To add some real-world numbers: The resale value has dropped about £100 per year for the entire line-up ever since launch. So if I can buy a second-hand used model at a price that I can currently afford, and re-sell it in a year's time for £100 less, and buy the next model. Meanwhile, I have had the best (if not the fastest) computer money can buy, with the latest operating system. For £1.91/week, the price of a bus fare or a cheap meal.

I can go up or down a model at any given time, as the hardware behaves as a commodity, and there is little penalty for trading, both price-wise, and restoring the settings and contents of the device. It is a good store of value, with the only cost of ownership the steady depreciation. And if you can buy below market and sell above market, extracting value from folks who are not as thrifty as you are, you can drive the cost even lower, or possibly even make a profit.

I have bought a "4" in spring 2011 (£350, sold for £40; 1 × battery replacement £10, 1 × screen & button replacement for free from a friend's junker), and a "5S" last year (£230, current re-sale value £170+). The actual cost over the five years has been £1.50/week, £79/year).

I still have an iPad 1 and I have the opposite feeling. Many websites kill the browser and I can't install another one. I'm gradually running out of use cases (browsing the web in a comfortable position is my main use case) and the device hardware itself is in perfect shape.

I also bought the iPad 1 and was similarly burned. The iPad 2 however has had tremendous longevity. I think the iPad 1 came out just one generation too early.

Define "longevity"? I'm typing this on an iPad 3 running iOS 9 and it's definitely showing its age. The hardware is in perfect condition but it struggles to render many web pages and the wifi (although better than on iOS 6-8) is hideously slow compared to my midrange Android phone.

The iPad 2 was sold side-by-side the iPad 3, 4 and iPad Air in Apple's stores. The iPad Mini also is essentially an iPad 2 in a smaller form factor as well.

So if you had gotten an iPad 2 on day 1, I feel like you would have had a reasonably long life on the device.

Your case with the iPad 3 is a little unique. It was the first device with a retina screen and was arguably underpowered for that task. This is why apple replaced the iPad 3 with the iPad 4 just 6 months later in the same year.

The iPad 1 and the iPad 3 are both underpowered for their typical workloads. The other iPads however have stood the test of time fairly well. My iPad Mini 1 (which is essentially an iPad 2) is a little slow, but serviceable and my wife's iPad 4 still works great.

Interesting, thanks for the history lesson! I got my iPad 3 at a discount when they were running out stock, and chose it specifically for the retina screen. It's done well, all things considered, but it definitely seems underpowered these days. Apps are fine but web browsing is quite clunky.

I basically stopped using my iPad2 a couple of years ago because it's too slow, interactively. I do leave a weather radar app running on it in the kitchen, just as a display. If I had to interact with it, it's painful.

I second you on this. My ipad one is perfect but websites are killing it. Reddit and Hcker News are working fine mbasic.facebook.com too but for other websites I expect a crash as soon as I touch the link. People talk about planned obsolescence but it's webdesigners that killed my Ipad1 not Apple.

You can install goodreader on it and use it for PDFs. The pandora app works ok (crashes once every couple days).

iPhones are still pretty poor value for money compared to cheap androids, as long as you can get reasonable pay-as-you-go contracts as well.

I'm not sure how that situation changes in the US, where there doesn't seem to be the same market for pay-as-you-go sims that is found in the rest of the world.

Most of the things my family used an original ipad for stopped working after a very short amount of time. It is now essentially garbage that I can't bring myself to throw away.

And my wife and I still use our iPad 2 without issue aside from the noticeable sluggishness switching apps or updating. Anecdotes!

Not sure what your point is. My point was that the original iPad was nearly unusable in less than 3 years. This is not an anecdote, it's a simple matter of fact.

The original iPad was launched in mid 2010. In September 2012 Apple released iOS 6, which didn't run on the original iPad. Shortly afterward, the apps we used all required a forced update to their iOS6 version (which of course didn't work) and it became a doorstop. YouTube lasted a little longer than most, but eventually it stopped working too.

It's quite possible that the iPad 2 you mention has had a longer life than the original iPad, but this in no way diminishes the fact that the original iPad, a not inexpensive piece of hardware was useless for most purposes after a little more than 2 years (assuming you bought it on release, which I did not).

That reminds me of my iPod Touch, bought in 2008 to help me decide whether I wanted to try a smartphone. The hardware's fine. Runs as well as it ever has. It's a paperweight because of the lack of software and the discontinuation of support for its hardware's video codecs (Youtube, Netflix, et al).

The first generation of any entirely new category of hardware is always a bit of a gamble.

"It is now essentially garbage that I can't bring myself to throw away."

I could have told you that before you bought it.

We've got an iPad 2 that is not useless, but much worse after upgrading to ios9. I still play Kingdom Rush games on it but its so slow now its too frustrating to use for internet browsing and other things.

I can't seem to find the link anymore but recently a tool was released which let me downgrade my iPad 2 back to iOS 6 and it's so much faster than it was on iOS 8. Obviously it's not an official Apple tool.

It's one of the reasons why I haven't upgraded my iPad 2 past iOS6.

It still streams Netflix great though, but the browser is starting to show its age - I can't load all webpages anymore. :(

Looks like I might need to pick up a new iPad..

"Looks like I might need to pick up a new iPad.."

That is insane. I can load all webpages on any laptop from 5 years ago. A browser doesn't become "slower". Even with bigger pages, they are still web pages, not 3D games.

It means the ipad itself is, for some reason, rendering itself slow. And you can't do anything about it because you can't hack it.

And your idea of the solution to the problem is to buy a new one ?

My god, somebody sell you a self-destructing product in order to force you to buy a new one, and you oblige ?

In the last 5 years, bloat on web pages has increased considerably. Tracking script counts on all pages has gone way up, and I very frequently will find that if I leave some web pages in a background tab, their memory usage will climb into the gigabytes, even for pages that are mostly just text! Since the ram on those older devices is not getting any bigger, of course web pages are going to get slower.

Yes, but it still web pages. Not meteo simulations. And I just tested in on an old asus with a dead battery and a broken screen. It's fine to surf on the web. Watch videos. Listen to music. You could do it 10 years ago already with even older computers. Your ipad is lying to you.

I know Kingdom Rush isn't exactly the latest high-end 3D thing, but I did a double-take at the notion that hardware that's fine for gaming is too slow for internet browsing.

obsoletion built into the product roadmap

And yet Apple devices have longer software support lifetimes than any Android devices and better resale values for a longer time. That hardly sounds like a set of characteristics you'd associate with products designed to become obsolete.

They are dependent on Apple for updates due to the code signing. Alternative operating systems also cannot be installed once Apple stops supporting them. That ensures obsolensce in the long term, even if it is longer term than their competitors' blob-ridden Android products.

Anyway, plenty of machines sold then and even today are junk, so maybe replacing them is not such a terrible idea. However, I think replacing the software matters more. Linux is an excellent option for these systems in the long term. If Apple made Mac OS X available for them, it would be too.

Is Android the right comparison? Because I don't think Android when I think about my barely useful iPad 2 (because Android tablets are tire fires), I think of the Pentium III Thinkpad that I use for distraction-free writing. They're both about as useful to me, and one is as old as a high school sophomore.

Realistically the early iPhones and iPads were an experiment. Nobody really knew what their useful lifetime would be. The same went for Android devices.

In fact the wisely received wisdom was that Android devices would have longer useful lifespans because open source leads to higher quality software that's maintained and updated for longer, which can be customized by users so it meets their needs better. The reality that many Android devices never see a single software update and are junked up with carrier crapware and poor device drivers hidden in binary blobs still hasn't sunk home for everyone yet.

Even now when I buy a new device I think about how useful it will be and what it's support will be like for 2 to 4 years. Beyond that, there's no way to tell. When my kid's original iPad Minis get replaced, if they still work I'll probably just use them as family photo and video galleries.

Cannot say the same for the iPhone 3G I had. Long gone.

I think most people when left to their own devices (heh) would prefer to purchase something that's more expensive to buy but less expensive to own, and in that vein I think the iPhone is much better value than an Android.