How are they going to make you buy shiny new iPads otherwise?
Edit: Why the downvote? I still have an iPad mini (1st gen), and I don't get to play with Swift Playground because iOS 10 requires iPad mini 2 or newer. Look, I'm as much an Apple fanboy as the next person: I use a MacBook Pro, I have an iPhone 6s Plus, and my wife will be getting an iPhone 7 Plus, but you can't deny that Apple, just like other companies, build arbitrary obsolescence into their products.
Even if you want to be cynical, the far more important strategic value in this is in developing more developers for their platform long-term. They wouldn't compromise that for the purpose of marginally more device sales.
That's a sensible argument. I can neither agree nor rebute until I get to play with Swift Playground. I can borrow my mom's shinier iPad Air when I see her. It'll all depend on how Swift Playground plays and feels. For example, there are some questions that will help me decide whether I'm being too cynical: will Swift Playground be only suitable for teaching kids or will it be good for advanced adult programmers coming from other programming languages as well? How much of Apple-specific API will it introduce, if at all?
I've been using Swift Playgrounds on my iPad Air since the second iOS10 beta. It's been really stable, plays well with my bluetooth keyboard and the error feedback on it is excellent. My wish list for the next version would include (a) the ability to create and edit files in *.playground/Sources and (b) a project navigator view to let me move assets around the folders inside a Playground or Playground Book on the device. That said, it's a great tool for education as well as prototyping.
iPad Mini 2 has 1 GB of RAM where the original had half as much. Typically Apple has only deprecated old iOS device models from new OS support due to hardware requirements.
If they allow an iOS version to be compatible with an under powered device that can barely run it they'll get criticized for slowing down older machines or even accused of deliberately crippling them down to force upgrades.
If they don't allow new iOS versions to run on older machines with lower specs, they get accused of deliberately deprecating older models to force upgrades.
Yeah. They wound up selling the iPad2/mini1 guts far longer than I would have thought smart. My iPad2 was feeling long in the tooth well before it stopped being sold new. (And I'm not the most demanding iOS user).
No, you're right, iPad mini 2 appears to be the hardware floor for Playgrounds - I can never keep the iPad SKUs straight. IIRC (and I may not, see above) that the 2 was the last 32 bit big shiny rectangle. But the point is there are multiple generations of existing devices that will run Swift Playgrounds.
