>on the contrary, iOS7+ is filled with transparencies, bouncing effects and other gimmicks that add no utility but demand hardware

No, Apple doesn't want their devices to feel slow. For example, my iPad 3 doesn't gaussian blur UI backgrounds. If Apple was nefarious as you're suggesting, they would force my iPad to render the expensive blurs.

Also, you can disable animation "gimmicks" (whose purpose is to orient and mask loading): http://www.iclarified.com/35637/how-to-disable-the-animation...

I definitely believe this is part of the business strategy for OS vendors. Microsoft actually successfully did this with new versions of Windows too, up until Vista (their incentives were less direct since they didn't produce the hardware directly, but they still got a royalty for every new PC purchased with a Windows license, which was all of them). Every new version of Windows would require a comparatively beefy machine to successfully run. Vista wasn't all that different in its requirements differential, but the market had started demanding devices that traded down computing power for more convenient form factor (the first generation of netbooks were big when Vista hit the streets) and expecting these devices to run Vista just as fast as they had run XP. Microsoft's failure to anticipate this shift in consumer behavior is mostly responsible for Vista's bad reputation.

Apple can continue to behave this way specifically because only Apple makes hardware that runs Apple software. If they opened up to third parties and someone created a computationally weaker but aesthetically preferable device that ran their software they'd be in trouble.

I like how you read an article whose point is that there's no sense in making up conspiracy theories, and infer from it support for a conspiracy theory.

Swift should theoretically deliver faster apps with less message passing overall and other big improvements.

At the end of the day the latest phones need to keep up with competitors and added features and resimplified experiences that are more costly to implement cannot be avoided. The only way to really avoid it is disallowing older phones to upgrade - which is far less desirable IMO.