Re:Apple To Release Mountain Lion On July 25
by taligent on Tuesday July 24, 2012 @06:58PM
(#4288495)
1) There IS a technical reason. The iPad 1 has a larger screen and as such requires more RAM than the iPod 4G. Also as for the iPod 3G "almost" identical makes a difference.
2) Apple releases a lot less products than the Android OEMs. So not sure compared to whom Apple is wasteful.
3) Personally I fail to see how autolayout is a particular attractive feature. And I haven't found it that hard to mix match SDKs/targets on iOS.
Re:Apple To Release Mountain Lion On July 25
by pmjordan on Saturday July 28, 2012 @05:29PM
(#4306572)
Re 1: The iPad has 786432 pixels vs the iPod 4G's 614400. Not that big a difference, particularly as that mainly affects the framebuffer. If each pixel in the back, front and Z buffers uses 32 bits, that's a whopping 2MB RAM difference, or less than 1% of the total. So, no technical reason, end of story.
Re 2: The android makers don't seem to brag about being environmentally friendly. Apple can be held to higher standards as they're making that a supposed selling point.
Re 3: I guess it depends on the apps you're making. For autorotation and dynamically-sized content in particular it's extremely useful and saves quite a bit of manual work.
For a company that keeps boasting about its green credentials, they do generate an awful lot of waste.
(not to mention the extra work for app developers, who can either drop 15 million users's worth of adressible market, or make use of iOS6 features - the most attractive of which, such as autolayout, have no sensible fallback)