The excellent iOS support matrix makes the decision more obvious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/89549358@N02/8454676411/sizes/l... As you can see, the geekbench score for the iPad is indeed higher than the 3GS but the 256MB system memory coupled with the display size likely meant performance wasn't acceptable. Since there's no paging on iOS, Apps are killed when they consume too much memory. Since the iPad already has less system memory available (because more is being used for graphics) it would lead to instability in existing Apps, and be harder to support.
Yeah, it was memory. Apple undershot the onboard DRAM pretty badly on that device. Really it was a design mistake, not a deliberate support termination.
Comments
The excellent iOS support matrix makes the decision more obvious: http://www.flickr.com/photos/89549358@N02/8454676411/sizes/l... As you can see, the geekbench score for the iPad is indeed higher than the 3GS but the 256MB system memory coupled with the display size likely meant performance wasn't acceptable. Since there's no paging on iOS, Apps are killed when they consume too much memory. Since the iPad already has less system memory available (because more is being used for graphics) it would lead to instability in existing Apps, and be harder to support.
Yeah, it was memory. Apple undershot the onboard DRAM pretty badly on that device. Really it was a design mistake, not a deliberate support termination.