The one thing I can think of that has effectively EOL-ed older iPhones is dropping support for ARM v6 codegen from recent versions of Xcode. It is not possible to build against the iOS 6 SDK (which is needed to access newer APIs) and support the 3G & below.
I'm no expert on compilers, but I find it hard to see how that isn't deliberate, or what other benefits it provides.
It was entirely deliberate. You can't write an app to support both iPhone 5 (with full height support) and iPhone 3G and put it on the AppStore, and use the normal compiler. Apple don't support the large image with < iOS 6 SDK, and they don't support armv6 with the iOS 6 SDK.
Dropping support is usually deliberate but not malicious. In this case, I suspect it was one less toolchain to maintain and run QA on for each release.
Comments
The one thing I can think of that has effectively EOL-ed older iPhones is dropping support for ARM v6 codegen from recent versions of Xcode. It is not possible to build against the iOS 6 SDK (which is needed to access newer APIs) and support the 3G & below.
I'm no expert on compilers, but I find it hard to see how that isn't deliberate, or what other benefits it provides.
It was entirely deliberate. You can't write an app to support both iPhone 5 (with full height support) and iPhone 3G and put it on the AppStore, and use the normal compiler. Apple don't support the large image with < iOS 6 SDK, and they don't support armv6 with the iOS 6 SDK.
Dropping support is usually deliberate but not malicious. In this case, I suspect it was one less toolchain to maintain and run QA on for each release.