Look, you want a service contract, go buy a service contract. Otherwise, how on earth can you demand that a product you bought yesterday be guaranteed to be upgradeable to a product released tomorrow? It's just preposterous.
And your example is simply inaccurate. The hardware (from HP or otherwise) doesn't stop working the way it always has, it just becomes vulnerable to recently discovered issues. After a 1 year warranty (or whatever), why should you get free updates simply because you want them? Sure, many companies do provide them, for whatever reason, but the issue is whether you have a right to such updates for no other reason than your opinion that the thing you bought should have a lifetime of whatever you think it should be!
And the example cited here of Apple being good at this is simply laughable: Apple patches things when they want to, and they have a long track record of being slow to roll patches out. They were also very late to OTA updates, and so on. I have a pal who is still chugging along on his old PowerPC Mac running the software it ran back in 2004. From his standpoint, until it dies, it does exactly the same job it did when he bought it, and any change would cost him time and money, and the fact that you or I might have a reason to change doesn't mean that he would agree with either of us!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
