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.