<i>That&#x27;s an interesting perspective, but that is essentially Apple breaking everything for everybody and forcing obsolescence of their products.</i><p>In practice, yes, that is very much the result. Sadly this seems to be SOP for Apple across the board in recent years, but it&#x27;s particularly bad with the mobile devices. The thing is, people don&#x27;t notice the cost of their shiny new iPhone so much because it&#x27;s obscured by ongoing contracts with their network. Tablets and laptops don&#x27;t enjoy the same luxury, which I suspect is a large part of the reason tablet sales figures have been less impressive since the early new-shiny rush for a few years after the first iPad arrived.<p><i>I consider that slightly different from &quot;I can&#x27;t do task x on my iPad because it isn&#x27;t powerful enough&quot;.</i><p>Fair point, but I think it starts to become relevant for much the same reasons if you want the iPad to be taken seriously as a laptop competitor. At that point, it doesn&#x27;t just have to be powerful enough to run toy apps today, it also has to be powerful enough to run serious productivity applications tomorrow. Earlier generation iPads -- even ones just a few years old and well within the normally expected working lifetime of a professional computer -- demonstrably didn&#x27;t have enough power to do that with the combination of hardware and software being offered.