Has iOS 4 been designed to force 3G owners to upgrade???

Question

Updated last night (pleased to say that unlike a lot of poor souls I had no issues with the upgrade - touch wood) and was just trying to work out what new features I actually have now (since they keep saying over 100 but don't actually provide a list!)
Digital Zoom - no
Custom wallpapers - no (and I don't believe for one minute that a devide that can play video and 3D games cannot have an icon move over a picture!)
Unified inbox - now I have 7 email addresses dumped into one place so I can't find one thing from another.. thankfully the original inboxes are still available (twice for some reason!)
Application groups - I can now organise my apps into groups of 12 instead of the groups of 16 I had them in (but handy for anyone who wants more than 144 apps)
So I literally can't find anything on here different that I actually want to use (I like the new calculator icon but I'm not sure that made the upgrade worthwhile!)
What I HAVE noticed is that every single thing I do on this phone is slower..
Slower to open up (hit "messages" and there is exactly a 10 second delay before showing me anything!), slower to actually use (sometimes I can be typing and have to stop for 5 secs for it to actually put any letters on the screen), slower for everything - just been on a webpage and zoomed in (10 sec delay before it redrew the screen), scrolled around (another 10 second delay before redrawing)
Reading a few posts it seems that I am by no means alone in having a sluggish time with my phone which begs a question.. Is it all designed to make me say "to **** with it" and pay for the upgrade to the 4G?

Answer 1

Already discussed in another thread, but no, it wasn't designed to force you to upgrade.
If that were the case, they wouldn't have updated it at all.
I personally think the release is not up to the quality that most users expect of Apple on iPhones, but then again, every release gets these kinds of complaints.
Apple again put almost all of their effort into new development for the iPad and iPhone 4. A small amount of their remaining resources went into just making sure the 3GS and 3G could get anything at all.
This brought with it a whole bunch of security updates, and the features that could be implemented easily and cheaply. By the time it got down the 3G, this probably meant more of just "disable whatever doesn't work right away" mentality, rather than spend extra time optimizing code to run quickly on all platforms.
I guess the thing to ask yourself is, what other phone manufacturers are releasing their firmware/OS/featureset for two-year-old hardware to keep release parity with two newer major hardware releases?
Frankly, I'm surprised Apple even tried to release iOS4 on the 3G. I agree that based on my results, this release was not ready for widespread release to all the 3G handsets that were out, and they should've canceled or delayed this release of iOS 4 to the 3G hardware until it could be better profiled for performance and gone through more extensive QA.
However, this is what we got, and on that side of things, Apple did what they could do with the resources they had. I don't see any evidence that this is a planned obsolescence release though, with the goal of forcing upgrades. If that were their intention, they wouldn't have released iOS4 on the 3G at all. It would've saved them a lot of money in terms of development, QA, and support time, and those resources could've been used to do more iPad and iPhone 4 development tasks. Meanwhile, this release will be good enough for some, who wanted application grouping and the unified inbox, and it'll hold them over on their 3G and won't compel them to buy a new 3GS or 4.
I'll edit to add... Mine was particularly slow until I actually fully shut down and restarted my iPhone. Now it's as sluggish typing as it was on 3.1.3. Which is too slow in my opinion, but obviously not the sole result of upgrading to 4.0.
Message was edited by: Hitokiri Eric