Apple would make you buy a new machine just to install a new application, if they could. I have confidence they will figure it out, in due time. There is, after all, tremendous pressure to maintain their revenue.
I would say iOS already works like this. They push out OS updates to devices not capable of running them properly, and provide no easy path to roll back. Many non-technical users will just think their "old" phone has "gotten slow", as if that's the inevitable course that products take as they age. So they buy a new device.
The App Store only makes this worse, since at any given time you can only download the most recent version of any app. So if you don't upgrade iOS, you find yourself increasingly unable to install any new apps.
And all in all it seems very successful. There have only been 5 iterations of the iPhone over about 5 years, but how many people do you know that owned at least 3 of them?
I can name a ton of people who've owned only 1 or 2 iPhones since they've released. However that isn't even what I'm arguing about.
Apple makes (in my opinion) a very smart decision to limit some features to only newer phones. Think about when iOS4 came out, it was only fully supported for the iPhone 4 and 3GS. Backgrounding on the 3G was a nightmare to memory and performance... so they cut it. You're saying they automatically lump in apps that make the device seem slow? I think they do the exact opposite. They make smart decisions to keep even 2 year old devices running like their brand new.
Of course they want you to update to a new device every two years (every single manufacturer does, don't just blame Apple here) but they are the only company I've seen that doesn't hold a gun to your head to upgrade just to get a new OS.
One thing I can always depend on with my iPhone, I'll likely see at least 3 major OS upgrades during my ownership. My Android phone (I own both) has only seen 1 major OS upgrade and very very very few incremental upgrades as well. The only reason why I have ICS on it is because of CyanogenMod.
I suspect that that he's talking more about the update to the 3G that rendered the phone almost unusably slow for a substantial proportion of users. Unfortunately they never did bother to fix it.
As a former owner of a 3G, they did (attempt) with iOS 4.2.1, which significantly improved the situation over the absolutely dreadful 4.0 and 4.1 series. It wasn't back to 3.2 levels by any means (there's only so much you can do when the phone had barely 30MB of RAM headroom when released — and yes, I think AAPL are stingy fuckers on their RAM, the original iPad looks like it has the exact same issue with iOS 6) but it did make the phone work again.
Yeah, I probably overstated my case - I think some people did find their situation rather improved. My wife's 3G never got any better, unfortunately :-/.
What really annoyed me with the situation was that they didn't release a good way (afaik) to downgrade your OS back if you didn't have a good backup. I expect that from a commodity manufacturer, but given Apple's premium reputation I tend to expect a quality response when they screw up.
That said, I still buy their stuff, so maybe that's why they don't care ;)
