iOS and iphones and shit
 

Having never had the dubious pleasure of owning anything from Apple or with an "i" in front of it, I'm not familiar with how the Apple eco-system does things.

If someone is browsing your site with an iPad or iPhone and they are on iOS 9, with Safari version 9, is it safe to assume that that is the highest version of the OS their hardware can support? I.e. this is a really old iPhone or iPad and the reason they haven't updated to a later OS is not because they just don't want to?

I can't update my old iPhone due to lack of free storage. No SD card slot build in of course, because they want you to use their "cloud". So, you don't have to update your current iOS version if you don't want to (but apps will probably stop working at some point).

Apple users are generally pretty good about doing upgrades (far better than Android users). So if you see an old OS it's probably an old device. The iPhone 4s, iPad Mini (gen 1), iPad (gen 2 & 3), and iPod Touch (gen 5) all maxed out at iOS 9. So it's probably one of those devices. But those devices were all released in 2011 and 2012. They're getting really old at this point. If someone can't afford a new device after 9 or 10 years, can they afford to join your site (or the sites you're promoting)? If they can't afford to join your site, do you really care?

The problem with Android devices is that (not only) the smaller manufacturers simply don't release newer version of Android OS for their older devices.. so the user has no chance to upgrade :)

I'm not an expert but it seems to me that everything to do with phones is a cluster fuck. So for the site that I'm working on I plan on having a legacy side for everyone with a traditional computer. But, I'll let WordPress handle all the phone chaos

This is exactly my thought and mainly why I was asking.

My iPad is a 2 and I bought it new eight months ago. I prefer the gen 2 over the newer version. My iPhone is version 7 but it works fine so no reason to spend a grand for the upgrade.

I know nothing at all about iOS or iphones, but the question relating to my specialized subject was missing from the poost... :(

It's not so much the phones, it's the browsers. They've come a long way in recent years, but still it's hard to know what to support and what not to.

E.g. I've just discovered that older versions of Edge do support the IntersectionObserver API but they don't support the ForEach function for iterating over the nodelist. Which is such a pain in the ass. Do I rewrite my JS code just for that browser, or do I say fuck Microsoft, and in any case why would anyone still be using an old version of Edge (or any version for that matter)?

And hopefully one day soon Safari will be able to do native lazy loading and I won't need the fallback code....