The business side of me has trouble believing that Apple is naive enough to not implement at least a similar strategy, which has been adopted across many industries for the sake of continued sales. If that's not the case, what is Apple doing to guarantee their continued growth?
Apple, and most businesses do have roadmaps of what they should do for future products. And unfortunately, DRAMs, SSD, and LiIon batteries do have finite lifespan, and that’s just how the technology is right now. To give Apple a bit of credit, they tend to use whatever newest tech that they can get in volume to give the best product they can make. Compare to some Android OEMs who still use lower grade/speed SSDs/chips just so they can sell their phones for less.
The idea of planned obsolescence is that it is intentional. I doubt that Apple intentionally release a gimped product hoping it to break prematurely. Nonetheless, as a consumer, we can be smarter in our buying behavior.
For example, I have the iPhone 5. It already has 1GB of RAM. I expect my next phone to have more RAM for better longevity. When Apple released the 6 still with just 1GB of RAM, I didn’t bite. I waited until the 6S. Something like that. There are turning points in tech where you will end up with an “obsolete” product sooner than you think because that’s the progress of the technology ie. buying an iPhone 5C when the 6 was released. The 5C was the last 32 bit iPhone, so one would expect it won’t have as much longevity at that point in time due to the transition to 64bit. Another similar thing was the Core Duo Macs, where they were 32bit.
There’s also the early adopter period. You pay more for early tech that may or may not last long. Example, the first iPhone, the first iPad. That’s the risk for being at the bleeding edge, first adopters. It’s not like Apple intentionally gimped those products, but they were the first iterations, so Apple was testing the market with the early adopters. The rest of us simply enjoyed the refined newer revisions of the products (iPhone 3G/3GS, iPad 2). This is not planned obsolescence, it’s the nature of a product cycle.
Considering the brand that Apple has right now, intentionally gimping products will hurt the brand. And the cost of that is a magnitude higher than whatever profit Apple is making. Apple is not stupid.
