5 ms·

Wasn't that because Texas Instruments pulled out of the mobile market?

wtallis 12y ago
That may be the excuse, but it isn't much of a reason. Google's got the clout to get rid of problems like that. They just didn't deem it worth the expense.
- deelowe 12y ago
  Do you have like 0 experience in hardware or just trolling people? If TI refuses to support the hardware, there isn't much you can do. Besides the enormous technical challenge of reverse engineering all of the software, there's likely legal issues as well. If a hardware vendor pulls support for your product, it's almost always better to end of life the device. A better argument is that vendors of consumer hardware should require that their partners sign up for long term support agreements where warranted. Let's not pretend that, just because a software company is big, they can force one of the largest chip vendors in the world to bow to their demands.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - wtallis 12y ago
    If you're an end user or a small shop, you SOL when the hardware gets dropped. But a company like Google always has options. It's not like TI went out of business or stopped answering Google's phone calls out of spite. Google can totally afford to buy a source code license for the drivers and firmware, and they would realistically only be taking on a small added QA burden since they know everything works as-is with the old OS version and they know what they changed with their new OS version. If they were really serious about maintaining their product leadership, they could even hire some of the original team that wrote the drivers and firmware.
    - deelowe 12y ago
      They answer your phone calls, they just say "it's not a priority for us to fix this right now" and then the negotiations start. Some times, that's where things end, because you just can't meet the demands of the vendor. Happens all the time in hardware for big and small businesses alike.
  - ldng 12y ago
    I don't get your point. Since TI pulled out, Google can't fix a software bugs (in webview for instance) which have nothing to do with hardware ? [edit] Just saw this comment that make sense : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943924
tdkl 12y ago
Glass runs the same TI hardware - and also 4.4. For another anecdote, Galaxy Nexus also supported BT 4.0 BLE with its Broadcom chip, but Google decided it wont enable it for 4.3 release. When I've found that out, it pissed me off immensely, so I found a solution how to enable the support and posted it as a flashable .zip on xda [1]. Same was also for N7 2012 and N10. After flashing BLE worked just fine. Google doesn't care for its old devices, nor did it cared when it shipped, Nexus line was always awesome hardware, but not fully utilized by software, which is sad from an engineers point. [1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/development/mod-4-3-ble-libraries-xml-rom-stock-t2387107 http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/development/mod...

That may be the excuse, but it isn't much of a reason. Google's got the clout to get rid of problems like that. They just didn't deem it worth the expense.

deelowe 12y ago
Do you have like 0 experience in hardware or just trolling people? If TI refuses to support the hardware, there isn't much you can do. Besides the enormous technical challenge of reverse engineering all of the software, there's likely legal issues as well. If a hardware vendor pulls support for your product, it's almost always better to end of life the device. A better argument is that vendors of consumer hardware should require that their partners sign up for long term support agreements where warranted. Let's not pretend that, just because a software company is big, they can force one of the largest chip vendors in the world to bow to their demands.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- wtallis 12y ago
  If you're an end user or a small shop, you SOL when the hardware gets dropped. But a company like Google always has options. It's not like TI went out of business or stopped answering Google's phone calls out of spite. Google can totally afford to buy a source code license for the drivers and firmware, and they would realistically only be taking on a small added QA burden since they know everything works as-is with the old OS version and they know what they changed with their new OS version. If they were really serious about maintaining their product leadership, they could even hire some of the original team that wrote the drivers and firmware.
  - deelowe 12y ago
    They answer your phone calls, they just say "it's not a priority for us to fix this right now" and then the negotiations start. Some times, that's where things end, because you just can't meet the demands of the vendor. Happens all the time in hardware for big and small businesses alike.
- ldng 12y ago
  I don't get your point. Since TI pulled out, Google can't fix a software bugs (in webview for instance) which have nothing to do with hardware ? [edit] Just saw this comment that make sense : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943924

tdkl 12y ago

Glass runs the same TI hardware - and also 4.4. For another anecdote, Galaxy Nexus also supported BT 4.0 BLE with its Broadcom chip, but Google decided it wont enable it for 4.3 release. When I've found that out, it pissed me off immensely, so I found a solution how to enable the support and posted it as a flashable .zip on xda [1]. Same was also for N7 2012 and N10. After flashing BLE worked just fine. Google doesn't care for its old devices, nor did it cared when it shipped, Nexus line was always awesome hardware, but not fully utilized by software, which is sad from an engineers point. [1] http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/development/mod-4-3-ble-libraries-xml-rom-stock-t2387107 http://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-nexus/development/mod...