At the same time, I had a desktop for "heavy lifting" like graphic design and 3d animation, storing a big media library, playing games, etc. I also kept a cheap, portable laptop for the occasional times I needed to travel and wanted some semblance of computing from a hotel room or an event. For all of the other lightweight tasks, I had been using smart phones since the early Treo days so that was fine for email and looking up info.

But then I was planning a longer trip from the US to Southeast Asia for several weeks and it was going to involve a lot of hopping from town to town. Suddenly even my laptop was too much to carry when I already had everything on my back. I caved and bought an iPad 2 for a good deal more than I wanted to spend. They were still hard to find so I could only find the larger capacity models and the only Android tablet worth considering (Xoom) was not as capable and still cost about the same.

That iPad was pretty cool and I used it for a year or two before it just got to be a pain in the ass. Updates were de facto mandatory as you mentioned. Staying on old OS versions meant unsupported apps and constant nagging. But each OS update made the thing perform worse and worse. The hardware cycle was much faster than that of desktop/laptop computers at that point so I couldn't assume the normal 5+ years of usefulness I'd get from a laptop and there's no option to just install a lightweight Linux distro or downgrade. Even after I jailbroke it I couldn't really do much to speed it up. At this point, doing more than opening a single browser tab or lightweight application will make the thing lag and stutter and generall suck.

I think now it gets powered on a few times a year for me to check on updates and see if there's anything worth checking out. Haven't bothered selling it since it's my only iOS device and I figure there may be a point where I want to try some iOS exclusive so I keep it around for that.

But what is the actual problem with that, if you use the tablet primarily as a convenient web browser, Facebook checker, e-mail sender, Netflix watcher, and maybe occasional casual gamer?

Apple has tried to force this kind of stuff onto its user base, but if my experience with family and friends is even remotely representative, the most common result is damaging their customer relations and making a lot of those customers buy exactly one Apple device ever.

The only people I know who have definitely had more than one iPhone or iPad either got a new device via work, got a newer phone "free" when they got a new contract with their network, or had much older versions with pre-Retina screens, much lower storage capacity, and other practical limitations compared to today's devices. To my knowledge, I don't know a single person who has actively and at significant cost paid for, say, a new iPad to replace their 3rd generation one.

In contrast, I know several people who have got some or even all of their money refunded as a direct result of app or iOS updates breaking things. That includes cases like taking a brand new iPad back to the store for a full refund the day after they bought it because they hated it that much (and then buying an Android tablet somewhere else instead) and taking an older iPad back to a store for a significant refund after arguing that the recommend iOS update had made it unfit to use and no mechanism to go back was provided (which was an argument that, to their credit, the store accepted, and they agreed on a modest refund given that the device had been in use for a number of years at that point but had had its useful lifetime abruptly cut off).