> 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 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.

With the exception of battery life 1G Apple Watches and iPads typically work just as well as they did on day 1. Cloud support will start to fall away at some point. But these products are very durable. Huge numbers of iPad 2s are still in use.

FWIW I think developers should support old hardware as long as they can, but only the lastest operating system for each particular supported model.

>1G Apple Watches and iPads typically work just as well as they did on day 1

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.

I'd support that if commercial OS vendors wouldn't keep ratcheting up the resources the OS requires with every release. My newer iPad is a horrible laggy mess since I upgraded it to iOS 11.

You're complaining that it can't continue to be upgraded and do new things, not that it can't still do the things it used to do.

I am very much complaining that it can't still do the things it used to do. Because mobile apps tend to rely on cloud services, and apps that rely on cloud services tend to be relatively quick to introduce breaking changes that cause old versions of the app to stop working properly, and at some point you stop being able to upgrade the app because of library compatibility issues.

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.