What I am saying is that these issues will become more and more pressing now that they are operating at a much larger scale than in prior years. In the past they could piss-off their cult followers and move on. I am not sure this is the case today. I think it might be reasonable to assume that normal folks --the bulk of the people buying iDevices--, not tech guys or cult members, will not take kindly to their 16 GB iPhone becoming obsolete simply because Apple released an iPad with more resolution. They would feel that this is absurd, and rightly so. There's nothing whatsoever wrong with older devices. Techies are different. I buy crap I don't really need just 'cause it's cool and sometimes because I want to actively support the company doing the cool stuff. Normal folk are far more practical than that.
If a normal person has a lesser-storage iPhone and, overnight, half their apps go away because they wont fit, they will not run out and buy a new phone. They'll be pissed. This will be particularly true if some mainstream media outlet grabs ahold of the reasons that led to this and outs the story to the general public.
There's another angle to this as well: Trash. Now Apple is in a position to generate, quite literally, mountains of trash based on decisions to not support older devices. I am not an environmental extremist by any measure, but I certainly don't like the idea of millions of perfectly good devices ending-up in the trash bin due to a bad tech decision.
