I'm not sure that this means what the article says it means. Apple was selling the iPhone 5C in India until less than a year ago. Dropping support for the new OS that soon would be uncharacteristic for the iPhone.
Instead, they may simply be dropping support for 32 bit apps on a 64 bit CPU. Having to support 64 bit and 32 bit apps one a single device forces them to ship two versions of every shared library, and is probably annoying for them in various types of interprocess communication, because, for example, CGFloat and integer types are different sizes.
My guess is that they will release a 32 bit version of iOS and a 64 bit version, and each one will only run apps for the native processor word size.
They did something like this for the worst gen iPads. Two years and support was dropped. I believe they've also done it for Mac hardware too. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if they did it for an economy model of the iPhone.
It had 256 megs of ram. I'm running the latest OS on an iPhone 5c that is 4 and a half years old.
The pace of change in phones/tablets has been tremendous since the iPhone and iPad were released. Current versions are more than 10x faster and ship with much more ram. There aren't infinite resources at any company (unless you want the army of programmers failed model from IBM of yore), focusing limited engineering resources on most important issues is crucial to making progress.
You got an iPad that worked well. They stopped enhancing it after 2 years. When did your car maker stopped enhancing your car?
The trouble with the car analogy is that internet-connected devices need constant security updates, whereas cars don't. A car built ten years ago is as safe as it ever was, minus whatever problems arise from wear and tear. A device running iPhone OS 1.0 will probably not survive long on the internet of 2017.
Instead, they may simply be dropping support for 32 bit apps on a 64 bit CPU. Having to support 64 bit and 32 bit apps one a single device forces them to ship two versions of every shared library, and is probably annoying for them in various types of interprocess communication, because, for example, CGFloat and integer types are different sizes.
My guess is that they will release a 32 bit version of iOS and a 64 bit version, and each one will only run apps for the native processor word size.