Not OP, but I work on medical devices. One product at my last job had an expected service life of 20 years. FDA requires that the manufacturer maintain the abil

Not OP, but I work on medical devices. One product at my last job had an expected service life of 20 years. FDA requires that the manufacturer maintain the ability to support and service a medical device for, IIRC, 5 years after market exit. In the 10 years after release that I was on that project, we went through multiple OS upgrades from Windows NT to XP Embedded, to Windows Embedded Industry (replacement for XP Embedded) and a number of replacement x86 CPU boards had to be qualified as one manufacturer after another exited the market. Since the device is validated as a complete system, we often had to buy a year or two stockpile of existing product to give us time to start the Validation process for replacement hardware. You usually have plenty of warning from a supplier that a product (Windows or a CPU board) is going EOL at a certain point, so you need to start validating whatever the next replacement will be well ahead of time.