No, but it can do all the things it promised to do when it was first sold.
By contrast, one of my old iPads is thinking about enrolling in a job retraining program to learn to be a trivet. This despite all of its components being in perfect working order.
I never suggested this was a conspiracy, just that it's a travesty.
I have an iPad Air 1, a device that is pushing ~5 years by now, that became abhorrently laggy with the transition from iOS 10 to iOS 11. Sliding up the multitask view or sliding down the cover sheet usually hovered around 5-20FPS, and sometimes came with a 1 second (!) delay. I don't know what magic the iOS devs worked with the upcoming iOS 11.3 (I run the beta) but both actions are fluid now, and the delay is gone. Besides that, my parents have an iPad 4, which is 'stuck' on iOS 10 but still is incredibly smooth and, so far, works perfectly well with iCloud.
I used to think that Apple didn't mind old devices being bogged down with big updates, since the unintended side effect would be people pushed to newer devices. However, with techniques like App Thinning, the way the 5S became smooth again going from iOS 9 to 10, and now the way they revived my iPad Air I'd say they seem to be reasonable in choosing when devices are too old and holding back iOS as a whole. Hell, with Apple your iOS device gets 4-6 years worth of big updates.. with Android, you're lucky if you get 2.
FWIW I think developers should support old hardware as long as they can, but only the lastest operating system for each particular supported model.
Yes, and no.
I have a launch-day iPad, and it became less and less useful over the years as the apps stopped being supported by their developers.
The last version of Safari for the original iPad is unusable if you surf anywhere but HN. It might as well be Lynx.
This time last year, my iPad was down to just e-mail, notes, streaming video from my satellite box, PBS video, and a great app from Panic called Status Board.
Now it's down to just e-mail and notes, so it spends more time in the desk drawer than propped up on a tiny easel on top of the desk.
To some extent, RMS is right on this subject: When your devices rely on the cloud, it means you don't really own them, because any cloud-dependent functionality continues to exist at the pleasure of others.
I think you have odd perspective here, because you're talking about tech lasting for a decade, but you're also explicitly omitting anything with a computer in it ("run an operating system").
"A 35 year old Commodore 64 is every bit as fun as it was when it first came out, and every bit as capable, but a piece of tech that's only 3.5 years old probably has a blinking jewel in the palm of its hand."
The hypothetical 35-year-old Commodore, however, can't do most of the things I ask my 3 year old laptop to do. Durability wasn't the issue; the rapidly increasing capability of newer and more capable computing platforms was.
We're at a point now where Moore's Law & related phenomena seem to have slowed a bit. Ten or fifteen years ago I always upgraded my laptop every 3 years. Now I can go longer, and typically only upgrade when there's a compelling reason (higher RAM ceiling, e.g., or external factors like the economics of extended service plans). Phones are the same; in the earlier years of the cell phone era, I got a new phone nearly every year because that meant smaller and more powerful and therefore more useful. In the Smartphone era, two years became the norm, and nowadays it's routine to see folks with 3 or even 4 year old phones.
The tl;dr is that there's no conspiracy or malignant intent here; it's just that shit gets better, and so the upgrade makes sense for most people. I mean, maybe you can get a 35-year-old Commodore running as a novelty, but I sure wouldn't want to try to do my job with one.