[hiatus]

> then isn’t that the same case with your perfectly good 10 year old Toyota?

A good 10 year old Toyota can have its head unit replaced and you can add new features if you so chose. When I was a kid it was a rite of passage to mod at least your speaker system.

> Or 10 year old Target Toaster oven or 10 year old Samsung fridge?

> I think we will live in a strange world if we start demanding our refrigerators allow side loading YouTube.

You set up a strawman argument. Who is demanding this of fridges and toasters?

[raffraffraff]

Exactly. A computer is a general computing device that can be made to do thousands of things through software. When a computer hardware manufacturer wants to limit what software I can run on my computing device, it is not a good thing.

It's odd that people will defend Apple for this, or laugh when you say that you want to use a 10 year old device, when on the same forum people applaud when someone blogs about getting their old Commodore / Sinclair / Toshiba 8bit to connect to the Internet. Wait, is the iPad too old to be useful, but simultaneously not old enough to be worth repurposing?

The iPad 4 has wifi, bluetooth, a retina screen and several days of idle battery life. If I could install a terminal and a VNC client, I could save this thing from e-waste for another 5 years. The way some people talk on here, it'll like they think that there's something wrong with that.