As a point of comparison, Microsoft ships its OS across a variety of manufacturers and largely keeps it maintained across them (give or take some exceptions like enterprise environments & the like).
Even unlocked Android phones purchased independently of carriers have inconsistent lengths of support, so it doesn’t seem to be entirely a result of carriers, so…What happened here?
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I mean an iPad mini 2 would obviously struggle with iOS today due to hardware limitations.
And you’re very much free to use it, problem is app developers do not find it worthwhile their time supporting older devices (we are talking devices that’s a minimum of five years old, more likely 7-8) so few use them and it impacts what they can and cannot do. Thus it becomes unusable.
But all Apple apps will obviously still work.
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My 10 year old Thinkpad barely qualifies as “running” windows 10, not Ubuntu for that matter. Haven’t bothered trying 11. I do partly agree with you, especially moving forward. But an iPad mini 2 has 1 gb of ram and 16 gb of space, both rather huge limitations for a mobile OS of today.