I think this analogy has gone off course a bit. But I do think a manufacturer providing automatic irreversible updates has an obligation to ensure, as best as possible, that the device continues to work with that update. If it worked yesterday, it should work tomorrow, period.

It would be perfectly reasonable to not force updates and allow users to continue with the current version forever if that keeps them running. But it's not reasonable to just break people's functional devices with an unavoidable update.