A dual-core Cortex-A9 with 1GB of RAM chokes at almost everything today even when updated.
Source: Surface RT today is still getting security updates. And will continue to get them until 2023. However, it doesn’t matter much in practice. And that’s a quad-core Cortex-A9 clocked 400MHz higher with twice the RAM.
Not my point at all, though still pretty appalling.
It's quite trivial to install LineageOS, for instance, on an old Android phone. Apple completely blocks this route. If your iDevice is no longer supported, it becomes a shiny, expensive paperweight.
That's fair. I'm not complaining about their update policy, though.
My issue is that I see tablets as computers, and yet I can't even run an updated browser on a fairly decent computer released only nine years ago.
Apple also makes it very hard for more savvy users to install something else on their hardware, so once they stop supporting it one's forced to recycle it.
Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned the iPad, but a thousand-dollar iMac from 2010 no longer being useful is quite sad, IMHO. My 2005 NEC laptop is still going.