While I understand the complaint, I have a fundamental disagreement with these types of arguments. If you were to restore this iPad to factory settings, it woul

While I understand the complaint, I have a fundamental disagreement with these types of arguments. If you were to restore this iPad to factory settings, it would function exactly the same way or just as well as if you had just purchased it. The apps that you get from the App Store are additions to the product and you know going in that they could stop working or stop being updated and get trampled in the march of technology. As long as you have a WiFi connection, though, that iPad will be useful for web browsing, notes, calendars, email and everything else that it was good for when it was purchased. In fact, I just restored an iPad 2 (Not an iPad Air 2, an original, non-retina iPad 2) and my parents are now using it as their Facebook/email machine. It's just as zippy (maybe a little slower but it doesn't feel slow) as it was when I bought it for those tasks and I can even FaceTime them on it without issue. There are tons of applications on the PC that no longer work because of changes in Windows. Unless the manufacturer decides to give you some kind of backwards support (like Microsoft including an XP emulator in later versions of Windows which, kudos to them, is not something they should have done or needed to do), I don't see how there can be an expectation of the hardware outliving the software. The software has always been the bottleneck and it always will be. I think it's great that the iPad is still the same out of the box as it was all that time ago.