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Well, nothing you say is wrong, and it isn't simply that they are foolish. Hardware companies just can't figure out a way to give us free OS upgrades and make m
by xrd 3y ago
Well, nothing you say is wrong, and it isn't simply that they are foolish. Hardware companies just can't figure out a way to give us free OS upgrades and make money. They generally stop making money the second the check clears. Apple has that one figured out, the longer you are a customer the more Apple services you buy. Google has a fundamental different model with Android where they are trying to make money and coerce their integrator partners to keep upgrading, but the money is way different.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoXiaomi doesn't make money from HW sales either, they rely on services revenue. They also have the same same 3yr support life every other Android OEM commits to. It's not foolish, it's shortsided. At the scale major OEMs operate, even a dozen engineers per device generation would be a rounding error.
- manderley 3y agoSeems 5 years are now the standard.
- _aavaa_ 3y agoExcept in most cases one of those years hardly counts since many non-top-of-the-line android phones ship with an already outdated OS (though this too has been slowly improving, as has the time it takes to get them up to the newest version).
- karteum 3y ago> Hardware companies just can't figure out a way to give us free OS upgrades and make money The biggest question is : why does it take so much efforts to design an upgrade ? Unfortunately Google never made it mandatory for chipset/hardware designers to have an abstraction layer (similar to BIOS/UEFI/ACPI/system tables) that would make a single Android kernel and OS install and work on every devices... (And I have criticized Microsoft a lot for many things, but I have to acknoledge that they have an amazing backward-compatibility track record, even for device drivers, while Linux has its stable_api_nonsense policy...)