Ive had that exact same feeling since my iPad 1's life was effectively ended by software updates. It was the quickest device to become obsolete I've ever owned.
I inherited one after never owning a tablet. I was able to turn it into a Plex video-viewing device after jailbreaking and figuring out what the latest supported version of Plex is and it works great for that.
Of course for web browsing in general it's pretty unusable.
As someone who had to develop for that thing - it was underpowered from day 1. iPhone 3GS hardware with 5x the number of pixels to push and higher expectations on software capability? It was never going to work.
The phrase "reduce reuse recycle" is actually a pyramid of effectiveness. The best thing is to reduce your consumption entirely, which in this case translates to not producing or buying new hardware you don't need.
I split "reuse" into "repair" and "repurpose", so that I can put "repair" before "reduce".
I think a product designed to be repairable indefinitely is less wasteful than one that has half as much mass but needs to be completely recycled whenever any critical part fails.
I would dearly love to have a standard laptop form factor, even if means cases would be 5cm thick when closed and 2kg without its innards. If there were a laptop case standard, it would be a whole lot easier to manage repair parts and 3rd party upgrades.
We definitely need a strong reduction in the introduction of new technology that replaces old, still working hardware. This is so wasteful. Along with this, we need centrally planned production of consumer goods to control the pace of change and prevent overproduction, and these goods need to be have government set prices to insure that everyone can afford them.