon that a device with decent specs, completely capable of running a new version of the OS, is simply cut due to the OEM allocating resources to a different department. Apple has the foresight to plan, it seems, the life of an iDevice. Currently, even the iPhone 3GS runs iOS 6. That device was announced and released in 2009. Four years for a phone is crazy - that's a ridiculous life cycle, and it universally bests the competition.
What could ios 7 and 8 do in the future to need the hardware the A5 provides? They don't really do a whole lot of hardware straining changes but if they keep the RAM huge for cydia tweaks, im content
