It Can Also Make the Company More Money
“Planned obsolesce” is term regularly thrown around at this point. It’s the theory that Apple and similar companies plague their old phones with slowdowns and incompatibility issues on purpose, so that consumers will be pushed into buying newer versions of the phones, thus raising revenue for the company.
It doesn’t appear this is the case, entirely. Apple isn’t purposefully looking for ways to phase out old iPhones; the problems are just a side effect from all of the other issues that we mentioned previously. However, the opposite also seems to be true. Apple has little reason to support compatibility with older devices when consumers are likely to buy new models. It’s not nefarious, but merely a part of any successful business.