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OP said: "replacing otherwise completely perfect Apple hardware that gets conveniently software upgraded to be too old for normal daily functions"

For iOS v10, the iPhone 5, which was released in 2012, is still supported. So no, Apple is not forcing you to purchase a new iPhone every 2.5 years.

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No, I was pulling that 2.5 year figure from my prior life of selling cellphones to businesses and the occasional consumer. On average 40% of a wireless account will upgrade per year, so about every 2.5 years you'll see a line upgrade devices.

Its great that Apple supports the iPhone 5 still, but the user experience on an iPhone 5 is different from an iPhone 7, and its hard to optimize for a device you don't have that is multiple generations newer.

If you're developing on Apple hardware in Xcode, you have a number of simulators available in the development environment to test/optimize most of that. I'm sure someone will come up with plenty of reasons that this isn't good enough for some developers, but it's not something I ran into when I was developing for iOS.

What you have to optimize exactly?

If it runs fine on a iPhone 5, it runs better on an iPhone 7.

You are not writing drivers, you don't need to optimize anything.

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