“constantly add more stuff that relatively few people want or need, and require everyone to buy new hardware to support it.”
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Windows, Apple and Android, and the companies that develop software that run on Windows, Apple, and Android, have all fallen into the habit of writing unoptimized, bloated code. Replacing a phone or a tablet because it “got old” is the norm now. We all know the only thing in phones and tablets that consistently get old are the batteries, the hardware is almost always fine, but the OSs and the software constantly get upgraded to the point where we don’t even keep track of the version numbers anymore (when was the last time you looked at the version number of Firefox?) A 6-year-old tablet is effectively junk because everything that used to run on it has been “upgraded” so many times. It’s like trying to run Crysis on a 486.
…and yet…