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Comment by jonquark | Hacker News Reader

There is a related story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18895064

I think (as I said in the previous discussion) that the key issue with the lengthening phone upgrade cycle is security patches.

Manufacturers are trying very hard to have built-in obsolescence: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/31/dutch_court_says_sa...

Unless this fundamentally changes, most non-techy users will have to needlessly upgrade perfectly good devices, run insecure software or become much more savvy about which manufacturers are better in this regard - and the outcome is likely to be some malware has a very large distribution followed by a lot of press.

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I think regulations around mandatory support periods should be set for the entire EU rather than on a country-by-country basis. They were arguing for four years and that seems too short.

It would be nice if they could set the mandatory support period to the same length as the patent protection period. If Samsung thinks four years of support is enough, than the patented technologies in the phone should only get four years of protection.

> Manufacturers are trying very hard to have built-in obsolescence

This would be a golden opportunity for a manufacturer to come out with a promised 5+ year support cycle. I think one of the reason they don't is because each manufacturer has 78 slightly different models every year to support, but in a maturing market they should have a better idea on what the market wants and cut that down. Why does know one learn the limited SKUs lesson from apple?

In that respect the Librem phone is arriving at almost the perfect time, it's close to PC levels of supportability.

Yup, I totally want that. I want a phone that will last 5 years or longer... ideally about 10 years, like the old ones used to.

The "old ones" were fundamentally different devices, though...

> Why does no one learn the limited SKUs lesson from apple?

I think even Apple has forgotten that lesson.

I have an iPhone 6 Plus that's going on 4.5 years old and it's doing fine (better than last year even with iOS 12), save a temperamental ring/vibrate switch. I recently sold my 4s that was in a drawer (about 7 years old at the time) and it also worked fine.

My iPhone 5 from 2013 is still in daily use, typing this message on an iPad 3 from 2012, on my desk is an iMac from 2008. If you are careful, these product will last a long time. No need to replace every 2-3 years.

This is one of the reasons I'm looking forward to the Purism Librem 5. Running essentially standard GNU/Linux with mainline kernel drivers for all the peripherals means you're not dependent on any one entity to provide security updates.

For your average consumer, this is probably a bad thing.

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