Your contradicting yourself. How can they be supporting their devices for longer (much longer) than their competitors because their premium customers expect it, but also guilty of dropping support for the same products early to make more money? You’re not making any sense.
So you think it's all right to have your computer become a useless brick after 5 years because the other vendors makes it a brick after just 2 years?
It's also worth to note that at least on Android you can still side-load/install apps outside the play store while on Apple your device becomes totally useless/museum brick.
The number of competitors has little to do with planned obsolescence but
" Planned obsolescence tends to work best when a producer has at least an oligopoly "
So our quibble is over “useless brick.” How does Apple dropping support for a device make it a “useless brick”? As far as I’m aware, you can still use an original iPhone from 2007 today. It won’t be fast, but it will work more or less.
Planned obsolescence is not related to advancements in technologies. Would you classify the Commodore 64 as having been designed with planned obsolescence in mind considering it ran on a 6502 when the competition at the time was transitioning to 8086? Of course not. So why is Apple deciding to put more advanced technologies into their devices planned obsolescence?
If you’re referencing the App Store, though, I can see where you’re coming from. But Apple releasing new technologies and not putting them on devices that can’t handle them (due to computing power) and developers using them (which prevents them from running on said old devices) is not planned obsolescence either. The developer chose to make it incompatible with the older devices, not Apple.
I'm not trying to use new tech on old devices. I just want to update the apps using "old tech"/sdk (which is the only one that works) but Apple store doesn't accept old tech/code regardless the device you try to target.
To answer your question:
today I can still deploy code on Commodore 64 but not on my old iPhone. How is that possible?
The same can be said for old consoles, or old non-smartphones that were also computers, had browsers, even in some cases have CPUs more powerful than contemporary iPhones, but didn't have any way to install apps at all.
There's no law requiring vendors to provide features to install apps on devices with CPUs at all.
You probably own a dozen devices containing CPUs, running software, for which there is no practical way for you to install anything. Apple provides a certain set of features in their devices, if you don't think that's a good deal, there are other vendors you can go to.
