Apple’s Planned Obsolescence Schedule

Adam C. Engst:

It’s not so much that iCloud is itself uninterested in the past, since Lion works on all Macs sold in the last 4 years or so. The problem is iOS, and the way Apple is keeping obsolete products for sale at lower price points. The iPhone 3G can’t run iOS 5 and thus can’t participate in iCloud, but you could have bought an iPhone 3G as recently as 15 months ago. Thus, you may be able to connect a 4-year-old Mac to iCloud, but not an iPhone that’s less than 2 years old. Since the entire point of iCloud is to route data among your many devices, this discrepancy is troubling lots of people.