[panglott]

I think it's clarifying to look at tablet manufacturers as a whole. The reflexive complaint of Apple is that their system is too locked-down and limited by their approach to software. However, at the same time, there were Android tablets being made in the same era, and it appears that they also suffer from some similar problems (being only limited to Jelly Bean). If so, perhaps the commonest complaints about Apple's approach to software is off the mark in this case.

All hardware products will suffer tradeoffs, and I don't necessarily find it reasonable to think that tablet computers should always be hardware-upgradeable, if it is at the expense of handle-ablity. The author's lament is that the iPad went obsolete before it broke. The PlayBook went obsolete nearly as soon as it was released. How did those Galaxy Tab 2s do? If the problem is that "it went obsolete before it broke", that's infinitely better than "it broke before it went obsolete".

[CaptSpify]

The problem is that it went obsolete artificially in a horribly short timespan, with no alternative way of keeping it going. If Apple didn't lock down their systems, we could keep it going quite easily. I have plenty of Android phones that, while they don't get updates from the manufacturer directly, still get patches by running LineageOS or one of the other variants.

I'm not saying Android is great here, I think it's a terrible system, but it's not nearly as artificially hampered as Apple's stuff is.