Some companies are guilty of such behavior but I've yet to see a really good example of Apple doing this.
you dont understand the concept of Planned obsolescences.
Nor do you.
Yes, you can always continue using items well past their supported life. Planned obsolescences reffers to to a combination of factors that a company can use to "force" an upgrade on its users
This is the part that is baloney. It is like blaming the guy at the bottom of a cliff for yelling jump to the guy at the top of the cliff. No company can realistically force you to buy something you don't want. Even though there is a democrat in the White House free will still reigns.
The simplist way is the outright cause the product to stop its life after a certain period of time. most companies don't do this as it would be suicidal. Nobody would buy an iPad if at 3 years the thing completely shut itself off and never started again.
Even if a company was stupid enough to do something like this it should force you to buy from them again. Actually just the opposite should happen, that should be the last purchase you ever make from that company.
However, there are far more manipulative forms where product support is arbitrarily removed creating a barrier to future use.
An example of this sort of software planned obsolesence:
Create an MP3 player. Version 1.0 software comes default.
1 year later, Release new MP3 player. Version 2.0 comes default.
First gen MP3 player does not get V2 software despite physical capability of supporting that software.
All future development, software, Apps and Music playing ability requires V2.0
That isn't forcing anybody to do anything. Generally there are rational reasons to move support to newer firmware revisions.
So yes, you can always continue using the original MP3 player in its current format. But you dont get support. You dont get updates, and sometimes if a company is vindictive enough, it even changes it's online stores format to only work on the new software.
Examples?
I'm not saying Apple is guilty of this form of it. But the accusation has been levied against them (And many tech companies who rely on hardware sales).
There are many people out there making all sorts of accusations against Apple, however before you put weight into some of this nonsense you should look into the facts.
sometimes it's not easy to tell when this is done. Apple HAS done it in the past. Often cutting support for 3 year old hardware from newer software for reasons that are arbitrary.
the last example I can think of is OSx Mountain Lion dropping support for Some Mac Pro's and Mac laptops that do not feature 64bit EFI's despite being fully 64bit CPU based systems and more than enough physical power to handle it.
This has nothing what so ever to do with planned obsolescence.
the inclusion of support would have cost Apple little as it existed previously. But cutting off support completely for people wishign to upgrade their OS would in fact force them to buy new hardware. Fortunately, Apple hasn't been so bold to also limit the Applications that run to Mavericks / ML only as that would be too obvious.
I would imagine you see a conspiracy hiding behind every tree in the forest. The only correct way for Apple to solve such a problem would be to issue a complete firmware update that could lead to even more support issues. In this case they simply took the avenue that caused the least harm and support issues.
In any event I have all sorts of old i86 hardware in the cellar, all the way back to 486 chips. Do you honestly expect each manufacture of these boards to support the latest version of Linux, Windows or whatever? Seriously.
Speaking of which even Linux has dropped support for old hardware. Why - because it is the smart thing to do, it makes no sense to support hardware nobody uses even in an open source environment. Conspiracy theorists often dismiss the reality of the practicle. If you want to look at an anti pattern here look at Windows which has strived to support old software for years and has turned into a disgusting mess.