Low End Mac’s Chris Carson notes that this fall Apple will release iOS 6, which is going to add a host of awesome new features that will give (almost) all of our devices new life. Unfortunately his 18-month-old first generation iPad won’t see its second birthday before it is officially considered obsolete – with new and updated apps starting to not work on it.
This upsets Carson, because inevitably a few months after iOS 6 launches, many developers will stop supporting iOS 5, although he concedes that to be fair, Apple is doing a better job of supporting its devices than anyone in the Android world. However, he recalls that it used to be that if you bought a new computer, you could easily count on updates for seven years – and sometimes more.
The tradeoff, he observes, is that dollar for dollar Apple gives you way more support for your money now than they did back in the day, with an average iPad selling for about $699, or $280/year for 2.5 years of updates, while his old Blackbird PowerBook would have cost an average of $5,000 (with necessary upgrades to run 9.1) or $714/year for the seven years of updates they received.
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