The evolution of iPads over multiple generations is not 'planned obsolescence' (PO), and this article is wrong to characterise this progress as PO.[1] PO denotes 'artificially limited useful life', whereas products like iPads and iPhones are replaced because of actual obsolescence or wear on consumable components. Most capacitors have a limited life in terms of time and charge/discharge cycles, and will degrade in performance over time; batteries are the same. Since no one wants their iPads to be overbuilt, (i.e. heavier and more expensive), they wear out over the course of just a few years. In addition to that, everyone will want higher resolution and more powerful tablets than are currently available; these consumers would rather buy a modern tablet now and another later than wait for the second to come out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

"actual obsolescence" The iPad? Really? I'm typing this on a netbook that cost 280 dollars five years ago. Everything sill works. It does all the same jobs it did years ago. There is absolutely no reason a device as expensive as an iPad shouldn't work for a decade or more.

PO can include external factors. Does apple continue to manufacture spare parts? If no, have they released the designs so that others can produce them? If not, then this is a case of PO even if the devices themselves have not been built to fail.

No, you are wrong here. All machines get old and wear out; digital machines wear out faster than mechanical ones. The OP you are replying to had a good point - capacitors in particular have a limited lifespan, and electronics are fragile. When the physical lifespan of 99% of the internals is 2-3 years before attrition in whatever it's form claims at least one component, why engineer something that cost 4x more but is only twice as rugged?

You seem to be hung up on Moore's law as well. And while Moore's law has lost some of its teeth in recent years(and tricks like cluster computing and specialized designs are staving off some of its effects), hardware still grows old quickly. (And bitching about your 5 year old $1k hardware is hilarious to those of us who remember paying $5-8k or more for "all the computer you will ever need" only to see it become almost entirely obsolete in less than a year.

But the fact is this: your 5 year old etch-a-sketch only has 256mb ram on which to run its OS and apps. Considering what people expect out of a tablet these days by way of web browsing, multitasking, etc, your iPad 1.0 actually IS obsolete, or quickly will be.

As to open sourcing the design - why in the world would Apple open source the trade secret that literally makes it Apple? The fact that Apple built it and no one else does is literally what makes Apple all of those earnings.

My 5yo netbook is no etchasketch. Without getting into OS debates, this "old" machine boots up and gets my presentation to the projector faster than any off-the-shelf apple/MS machine. 5years is nothing for a digital machine. Capacitors can and do last far longer. They cost pennies, not even, fractions of pennies. If iPads are failing because of such fundamental components then apple has questions to answer.

256mb belongs in the 90s, not 2010. This machine came with 1gb and upgraded a couple years ago with a ssd and 4gb of memory. And anyone who travels will tell you that having an oldschool VGA output is very useful. The average conference-hall projector is far older than the average portable. One less adapter is one less thing to loose.

You don't have to "open source" designs. Look at what car companies do. They maintain a supply of spares and they license out designs they don't want to build themselves. That's what people expect from car companies.

Throwing working machines in the trash simply because they are scratched or fail to keep pace with fashion is wasteful vanity.

I am currently on my third (or maybe fourth) iPhone, and every one was replaced for multiple reasons. The headphone jacks are only good for a few thousand insertions, the batteries get worn out, the internal components start to fail, and the buttons get mushy/broken. In addition to this, sometimes people drop them, and the screen cracks. The processors, ram, and solid state memory get out-of date, and make the product feel 'slower' and less pleasant to use than newer devices. In this environment, is it worth it to make spare parts and replaceable components? Which components would you make re-usable?

On one corner of the desk that I am currently using, there sits an old aluminum 13.3" Macbook with a replaceable battery. I never replaced the battery because the laptop got dinged up, old, and slow, so the effort and resources that went into making the battery replaceable were wasted. Getting rid of 'serviceability' is often worth it.

The iphone 4s is 5 years old and runs the latest OS and takes a few seconds and $40 to replace the battery. My ipad2 is still working perfectly. Battery lasts days and runs all the things it used to and then some. Fragility is not the same as planned obsolescence.

I owned an iPhone 4 up until a couple months ago. It worked fine for most of its life but near the last months most apps on it became unusable. Everything just ran so slowly. I remember google maps being particularly bad, the app would run incredibly slow and eventually crash about 30 seconds into using it basically every time I opened it up. You could still use the phone I suppose, but it would require a good amount of patience.

Would not surprise me that this happens because the apps expect more RAM to be on hand, and so are not as carefully optimized for low RAM circumstances.

I am seeing something similar over at Android. Where earlier versions of the Play store app worked without a hitch on my aging tablet, now it seems to crash left and right whenever i want to look at longer lists of search results or similar. And this seems to happen when it tries to load the app icons or similarly asynchronously, meaning that i can enter the search, get a list of results, and then see the app stutter and crash as it tries to load the graphics.

The iPhone 4s is only four years old.

The mandatory (1) software updates (specifically iOS8) have basically made it perform half as well as it did when it was sold, I don't think it's a shining example.

(1) If you want support.

Use electrical tape. It's cheap and effective, but comes off easily when you need it to. Comes in several colors, too.