"Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things"
This. Same with iphones. Perfectly good hardware, continuing to do a decent job doing the stuff you bought it for, being slowly forced into obselecense by iOS and app upgrades. Which makes short term sense for a company whose core business is selling hardware - forcing people to buy a new device every couple of years regardless of whether the last device has died or not does in fact make you money. In the short term. But sooner or later your customers get tired of periodically having to replace working hardware just so they can continue to have essentially the same functionality they had with the previous device, and will switch to one of the many other manufacturers who have (by now) duplicated your functionality. The *only* reason to buy Apple hardware is when Apple does something genuinely new and their latest gadget does something genuinely useful that no-one else does yet (first gen iPhones, for example). After that it's all incremental upgrades and forced obselecense and you may as well switch to the competition until the next time Apple does something genuinely new. Assuming they continue to do so - not a guarantee for any company.