> "I want my phone to work until the hardware fails... But apple explicitly tries to make the environment around the old phone obsolete."
As of December 31, 2022, U.S. telcos* decommed the 3G tech phones of the mid-2000s used.
As long as your iPhone can still use the telco network, it still does the functions it shipped with just fine.
A phone's environment depends on a lot more than its hardware maker.
(FWIW, thanks to its different incentives than other handset makers, Apple continues to offer the longest average OS support of the hardware and OS giants. Google's Pixel 8 is the first to bump Google's 3 years to match Apple's 7, and Samsung's S24 also finally matches 7 years. So on current devices, they stepped up, but on devices before 2023, Apple's support is more than double theirs. Arguably, these two finally stepping up were in response to the "environment" of Apple's incentives and EU regs.)
* Verizon was the last. AT&T turned off its 3G network on February 22, 2022. T-Mobile dismantled Sprint's 3G CDMA network on March 31, 2022, and its own 3G UMTS network on July 1, 2022.
Your old TV still works even with an adaptor - but there's no such a method for the phone.
I want my phone to work until the hardware fails, not when apple decides they want to push people to buy a new one next quarter.