It should not take so much effort to make our devices useful after Apple has moved on from them. There are tons of uses for a capable device after the manufacturer has abandoned the customer.
We need Right to Repair now.
This is how Apple steals from us: They let you buy beautiful, high tech hardware that requires their software. Eventually, they stop supporting that software, so the hardware (mostly) stops working. This is theft. Sure, it may be legal, but morally, it is wrong. So many old iPhones and iPads are languishing, when they could be used as Raspberry Pis (or old laptops) are often used: home servers, learning tools, linux devices etc.
The general problem lies with the utility for mass-market products, even if you re-purpose it, how widely spread can you do that? How feasible are most ideas on what to do with products that are end-of-life? A lot of existing things are just dumped and forgotten about like thin clients, settopboxes (same hardware as Raspberry Pis) and entertainment systems in cars.
We like to point at manufacturers and products from well known brands but in reality it applies on a much larger scale, yet the infeasibility scales with it all the same. Some of it might be due to legitimate PKI-based lockouts, while other reasons might simply be the lack of broad interest and governmental policy.
In an ideal world the specifications on how the devices work and end-of-life disablement of lockouts would be a reasonable bar to set; it'd be hard to argue that it's bad for commerce, and implementation-wise even PKI-based systems have easy ways to facilitate this. The cost would be enablement from the manufacturer's side and for some brands the connection between their brand name and a device they cannot control the presentation of. I don't know how to solve that but it's definitely a much larger problem than people in tech might think of.
They should not have this control. Lamborghini doesn't get to stop crypto kids from using non-Lamborghini paint to put anime girls on their cars. Apple shouldn't get to stop users from using non-Apple software to draw pixels on their screens. The "their" refers to the owner of the product, not the owner of the brand.
And if the ECU is destroyed during the crash wouldn’t determining faulty firmware be impossible so Lamborghini would get blamed regardless?
So then the only sensible course of action is to lock it down such that no one can ever change sensitive firmware without Lamborghini approval.
This isn’t limited to cars, a Linux iPad could suffer a catastrophic battery explosion on a flight which causes significant consequences, who is liable?
there's no precedent for ipads to "upgrade" to another OS/firmware, unlike macs, so customers can't claim anything was taken away from them. plus, macs are considered essential for developing for iphones/ipads, so apple doesn't want to disenfranchise ecosystem developers too much by locking down macs, especially when laptops are a dwindling segment anyway.
I love M1 performance though.
I am sympathetic to the environmental ewaste aspect of older devices, but on a purely value based judgement, the Apple devices are vastly superior to anything else on the market. An open source linux tablet would do the job I want done worse.