User blog comment:FishTank/State of Mobile 2021/@comment-1038387-20201215204336/@comment-4522253-20201215212129

I know from experience what you mean. I upgraded to a new tablet myself last year from a 2015 model. There are some things that continue to work well, and others that do not age well. Which speaks to the point: tablets are seen as a luxury investment and are not updated by consumers as often as phones. iPad, in general, has the biggest share of "mobile" tablets; no other manufacturers have really been able to fully capture that market, and Android tablet sales are fairly low across the industry. The decline in tablet usage is largely because those features either find their way into phones or because laptops have ever smaller and more mobile form factors (including tablet-style devices). Our analytics are not including Surface or ChromeOS devices as tablet devices, for example. The portability of such devices is eliminating the middle-ground class traditionally known as tablets, since at least 2014.

But, as much to your point, we support browser versions when we design features like Feeds only to a specific baseline. If your device can't support a given OS version (and with it, browser version), we're sorry that we can't provide the best support for new features. I may be able to look up and report how frequently older devices like yours try to access our systems, but I know that won't be as much of a comfort to you as the new iPad that is coming your way. Despite having few or no moving parts, many electronics do have parts that age and burn out (and therefore decrease the capabilities below what they were when you first got them). It's not as easy to see such integrity failures inside a tablet as it is when light bulbs burn out, but the same concepts apply.