rcfa

And what would be the hardware constraint in this case? It’s not RAM (2-3 GB) is part of both A9 and A10 based devices.
It’s not neural processing, that came only with the A11.

The only significant difference, aside from compute power which would make the older phones simply run not as quickly, are the low-power CPU cores.

The only way that would be of more importance for iOS 15 than for iOS 14 is if Apple plans to massively increase “always on” background processing in such a central function that without it, iOS 15 wouldn’t just be itself, where without low power cores battery life would be intolerably short.

Otherwise, I would have expected the next device culling to coincide with the requirement for neural processing, i.e. maybe iOS 16 only for A11 and later.
Similarly, the A11 is the first CPU with an Apple-designed GPU, which would make it another reason for a natural next-generation cut-off.

So I hope Apple keeps supporting these A9 devices, which are otherwise modern in terms of mass storage controller, etc. until A11 is the base requirement for reasons listed above.

I assume this leaves the neural processors completely unused? What about the GPU? Are graphics done just with the CPU thanks to the shared memory architecture? Or is there sufficient documentation/reverse engineering around, to allow for using that?

Apple should just document their hardware properly, after all, they sell hardware, not software. If people want to run Linux or some other OS on their hardware shouldn’t bother them, it’s not like documenting some instruction sets and boot sequence details allows anyone to clone their chip designs or something like that; and security should never rely on obscurity, but on well documented processes.

They should go full-on bankrupt.

They present themselves as add-free and rather expensive pay-as-you-go dating service.
To charge, and to then on top of it track, spy on, and exploit users private data, is beyond reprehensible.
If it were a “free” service, that would be expected...

There’s usually a long stretch of time between initial study results, verification of these results, creating a product, and getting FDA approval.

Also, if these are indicators for inflammation, disambiguation is going to be a big thing.

It’s one thing to look at COVID-19 patients and going back in time looking for indicators; it’s a different thing concluding based on indicators that someone’s got COVID and not some other infections, allergies, etc. that result in an inflammatory response.

Best one could do relatively quickly is warn people that they have indicators typical for inflammation and tell them it might be worth reducing contacts until they can get tested; but likely even that would require disclaimers the size of a small phone book...

I love the Touch Bar, especially the version with a discrete esc key.

The only issue with it: it doesn’t default to function keys during boot, but is blacked out. This makes dealing with booting a boot-camp partition in Windows recovery mode problematic without external USB keyboard.
And that’s a problem the ARM based Macs won’t have to worry about until M$ officially releases Win10-ARM.
So, yeah, I’d miss the Touch Bar!