Saturday, June 16, 2012

Apple has announced that Siri is going to be available on the new iPad but that it will still not be available on  phones that preceded the iPhone 4s.  This seems puzzling since the computational load for Siri is handled by Apple's massive data center(s). 

Similarly, the new Apple maps app for iOS 6 seems like it will be limited to iPhone 4s and later phones.  

Programmers on jailbroken iPhone 4's have long since been able to get Siri running and were able to do so with the mapping app only a few days after release.  Withholding Siri from the iPhone 4 has probably encouraged thousands of users around the world to jailbreak their phones.  

Certainly if third party programmers could do it, Apple could do it too but why won't they?  
The easy answer is that they want to encourage people to upgrade their phones.  Of course this seems plausible but they are "fragmenting" their own OS (albeit to a much slighter extent than Android's tremendous fragmentation problem.)  

Perhaps there is not a possibility - I've got a theory that I have not heard mentioned anywhere else.   There could be a contractual relationship with Google that prevents Apple from cutting out or replacing Google services on iOS devices released before the iPhone 4s.  

Just a theory, what do you think?  

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