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I don't know anything about phone vendor relationships with Qualcomm, but "able to deliver" does not necessarily mean "able to charge a reasonable price." If "a
by addaon 5y ago
I don't know anything about phone vendor relationships with Qualcomm, but "able to deliver" does not necessarily mean "able to charge a reasonable price." If "able to deliver" means "has competent engineers familiar with the product, and are willing to put those engineers on the project in exchange for full costs plus profits" rather than "can e-mail you an up-to-date repository", it can be prohibitive.
Especially with as few as ten million Pixel 3s sold [1], and a half-life of less than two years for cell phone usage, it's going to be hard to justify even a single engineer-year so late in the game for such a small audience.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pixel-3-by-the-numbers-googles-flagship-phone-was-a-flop https://www.zdnet.com/article/pixel-3-by-the-numbers-googles...
- sorenjan 5y agoThe half-life of less than two years is a chicken and egg problem. People buy new phones because their old ones doesn't get updates, and phone manufacturers doesn't update old phones because too few people use them. I don't understand how it could take a full time engineer one year to produce a software update for an already fully functional phone. Even if that was the case, $500k/year for ten million devices is 5 cents per phone. If companies can't be bothered to spend 5 cents to keep a fully functional phone from becoming e-waste for another year I think regulation is in order. For reference four of Google's execs recently got huge bonuses ($2M) for contributions to "Google’s performance against social and environmental goals for 2022." https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/4/22867419/google-execs-million-salaries-raise-sec https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/4/22867419/google-execs-mill...