6 ms·

The footnote says > For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported. So.. they might need to rip

The footnote says > For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services may not be supported. So.. they might need to rip out some problematic drivers, maybe? Like, imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative, you get to choose to continue updates but losing bluetooth as a feature. The footnote continues > See our Help Center for details. So kudos to first one dig out the exact page they're referring to (there's no link).

Zenst 3y ago
https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en That one, had link for me.
- yencabulator 3y ago
  Except that also just ends with > ** For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services might not be supported. which doesn't really say anything...
redeeman 3y ago
> imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative no, then you tell them that if they dont play ball, they will NEVER sell a single chip to anything google ever again, and then you hire some people to reverse engineer the shit, and make it work anyway. And then you publish all about how company X is being stupid and trying to work against efforts to save the environment, how they are trying very hard to make money on peoples hardware being obsoleted before time etc. But then we realize that google themselves have bummed out to large extents with what they have permitted on android and chromebooks, so anything like this would not happen
- eru 3y ago
  Good luck with that, in case the company goes out of business?
  - toast0 3y ago
    In that case, it's easy for Google to never buy from them again.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  Tell me you have never worked with hardware suppliers without telling me you have never worked with hardware suppliers. Imagine that the part you want (given the constraints, etc.) has maybe two suppliers. You pick one of them and use them in your product. Then they drop support and you pull this stunt. What do you think will happen? People will storm the company with pitchforks and they'll quietly release their full source code and promise to never do that ever again? No, what's actually going to happen is you're going to write a blog post, Hacker News is going to be like "yeah I worked with that supplier once, never again" and the average consumer is going to be like "who is this company?" and it will be forgotten by next week. Your reverse engineered drivers, which you of course spent millions of dollars on hiring top-tier engineers to make, will ship and the company will immediately sue you for infringement. Maybe if you did a very careful job you might be able to claim some sort of interoperatability defense and win the case years from now. Before then the court will grant an injunction preventing the sale of your device. There's no need to tell the supplier that you will never work with them again. You've ruined the relationship already. And the other supplier? They probably won't work with you either, because they're doing the same thing and would like to keep doing it, thank you very much. Oh, you think you're Google so people will care about your business? They're selling 10x the volume to Samsung for their smart fridges. And now you get to I guess create an entire division to create a Bluetooth chip from scratch. By the way leadership wants to ship Pixel 9 on time so can you please have it ready by December? And it needs to support all the latest features because it would truly suck if Apple shipped Bluetooth 6.5 support before we did.
  - redeeman 3y ago
    perhaps if it was something mega complex, but we are talking a bluetooth chip, hardly an unwinnable scenario for google. are you saying for real that google isnt big enough to get its way with these things? they could buy these puny suppliers, piss on every desk in their offices, and close them down, just for fun if they so wanted. and how come this "sued into oblivion" doesnt happen when the community writes drivers for linux in the cases where vendors do not play ball? are you saying theres absolutely no way google could pay money to make this happen? get real
    - 3y ago
- tytso 3y ago
  Unfortunately, the supply chain often goes 3 and 4 levels deep. And by the time you get to companies that far in the supply chain, (a) no one has ever heard of that company, so the trying to threaten them with reputational damage doesn't really work (it will be some random set of chinese characters for a company in Shenzhen, for example), and (b) it will turn out that the team that wrote the device driver for that particular subcomponent in the SOC was disbanded as soon as the part was released, and 4 years later, half are working for a different company, and half were died during the COVID pandemic. Sure, if you could set the Wayback machine back in time, and require that device driver be upstreamed, with enough programming information so it's possible to maintain the device driver, maybe it would be possible to upgrade to a newer kernel that doesn't have eleven hundred zero-day vulnerabilities. But meanwhile, back in the real world, very often there's not a whole lot you can do. So this is why it's kind of sad when people insist on buying Nvidia video chips that have proprietary blobs because performance, or power consumption, or whatever, instead of the more boring alternative that doesn't have the same eye-bleeding performance, but which has an open source device driver. Our buying choices, and the product reviewers that only consider performance, or battery life, etc., drives the supply chain, and the products that we get. And this is why we can't have nice things.

Zenst 3y ago

https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/6220366?hl=en That one, had link for me.

yencabulator 3y ago
Except that also just ends with > ** For devices prior to 2021 that will receive extended updates, some features and services might not be supported. which doesn't really say anything...

redeeman 3y ago

> imagine the bluetooth chip vendor not being cooperative no, then you tell them that if they dont play ball, they will NEVER sell a single chip to anything google ever again, and then you hire some people to reverse engineer the shit, and make it work anyway. And then you publish all about how company X is being stupid and trying to work against efforts to save the environment, how they are trying very hard to make money on peoples hardware being obsoleted before time etc. But then we realize that google themselves have bummed out to large extents with what they have permitted on android and chromebooks, so anything like this would not happen

eru 3y ago
Good luck with that, in case the company goes out of business?
- toast0 3y ago
  In that case, it's easy for Google to never buy from them again.
saagarjha 3y ago
Tell me you have never worked with hardware suppliers without telling me you have never worked with hardware suppliers. Imagine that the part you want (given the constraints, etc.) has maybe two suppliers. You pick one of them and use them in your product. Then they drop support and you pull this stunt. What do you think will happen? People will storm the company with pitchforks and they'll quietly release their full source code and promise to never do that ever again? No, what's actually going to happen is you're going to write a blog post, Hacker News is going to be like "yeah I worked with that supplier once, never again" and the average consumer is going to be like "who is this company?" and it will be forgotten by next week. Your reverse engineered drivers, which you of course spent millions of dollars on hiring top-tier engineers to make, will ship and the company will immediately sue you for infringement. Maybe if you did a very careful job you might be able to claim some sort of interoperatability defense and win the case years from now. Before then the court will grant an injunction preventing the sale of your device. There's no need to tell the supplier that you will never work with them again. You've ruined the relationship already. And the other supplier? They probably won't work with you either, because they're doing the same thing and would like to keep doing it, thank you very much. Oh, you think you're Google so people will care about your business? They're selling 10x the volume to Samsung for their smart fridges. And now you get to I guess create an entire division to create a Bluetooth chip from scratch. By the way leadership wants to ship Pixel 9 on time so can you please have it ready by December? And it needs to support all the latest features because it would truly suck if Apple shipped Bluetooth 6.5 support before we did.
- redeeman 3y ago
  perhaps if it was something mega complex, but we are talking a bluetooth chip, hardly an unwinnable scenario for google. are you saying for real that google isnt big enough to get its way with these things? they could buy these puny suppliers, piss on every desk in their offices, and close them down, just for fun if they so wanted. and how come this "sued into oblivion" doesnt happen when the community writes drivers for linux in the cases where vendors do not play ball? are you saying theres absolutely no way google could pay money to make this happen? get real
  - 3y ago
tytso 3y ago
Unfortunately, the supply chain often goes 3 and 4 levels deep. And by the time you get to companies that far in the supply chain, (a) no one has ever heard of that company, so the trying to threaten them with reputational damage doesn't really work (it will be some random set of chinese characters for a company in Shenzhen, for example), and (b) it will turn out that the team that wrote the device driver for that particular subcomponent in the SOC was disbanded as soon as the part was released, and 4 years later, half are working for a different company, and half were died during the COVID pandemic. Sure, if you could set the Wayback machine back in time, and require that device driver be upstreamed, with enough programming information so it's possible to maintain the device driver, maybe it would be possible to upgrade to a newer kernel that doesn't have eleven hundred zero-day vulnerabilities. But meanwhile, back in the real world, very often there's not a whole lot you can do. So this is why it's kind of sad when people insist on buying Nvidia video chips that have proprietary blobs because performance, or power consumption, or whatever, instead of the more boring alternative that doesn't have the same eye-bleeding performance, but which has an open source device driver. Our buying choices, and the product reviewers that only consider performance, or battery life, etc., drives the supply chain, and the products that we get. And this is why we can't have nice things.