You’re blasting Apple for their obsolescence? The company that has gone out of their way to support phones and tablets _far_ longer than their competitors?
But when Apple support does end, it's game over. I picked up an iPad 2 (from 2011), it's perfectly capable hardware, although a bit slow, but it's only usable for browsing HN and viewing PDFs because one can't upgrade the goddam browser or install an alternative one. Updates ended in 2015, mostly.
I could upgrade a One Plus X released in 2015 to Android 7 (Lineage 14.1). An old version, but everything is perfectly usable. Browsers are at their latest versions. Before this, the phone was on stock Android 6, the latest Firefox ran on it. Still bad, because there's no security upgrade, but unofficial builds for the latest versions of Lineage exist on this phone (they will never be official because the goddam kernel can't be upgraded, and newer versions are necessary to support features mandatory for being official, including the way disk encryption is managed).
Anyway, phones and tablets are in a sad state overall. They become e-waste way too soon. Android and iOS both have horrible support time. Not more than a few years of updates (with FairPhone probably being the best here, but still a few years). And anything else is pretty much unusable, at least for phones. In comparison, PCs can be upgraded pretty much forever, at least on Linux. Phone constructors are doing this to themselves through lack of standardization and vendor lock in, but I guess they are happy enough with the situation.
The Samsung Galaxy S II (a phone) released late 2011 had official lineage 14.1. There are unofficial builds of lineage 19 today.
That's a particularly good situation, I don't really know how was Android back then, but in any case Android still allowed installing alternative browsers, allowing devices to be useful long after updates stopped. Firefox was still installable on android 4.4 recently enough. So there's that.
But again, that's still just bad either way, I expect better from hardware. 4 years is awfully short and I don't quite care if Android was better or worse. Apple controls everything, how come it was only capable of 4 years of updates? It's unacceptable, and the usual two or three years of updates on stock Android too, of course.
Okay, Jan.