They decided for me that my updated iphone 4s should never be able to be restored to factory condition and I would be forced to suffer terrible performance and battery life.

They decided for me that all my apps should auto-update. This incentivizes application developers putting their users on a constant upgrade treadmill (similar to apple). I guess there is so much amazing "Innovation" happening in every update that they decided that users absolutely must want every single update. This has caused developers to never consider a software feature-set as released or finished and free of bugs. They have taken this horrible mindset that only existed on the web and brought it to native apps.

Then there is the heavy handed approach of forcing you to update your entire OS just to run a developer IDE. Something previously _unheard_ of and frankly embarrassing from an engineering point of view.

Well folks, that's all the time we have for this segment today, tune in tomorrow for more.. :)

One obvious example is the fact that Apple does not allow you to install anything but the latest OS (and possibly one minor revision back) on an iOS device. OS upgrade kills your battery life or makes a critical third-party app stop working? Too bad, so sad, sucks to be you, there's no way to go back.

They don't force you to upgrade, but they artificially block the ability to go back.

Example: Apple held my iPad 2 hostage until I stopped using iOS 8. I forgot my unlock pin (because I lent my iPad to someone else) and there is no way to factory reset it without also updating the OS.

So now Flux no longer works, and there is no way to adjust the gamma on this device, which means I no longer like reading on it before bed. And there are plenty of other regressions in iOS 9 as well. And they forced me to update my desktop just to interact with it.

SO, Apple very much forced me to update, if I wanted to keep using my device. There is no reason that updating iOS should be required to factory reset it.

Isn't that making a decision for you? "users will only ever need to install software from our central app store" is deciding for the user that they don't need to be able to run whatever software they want on their device. It's fine if, as a user, you decide you don't need that capability, but you are still having that decided for you.

Disclaimer: I don't know the current status of 3rd party app on iOS but my point still stands.

They decided that ios9 on 5S should stutter while scrolling throughout the OS. A smooth working device experience on 8 was broken by an update and 10 minutes later with no option to revert anymore.

Interesting it coincided with release of SE couple months later...

All vendors suck, they just all have their own incentive.