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? 👀
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? 👀
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.
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
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.
Yeah, no point supporting something that has become obsolete. Foss community often puts effort in as passion, but a business will not want technical debt and move on to the next hardware support
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.
They’re trying to, but market adoption has said so far that we’re unwilling to tolerate it.