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You're getting updates for PCs over 10 years old because thanks to the way IBM PC clones work, the OS kernel can be independently updated from the drivers of th
by FirmwareBurner 3y ago
You're getting updates for PCs over 10 years old because thanks to the way IBM PC clones work, the OS kernel can be independently updated from the drivers of the peripherals, not tied to them as it is in the ARM ecosystem with obscure FW blobs that are tied to the interfaces of a particular Android/Linux version.
On Widows at least, drivers from the Windows Vista days still work just fine on Windows 11 as the ABI hasn't changed that much since then. Good luck with that on Android.
- CivBase 3y agoSounds to me like a design problem, not a justification for letting companies maintain control over the goods purchased from them.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoSure, but since time immemoriam this has been left to the "free market" to sort itself out, and the "free market" has let us to this point. Should some government regulatory body like the EU intervene to force their hand? Maybe. But do remember that in the "old-days" of dumbphones and featurephones you were getting no SW updates at all ever and replacing your phone every 2-3 years was the norm back then. It's only now that we're thinking about this as we start to think about phones more as general purpose computers in our pocket and less as phone dialing and messaging devices, like in the old days. One thing's for sure, it's that the free market will never self regulate itself on this matter, same how it has not self regulated itself in the auto industry were it not for the EPA and EU, we'd still be buying ICE cars that turn our cities into smog if we were to leve emissions to the auto manufacturers.
- tortoise_in 3y agoLineageOs