This very morning, my wife performed reset of cache/cookies from our family’s perfectly fine iPad 3 (yeah, the one from 2012, 11 years old). The iPad is our kitchen TV, it shows either some content from VLC (works perfectly fine, kudos to the devs) or some YouTube from Safari (the AppStore’s app support is long gone, web app still works quite well, even considering it was updated recently). Today I spent my morning trying to login our kitchen account. Didn’t work. The account is perfectly fine, but Google refuses to login, as — I’m pretty sure — we use our obsolete software. Well, we do, we do. But even YouTube itself works relatively fine, and as many of you may understand, the iPad is great and much beyond what we need for kitchen, it has a loud speaker and great display, we don’t need anything else for that use-case. On top of that that’s separate device is nothing to worry about, as you may imagine controlling the iPad with dirty fingers, all the oils of the kitchen, etc. Not a place for a modern iPad that we also have, imo.
For me that’s a great example. I personally know many old (even obsolete iPads) lying here and there collecting dust, as their software (and hardware) vendor decided they are all in for nature and ecology (sarcasm), so let millions of perfectly capable devices would be thrown away as a trash.
Eyeing some Android tablet for that, the one I can flash with Lineage OS and be happy with. Maybe Google’s Pixel C or even Nexus 7.
Meanwhile we continue using the iPad unlogginned till it stop working.