It's not. All hardware has a planned lifecycle and it's just up to them to draw the line in the sand. They'll also do it through software updates by making less features available on the older model in order to compel you to upgrade to the newer. "AirPlay Mirroring" only available in Sandy Bridge or greater because of the usage of Intel QuickSync is an example of that.
For any cocoa/obj-c dev that's dealt with constant deprecated API's on Mac, they know exactly what I'm talking about.
> They'll also do it through software updates by making less features available on the older model in order to compel you to upgrade to the newer. "AirPlay Mirroring" only available in Sandy Bridge or greatest because of the usage of Intel QuickSync is an example of that.
By your own admission that's not "in order to compel you to upgrade to the newer." That's because the newer hardware is required to make it work satisfactorily.
The point of Quick Sync is to offload video encoding to specialized hardware, which reduces CPU usage. A quick Google search confirms that AirParrot uses a lot of CPU, which hurts the user experience. I won't opine on whether this is worth dropping the feature (and of course an application could be designed to use Quick Sync if available and fall back to the CPU otherwise; would be nice if OS X exposed this as a public API, although I think it's not hard to get at anyway), but there certainly is an advantage.
