Apple’s CEO confirms that no more updates are headed to original iPhones

Apr 13, 2010 09:43 GMT  ·  By

A forum post saying that iPhone 4.0 multitasking can actually be enabled on older generation hardware, including the iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G, caught our eye today. With such a simple modification required in the lines of code making up iPhone OS 4.0, jailbreak experts are sure to include this little “mod” in their tools.

Writing on the ModMyi forums, pauldanielash (MMi Staff Writer) says, “Turns out that older iPhones and iPod touch devices can, of course, support iPhone OS 4.0 multitasking. The switch to enable or disable multitasking was found last week by Will Strafach (@cdevwill), the guy who tweeted the picture of the iPad running Cydia.” “Apparently one of the properties in the capabilities plist of springboard.app (/System/Library/CoreService/SpringBoard.app/N82AP.plist) is MULTITASKING=FALSE. Change that to TRUE, according to Will, and you're all set,” the poster explains.

The author of the respective post adds that unsupported hardware is likely to “crawl” under the load of the new feature, “But why not let users decide whether or not they want to enable it? Although if Apple wants to continue to encourage jailbreaking by locking down the features of the OS, that's fine with us…,” the staff writer concludes.

A member of the infamous iPhone Dev Team has confirmed that jailbreaking the iPhone OS 4.0 developer beta is already possible. The process of jailbreaking hacks a device to offer one main benefit: installing unapproved, third-party software. This time around, however, the jailbreak tools set to emerge following the public launch of OS 4.0 are to bring even more benefits.

It is now known for a fact that older hardware, like first-gen iPhones and iPod touches, are not to receive any more updates from Apple. MacStories revealed in a report that a Twitter user sent an email to Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) asking about future support for the original iPhone, to which Jobs issued one of his typically terse responses, saying, “Sorry, no.”

Following the iPhone OS 4.0 event, Apple revealed that certain new features, like multitasking, would not be supported on the iPhone 3G and second-generation iPod touches. Apple pundit John Gruber weighed in on the matter claiming it all had to do with the amount of RAM these devices packed – 128MB, whereas third-generation hardware employed double the amount of memory, therefore was able to handle the workload. Jailbreak tools are almost certainly to unlock multitasking for old-gen iPhones and iPod touches, although users may quickly decide they’re better off using their devices as they did before.

Softpedia does not condone jailbreaking.