> There's a decades-long meme that Apple purposefully slows down older hardware to push people to buy completely new hardware.
I seem to recall the first several years—maybe even the first decade—of OS X being marked by each new release being faster on the same hardware, though dropping support for the oldest hardware. It was definitely true for the first few releases of OX X, because 10.0 was notoriously sluggish. I also don't recall any slowdowns with my 2006 iMac across the several upgrades it received before Apple made 64-bit firmware a hard requirement.
If there's any truth to the meme you cite, it probably stems from the mobile side of things, where iOS started out fairly efficient but the hardware was very underpowered. (And in that case, I'd like to point out that the iPhone is only 10.5 years old.)
At that point Apple sold the OS upgrades, though, and now they only make money on the hardware (well, and services etc., but not on OS sales). So it makes sense that things have changes as their incentives have realigned, in addition to the factors you cite.
Apple has never sold updates for iPhones. What you’re misremembering is them selling updates for iPod touches back at iOS 2 because of some perceived accounting issue, and the cost was pretty token, something like $5-10 IIRC correctly. Hardly a cash cow that would have had them making more optimisations then they do today
Entirely the mobile side of things due to upgrading iOS. I was forced to upgrade from iOS 10 to 11 on my iPhone 6 to be allowed to use two factor authentication for my work place. Instantly it become a sluggish mess.
I seem to recall the first several years—maybe even the first decade—of OS X being marked by each new release being faster on the same hardware, though dropping support for the oldest hardware. It was definitely true for the first few releases of OX X, because 10.0 was notoriously sluggish. I also don't recall any slowdowns with my 2006 iMac across the several upgrades it received before Apple made 64-bit firmware a hard requirement.
If there's any truth to the meme you cite, it probably stems from the mobile side of things, where iOS started out fairly efficient but the hardware was very underpowered. (And in that case, I'd like to point out that the iPhone is only 10.5 years old.)