Even with android custom ROMs like Lineage, support eventually ends. Meanwhile, you can just slap on linux onto any old computer and its still getting the latest updates. 🤔
Why not just do the same thing with phones? Forever phone updates? 👀
PC operating systems are, at least to a broad degree, generic. That’s because a huge amount of backwards compatibility is built right into the PC architecture, much to the delight or chagrin of everybody depending on who you ask. There’s silicon on your processor’s die right now that’s doing fuck-all except ensuring that if you were struck by the perverse urge, you could boot MS-DOS 1.0 onto it even though it’s virtually guaranteed that you never will.
Phone operating systems absolutely are not generic, because each phone model is basically unique unto itself in terms of what hardware is in it, and backwards compatibility is not in any way a design goal. Furthermore, the entire package has to be rolled into a single unified ROM image.
There are proprietary core components in phones, notably their SoCs (systems-on-a-chip) and modems (which are often built into the SoC) which their designers jealously guard and are loaded down with patents and other IP restrictions. This hardware requires closed source drivers which must be updated or at the very least recompiled for new kernel versions if the OS is to be updated. That’s for Android, anyhow. It’s even worse for Apple devices, because they’re entirely closed and Apple is in total control of both the hardware and the software. At least they bother to support their own devices with updates for quite some time, but even they’re not absolved of fuckery – see, for instance, the deliberate slowing-down-with-updates scandal from a few years ago.
If nobody is providing source code or compatible binaries for the core hardware your phone needs in order to work, at minimum it’s going to be impossible to update your device beyond the kernel version that was last supported on it, even with a custom ROM. And all of this is before getting into locked bootloaders and other chicanery that prevents you from running your own code outside of user space on the hardware even if you had the code to run.
At the end of the day: The hardware vendors are absolutely not interested in providing driver support to end users or source code to anyone, and the handset makers and most especially the cell service carriers, at least in the US where the majority of people buy or lease their phones from said carriers, literally have a vested interest in dropping support as soon as they can get away with it. That’s because rolling out updates to oodles of individual phone models costs money to do, but they only make more money off of you by selling you a new phone.
older electronics, were designed to last 5-10+years, companies realized they wernt getting any more profit, so they had planned obselescene into every electronic device. every 2 years. microwaves built pre-2000 would last 20-30+years, and with more efficiency, while more modern ones are prone to catch on fire or break down after a certain amount of uses.
microwaves […] more modern ones are prone to catch on fire
🧐 Got a link?
Because they are incentivizing us to buy new phones. It’s not a technical reason it’s a capitalism reason.
Wasn’t one of the phone companies found to be purposely slowing down older phones with each new update
Apple aggressively throttled CPUs when new models came out.
They claimed it was due to age of batteries and to prevent overheating. But then Samsungs started exploding and I think people just let it go.
Not sure if they still do it or not.
the exploding has nothing to do with this throttling tho.
Not so much overheating as dropout. Batteries lose both energy capacity and power capacity over time. If you draw too much current from an older battery, its voltage will drop significantly and possibly prematurely shut down the phone.
Lowering peak current (by slowing down the phone), can prevent your phone from shutting off while it still has like 20% capacity left.
Considering Apple was doing battery replacements for like $60 (before bumping to $100), and this was a setting that could be turned off, I think the only real crime was enabling it by default and not properly informing users.
That was Apple
“Battery degradation”
and now people , some of thema re. realizing the current iteration of phones, iphones, samsungs are really no different from the last few generations.
With that username, I trust this answer completely.
Planned obsolescence to a degree. If you spend $1k a year on a new phone the C suite makes happy faces, but of you spend $1k every few years the C suite makes sad faces. What better way to keep them happy by stopping support for a device.
I mean, I guess my question is: “Why don’t they pull the same shit on computers then?”
Because IBM built the PC as a side project out of mainly off-the-shelf parts, except for the BIOS, never intending it to be more than one of many personal computers in the market… and then Compaq and Columbia Data Products reverse engineered said BIOS making PC-compatible clones a possibility.
Open BIOSes and a personal computer made of essentially off-the-shelf parts led to everyone and their aunt making PC-compatible machines, and the personal computer boom, and most personal computers being able to run mostly the same software.
IBM tried to lock it back down with the PS/2, and Microsoft also later tried to lock it down to Windows with some shady schemes like ACPI, but all attempts ultimately failed because by that point the PC ecosystem was so large that any attempts at lockdown were sidestepped by other vendors, or eventually reverse engineered or bypassed.
Sadly the same never happened with phones. The PC thing was a serendipitous fluke to start with, phones aren’t made of off-the-shelf parts, and manufacturers were wise to the “risk” and made sure to keep as much control as possible.
Microsoft makes money supporting their OS on older hardware for businesses. That has gone on long enough they have to continue, and they might as well share it with everyone else.
Windows11 is trying to do just that; having a minimum spec chip, so they could eventually drop support for a lot of older hardware. But PCs are so modular that you can pretty much add any hardware together and the OS (such as Linux) can figure out the packages you need to make it all run…but even Linux has dropped a lot of 32bit support in the last few years. So it happens, just at a much longer time frame
even Linux has dropped a lot of 32bit support in the last few years
And that’s just because no developer uses those systems anymore actively. If you really want to, you can pick up from where they left and bring the support back. But as 32bit x86 CPUs haven’t been produced in the last 20 years (give or take a few years) there’s just not that many working systems around anymore.
They’re trying to, but market adoption has said so far that we’re unwilling to tolerate it.
Operating systems for computers are generic, operating systems for phones are specific
This is the crux of the problem, there is no single repository where a mobile operating system has been made to generically work anywhere
PC = General Purpose
Mobile devices = Purpose builtEven for Linux there is a end of life for devices: https://linuxiac.com/linux-kernel-to-drop-support-for-legacy-i486-and-early-586-cpus/
The difference to phones is that around Linux everything is open source so that some poor shmuck ho still has this old computer and is capable can keep supporting it for everyone. When it comes to phones it’s much more difficult because a lot of the parts are closed source. Similarly to Mac OS and Windows.
It won’t last forever though…
A lot of the non-upgradability is the pursuit of smallest form factor. But then everyone throws a case on it anyways. Miniaturization has diminishing returns and we hit that long ago with laptops.
Eventually we’ll hit it with phones, and then it’s just a matter of time till a solid “base” with swapable components come out. There’s been a couple already, but they still require a sacrifice of size or speed/power.
That’s why manufacturers are trying to push us to watches or glasses. They need to shrink the form factor to keep up the (insanely profitable) strategy of selling a brand new unit every 2 years.
PCs are generally based around the X86 chip architecture which is an open standard. PCs are basically modular and lots of manufacturers make components that are interchangeable, creating a huge variety of possible hardware. Hardware suppliers also sell to both big manufacturing companies and individuals. It’s therefore in their interest to distribute their drivers freely even if closed source. If hardware breaks it can be replaced and the PC keeps going, and some components can be kept going for years as a result as people dot have to throw the whole machine out everything something breaks or becomes obsolete.
Mobile devices are closed standards. They use a more limited range of off the shelf components which are deeply integrated into a device, and the hardware suppliers provide their drivers to the device manufacturer or the device manufacturer builds their own drivers and custom version of the os. Hardware can have very long retail lives selling for years and still being functional, so the manufacturers have an incentive to keep drivers available and even update them.
It means mobile devices are more locked down, and the hardware drivers harder to come by. This makes it hard to build custom OS for them and therefore when the device comes to the end of its support from the maker there is limited options to keep it running securely.
It’s effectively a type of planned obscelence that keeps the mobile industry going. Manufacturers stop supporting old devices (because it provides no income) and then consumers have to buy new ones as no one can provide the security patches to keep them secure.
So for mobile there is nothing to force Android or IOS to be kept up to date for old devices. The money is in new devices, and for Android manufacturers are responsible for the mobile device anyway. While for PC it’s in Microsofts interests to keep updating and keeping devices secure via Windows becuase devices have long lifespans and old components can be in the PC ecosystem for decades. Similarly Linux is able to support hardware for a long time because drivers are more freely available and long lifespans to hardware incentivise people to put the effort in to write open drivers when they’re not there.
Microsoft is trying to force an upgrade cycle at the moment with Win 11 though. And the laptop industry ia more like the mobile industry than the desktop pc industry with more propriety devices and locked down hardware.
I agree, but the instruction set (what you called a chip architecture, which isn’t wrong at all but potentially confusable with microarchitecture which is how you implement the instruction set architecture) has nothing to do with this. Though Apple does have the ability to make their own instruction set if they want, they and (mainstream) Android currently use ARM, which is also an open standard.
Corporate greed.
The way that Google and Apple approaches programming is a little obtuse and it never gets out of the way.
Without someone like Linus Torvalds rewriting a whole new approach to mobile phones we’re all stuck with the majority offerings from lock-in corporations.
Then there’s telcos and manufacturers who never get out of the way either. So, even if we run to changemakers like FDroid the desired compatibility is still limited by a cacophony of weird restrictions and unknown difficulties.
With mobile phones we need to start manufacturing with Open Source to get the compatible-mobiles industry up to standards first. It’s not something that’s happening because those guys are far too retired to come back to a new front for machine compatibles - it’s 80s stuff.
Also, a non-java scheme would be a better way to go. Java development is all about using giant washing machines to spin out compilations from esoteric versions of fragile code. Having code that didn’t break every year would be great too.
x86 hardware interfaces are traditionally pretty well documented and standardized, going back to the original IBM PC in the 1970s(?), enabling among other things an aftermarket of plug-in expansion cards and other peripherals. That standardization also makes it possible to write device drivers and keep them working.
ARM stuff on the other hand is closed and changes all the time. So this year’s peripheral won’t work with last year’s phone. Mac stuff is also like that, maybe not quite as much most of the time.
Directly from my ass, it’s my assumption that the primary maintainers just don’t have an incentivize the cost of supporting older devices and the disparate hardware configurations.
Like, planned obscellesance or not, smartphone churn is going to happen anyways. People lose them, smash them, fall into a pool with them, decide they NEED the newer camera soldered into them, etc…
It’s not like there are old phones in a closet somewhere propping up business critical infrastructure like with computers.
The cost vs utility of maintaining forward features and security patches for a massive catalog of hardware configurations just isn’t there.
I think it has a bit to do with a lot of firmware or drivers being closed source too. I feel like a couple years ago I ran into that issue with camera my old Android phone had
When I bought my phone 5 years ago, 128G of storage seemed limitless. Now it appears to be a tightening constraint. Should I be able to increase that storage, I wouldn’t even be thinking of a new phone. Sadly, Samsung removed storage expansion from their flagships.
Sadly, Samsung removed storage expansion from their flagships.
Behold!
(Not my image, I stole it from reddit)
This appears to be an iPhone, but you can do the same with any phone, just use double-sided tape xD
This is amazing, hahah
just use double-sided tape
Could be a good use for one of those cases with slots for cards. Slide the drive in the slot, cut a hole for the USB C jack at the bottom, et voila.
No parts standardization, replacements, or compatability.
Short lifespan batteries.
Very small chipsets/components have capabilities increase via tech advancement at a faster rate than larger boards.
Actually very similar to larger apple products as well.
