Yeah, it's rather strange that Apple's dropping so many recent devices in iOS 13, especially since they specifically talked about improved performance on the 6 in the iOS 12 announcement [1]. They also dropped the 6th gen ipod touch, which they were still selling up until a few months ago.
Why do you think they started updating system/apple apps outside of the iOS version releases. They can keep updating the apps and give security updates to the older version of iOS for previous gen phones.
Do they actually do this? AFAIK, almost all the system apps are bundled with the OS, and don't recieve any updates after the next version is released; the last time I remember them ever releasing a security update for an old version was the certificate validation issue a few years ago.
iOS 12 is only "fast" if you compare it to the disastrous iOS 11. At some point around iOS 12.2, our iPhone 6 Plus became so slow that we replaced it (with a new iPhone of course). iOS 10 would have been a good LTS release for the iPhone 6.
This trend honestly makes me feel dirty to work in software. If you only use a few core apps, iOS 12 looks and feels just like iOS 7, yet it needs several times the horsepower to work. And unlike on the web, we can't blame it on JavaScript ads. It's just shoddy engineering that aligns with Apple's incentives.
It's nice to know, thanks. I wonder why they decide to drop support of those quite modern phones. I could understand when they dropped support for old phones with slow CPU and tiny RAM, or when they dropped support for 32 bit. But iPhone SE is very powerful device, for example.
