The main message I take from this story is that a decent quorum of consumers want Apple to offer a smaller phone in each generation. The OP seems not to have minded having to upgrade eventually, just not to a “virtual tablet.” I’ve heard others express the same desire.

I'm still daily-driving an iPhone 7, so I sympathize. A few apps have complained about the older OS; so far I've been able to react by deleting the apps.

Smartphones cause a truly astonishing amount of waste (https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2018/12/11/right-to-repair-...: ~151 million phones discarded in the US each year, as of 2018), to say nothing of the various social follow-on effects that are being argued to death elsewhere. I was a very late smartphone adopter and I'm already trying to reduce the amount I depend on this thing; too much of their marketing always struck me as being more akin to new sneakers than life-improving tech.

As a dev I understand the challenges of supporting older hardware. As a conscious consumer, I wish there were another option available in the market, and I haven't yet decided what I'll do when my current device finally needs to be retired.

To play devil’s advocate here, I actually think iPhones have some of the best longevity and resale value, compared to virtually any other product or brand - except perhaps if we go back decades to appliances made near the middle of the century. The fact that a device can be perfectly usable for 5+ years is pretty good compared to most other things I find myself buying and replacing in less time.

Otherwise I think the only real “solution” to this is to rethink your notion of a phone. Personally I tend to use WhatsApp, email, and other non-phone-specific applications, and don’t use the actual phone feature very often. So theoretically I could use any small computing device and upgrade its components as needed, and not need to have a phone at all.

The real question, IMO, is why the need to release a new model every year? I think a lot of the churn of both hardware and software had nothing to do with technological progress, and everything to do with generating sales.

This situation doesn't happen with hardware running an open source OS. For example laptops running Linux can upgrade basically forever. Why are community maintained open source OSes better at this than commercially maintained proprietary OSes?