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> A five year old computer running a recent browser will also struggle with new websites.

My _gaming rig_ is 5+ years old and still runs new games fine. I don't even know where you came up with this. My wife owns a 2012 Macbook Pro and it still runs everything fine, even the newest OS and MS Office applications.

sorry, I should have said "low end laptop," "netbook," or "chromebook." Those are all in the same class as an iPad, with the same portability requirements, etc.

I've been using my $300 Acer c720p chromebook for almost 5 years. Keys are falling off, it has quite a few cracks and smudges, and the battery is less then half of what it used to be, but it still boots up in about 8 seconds, and there's no new noticeable lag. Right now sounds like my Chromebook was a better decision than a iPad.

In the 90s five years made a huge difference and some people still have that mindset. In the 2010s five years is nothing. I kept my last desktop PC for seven years with only an SSD upgrade and it was still running new games on medium graphics settings. In seven years the new CPU had not quite doubled in performance vs. the old one[1].

[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=838&cmp[]=256...

Yep, my early-2011 Macbook Pro is still a daily-use machine that works great, the SSD upgrade really helps. The main thing I wish I could do on it is play Civ VI.

You really don't. Civ VI is a big step back from Civ V, from terrible graphics through to the removal of automated workers.

The article doesn't clearly says the problem, but there is a problem, and it's none of what you said (although the article does talk a bit about repairability).

The problem, in iOS (but also happens on Android, to a lesser extent), is that older devices are locked out of OS upgrades at a way faster rate than they break down, and in turn, because they run older OS, they are locked out of installing new apps, including older compatible version of those apps.

Simple fact: a 10 years old computer (and probably some 15 or even 20 years old ones) can get the latest Windows/Unix of your choice, but any iOS device that was released more than 2/3 years ago cannot get latest iOS.

Really, it's pretty simple: Apple doesn't care about retrocompatibility. Either you get a new device, or you have to do with what's already installed on it.

That's a much better statement of the issue.

So, it sounds like the author is asking for: upgradeable, portable hardware, with longevity of 5+ years, that can have a "maintenance" release of software, for under $350. I don't think there exists a business case for such a product.

"any iOS device that was released more than 2/3 years ago cannot get latest iOS." is no longer correct, though it used to be. Apple is now providing iOS support for five years. Consider that when buying your iDevice, especially the expensive devices like an iPad Pro or an iPhone X.

It's more than that: Safari could be fine on these devices, but the original iPads had very limited memory, and websites these days are resource-intensive. It's hard to browse the web, when otherwise it would be a great web and ebook reader (it's just the latter now).

The complaint is that a device which was once useful is getting less so year by year because of vendor lock in and planned obsolescence, and not because of hardware failure. This is a “should” question: Should a device manufacturer be able to decide to make an otherwise fully functional device less and less functional until it is useless?

Case 1: Like others here I have an old iPad 1 which is stuck on iOS 5 or so, and although the hardware is still as flawless as the day I bought it, I can use it for fewer and fewer computing tasks year after year, can install fewer and fewer software on it, and have no way to fix the problem.

Contrast that with case 2, my 12 year old Dell PC which has undergone a number of software updates (currently running Linux beautifully) and continues to be very useful and updatable to this day.

The trend seems to be to move us more and more towards case 1 and away from case 2, which is in my vein an overall loss for end users.

While I understand the complaint, I have a fundamental disagreement with these types of arguments. If you were to restore this iPad to factory settings, it would function exactly the same way or just as well as if you had just purchased it. The apps that you get from the App Store are additions to the product and you know going in that they could stop working or stop being updated and get trampled in the march of technology. As long as you have a WiFi connection, though, that iPad will be useful for web browsing, notes, calendars, email and everything else that it was good for when it was purchased. In fact, I just restored an iPad 2 (Not an iPad Air 2, an original, non-retina iPad 2) and my parents are now using it as their Facebook/email machine. It's just as zippy (maybe a little slower but it doesn't feel slow) as it was when I bought it for those tasks and I can even FaceTime them on it without issue.

There are tons of applications on the PC that no longer work because of changes in Windows. Unless the manufacturer decides to give you some kind of backwards support (like Microsoft including an XP emulator in later versions of Windows which, kudos to them, is not something they should have done or needed to do), I don't see how there can be an expectation of the hardware outliving the software. The software has always been the bottleneck and it always will be. I think it's great that the iPad is still the same out of the box as it was all that time ago.

It's not just hardware upgradability: some of the problem could be solved if app developers created simple, lightweight iOS 5-compatible apps. But of course there's no business case for supporting early iPads, and I don't even think many early iPad owners necessarily think there should be.

The iPad is great because it is compact and a specific, coherent design. I could use a 12-year-old desktop tower for my evening reading, but I don't want to.

The current version of Xcode will not even let a developer target 5.0 even if he/she wanted to.

It doesn't sound like a complaint so much as an elegy.

I still regularly use an original iPad nearly every day. It can't update past iOS 5, and it's been pointless to try to install new software on it for years. At this point, it's mostly a Kindle and PDF reader that is still much more usable than our Kindle Fire.

That's no complaint! It's sad because these were great machines that are just becoming obsolete. Its the upside of such attention to hardware quality: they become obsolete before they break, instead of the reverse.

I use an early-2011 Macbook Pro too, which is far more battle-scarred (the battery swelled and cracked the touchpad before I replaced it, and I lost a few screws when installing an SSD), but it still feels like a great everyday machine.

The complaint in the article is that it shouldn't be obsolete. An iPad is touchscreen, SoC, wifi/bluetooth, battery. Quantitative improvements in hardware don't mean that the capabilities of old devices should be taken away.

Software is moving backwards (alarmingly quickly). In 2009 my 2nd generation ipod touch was able to browse the internet, run complex 3D games and stream videos with no issues. It still works and still does all those things because I never "upgraded" it. Taking away features for a given piece of hardware is a regression. Give new software features to the people who have hardware to run them.