Yes and I also paid good money for my Apple // software, my 68K Mac software and my PPC Mac software. How far back should Apple go supporting older platforms?

> my PPC Mac software

Rosetta was bundled with OSX for 4 years. That's for PPC mac software running on hardware which literally could not run it natively.

> my 68K Mac software

The Mac 68k emulator was only deprecated with the Intel transition, 68K mac software remained supported for about a decade.

> How far back should Apple go supporting older platforms?

Supporting software which runs natively on the hardware doesn't seem exactly reaching.

32 bit apps don't run natively on the new ARM chips. Heck many old apps don't run at all on iOS 10.

Apple was able to reduce the size of iOS by not having 32 bit support libraries in memory. Since iOS doesn't have paging, that saved memory benefits 64 bit apps.

> 32 bit apps don't run natively on the new ARM chips.

Which is not my issue, have you considered reading my comments? Here, let me make it easy for you:

> the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2013~2016 iPhone which had been able to run them right until you updated iOS.

> Apple was able to reduce the size of iOS by not having 32 bit support libraries in memory.

Is that why capacity available went down 730MB on a 7?

> Since iOS doesn't have paging, that saved memory benefits 64 bit apps.

You could already save that memory by not using 32b software. Don't use the software, the libraries don't get loaded. Furthermore given iOS will kill background applications to reclaim memory, the "saved memory" is just about non-existant.

All of the 64 bit programs can share the same 64 bit libraries. Once you load one 32 bit app it going to take up memory causing the 64 bit programs to killed.

There is always a performance hit going from 32 bit to 64 bit processes. There is a hit to performance when running both 64 bit and 32 bit processes on Windows. Why take the hit to support some old 32 bit apps that probably haven't been updated to take advantage of even the 4" inch phones let alone the larger phones? Why take on the support and security concerns for a few old apps - many of which already don't work on iOS 10?

I think a slight "performance hit" to run essential 32bit apps is better than the "performance hit" of the apps not launching and the data inside them rendered inaccessible.

I guess knowing my RAM is unused helps me feel better while I'm wondering which files I've lost to the forever locked away 32bit app containers.

Essential apps that the developer has decided not to update in two years. Not even a simple ‘recompile and submit’ that many apps would require.

The developers of the apps clearly don’t think of them as essential.

I first bought Infinity Blade in 2010. I had forgotten about it for years and then redownloaded it recently just to find out that it was never updated to be 64 bit and that it hadn't been updated in 5 years - February 2012.

I was going to play it for a little while before I updated to iOS 11. To my surprise, Epic decided to update it for the first time in 5 years and port it to 64 bit code. It couldn't be because it was still making much money, but I did appreciate it.

EDIT:

It was also updated to support the iPad Pro.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/infinity-blade/id387428400?m...

> The developers of the apps clearly don’t think of them as essential.

Or, like the vast, vast majority of games, the developer was contracted for the initial development and the publisher who owns the right to the IP and specific software has no financial incentives to pay for additional work to update it and thus won't, regardless of the developer's wishes or whims let alone the users's

Users paid most of that money to the apps developers, yet the developers won’t even recompile the apps to keep them on the store. Why should Apple punish all the other iOS users by sucking up memory to support abandoned apps they don’t use?