> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.

I dusted off my old iPad from 2010 - a device that was four years newer a couple of years ago. It couldn’t handle many web pages.

I also dusted off my old 1st gen iPod Touch a couple of years ago it had the same hardware - except for the cellular modem - as the first gen iPhone. Do you remember that with the first gen iPhone, it didn’t have enough memory and processing power to hold an entire page in memory? If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard pattern while the rendering caught up. The iPhone couldn’t even handle what was the modern web then.

It definitely couldn’t handle inline video. It didn’t even have enough memory to allow you to have a background image on the Home Screen.

> And an original iPhone could do texting and stream music and doff around on HN.

Texting and SMS always goes over the carriers network. The carriers don’t support their 2G network anymore.

> Nothing else you need to make phone calls.

You remember that whole problem that the 2G original iPhone works on a network that is not supported anymore?

> Why not? Their OS is portable.

The “modern” version of iOS is not “portable” to a phone that only has a 400Mhz processor and 128GB of RAM. iOS 5 could barely run on the first generation iPad that was 4 years newer. The original iPhone struggled with iOS 3.

> 10 million is not a small number of devices. The effort is negligible for a company that size. They would get more PR value by claiming the longer support lifetime than it would cost them to release the updates.

> Modern web browsers have more efficient javascript engines

They are “more efficient” because they have multistage just in time compilers that cache the pre compiled code. Caching takes memory - modern iPhones have 3GB - 6GB RAM. The original iPhone had 128MB of RAM.

A modern iPhone also has multiple cores. Some of those cores can be used to do JIT on the JavaScript code while other cores are used to make sure that the UI is responsive. The original iPhone had one slow 400Mhz slow core compared to the 4-6 multi GHz cores.

> and do things like unloading background tabs to deal with people opening hundreds of tabs of porky websites that could otherwise take down even desktop computers.

Desktop operating systems have swap where they can swap memory to disk and they also have a larger 64 bit memory space. The original iPhone didn’t have swap and it only has a 32 bit processing space.

Even today, Safari will unload pages when it runs out of memory and refresh it losing context. But do you remember that whole issue that the original iPhone couldn’t keep the graphic context of one entire page in memory?

> But the same improvements allow you to e.g. open multiple Wikipedia tabs on an older device.

That’s not true on mobile even today.

> Why not? Their OS is portable. 10 million is not a small number of devices.

Back when the iPhone was introduced, Jobs said he wanted to capture 1% of the cellular market by selling 10 million devices. The iPhone only made up 1% of the cell phone market as it existed in 2007. How many users do you think were still using an original iPhone in 2010 let alone 2023?

> That doesn't make the Core 2 Duo useless.

The Core2Duo is not useless precisely because it can do what a modern computer user wants to do - run the latest OS, run the latest browser, use a decent wireless network standard (802.11n), mine had gigabit Ethernet which is still the highest speed commercially available to most consumers, run the latest version of Office365. It has a front facing camera and a nice screen. Low end computers today still come with 8GB of RAM. The average low end computer today still comes with less than 500GB of hard drive space.

The original iPhone can’t function as a phone. It has 40-60x less memory than a modern iPhone, 8-16x less storage, an outdated wifi technology (802.11g)