This is merely obsolescence by design, a business model made famous by the Detroit automakers long ago and practiced by nearly every major manufacturer in the USA and beyond! Nothing new here, nothing to cast stones at Apple over unless you also cast stones equally at all the other companies doing the same thing, and yes that includes the manufacturers of Android phones. If you (a "you" directed at no person in particular) owned a company that sold electronics, would you try to make every model you sold in the last 5 years remain compatible with all new firmware updates. I doubt it, unless of course you wanted to bankrupt the company. We consumers love shiny new things. We consumers demand shiny new things on a regular basis. They just give us what we want.