There are absolutely cases where they have artificially gated features to new devices, even when the hardware is capable (I'm thinking around Handoff/Continuity, etc.). Where the initial reaction is "maybe it's a new BT chip or ..." but it can be shown that the functionality is perfect when some trickery is done to fool the OS its running on more modern hardware.
This is a consequence of Apple’s deeply ingrained (and hugely successful) product design culture.
When you’re trying to develop a vertically integrated feature across a synchronized release requiring potentially new silicon, a new device, new OS frameworks, new app code… you have to express your requirements precisely. Either the M1 is being designed to support three displays or it’s being designed to support two. Not “as much display support as we can squeeze in where performance is still OK end-to-end”. By the time you know if end-to-end looks good for all the features you built up depending on lower layers in the stack, it’s too late.
You’re also likely not to trust “hey, seems like our tolerances were excessive and it works great on older hardware”. And building up that trust is time-consuming and difficult, so they rarely go back to do it without a strong market justification. Stage Manager being the most recent—somewhat odd—example.
They originally claimed it was going to be supported only on the most recent SoC’s, then backtracked.
Which is weird because who really cared about stage manager? I guess they decided the media kerfuffle was making owners of unsupported recent hardware feel put down.
There was also that instance where Siri was gated from the iPhone 4. It was later shown that it was possible to install the Siri interface on the iPhone 4 through a Jailbreak - the only thing that prevented full functionality was a device serial number embedded in the request to the Siri server.
There are cases, but credit where its due, I think they are generally very generous in bringing new features to older devices, compared to plenty other companies that basically forget about they ever released another device the moment a new one drops.
E.g. the apple watches really “inherited” a good chunk of all the new features to the point that there are several versions that are basically identical. Like, I have the 6, and besides the on-screen keyboard (for which I guess the screen was too small based on their testings) and temperature-sensor reliant features, it does almost everything the new 10 will be able to do.
Eh, sometimes. Other times, a newer piece of internal hardware has no new “feature” but just works better and has fewer failures. This is particularly true with every kind of wireless networking, including Bluetooth. It may work, but not have hit the quality bar.
Almost anything can kinda work on older devices. But lots of little details make the difference between a good experience and a poor one. Which simd instructions did it support. What’s the battery impact on that BT chipset. Did the ANE support NN layer style X?
Apple has a great track record of brining new features to old hardware. I don’t see example here or elsewhere that I think were purely greed and not quality driven.
Unless I'm mistaken, stage manager requires running 5 apps simultaneously when iPads were previously limited to 1 or 2? That includes 5 render pipelines (way more pixels to push than exist on the physical display). There would be hardware load on pretty much every key piece of hardware (GPU, CPU, memory, caches, disk), and by a non trivial factor.
Same reason. Rendering more apps at full screen in real time takes a ton of GPU. Adds ~5x the pixels, and 5x screen scale transforms+effect. All the optimizations for “that’s hidden”/“that’s background” go out the door.
