This is something I just don't understand. As phones get more powerful, there is absolutely no excuse to not support them for longer. When did the standard for supporting consumer devices get so low? Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
Meanwhile, I have a Samsung Note 2 phone which is 8 years old. It's fast enough for what I do (browse the internet for 10 minutes a day, send a dozen WhatsApp messages, book an Uber). That thing was released in 2012 and could no longer upgrade to new Android releases in 2014. That's pathetic. I need to replace it this year, not because it's too slow, but because it's insecure and no longer supported by anything. I was going to buy a smart scale the other day, but the app doesn't support my Android version. Also wanted an app for syncing the time with my Bluetooth GShock. Not supported. Sonos speakers? Not supported. It's a garbage phone now not because of the hardware, but because of the lack of support.
Embedded development is hard. Really hard. And much of that difficulty is intrinsic to the problem space, so it isn't going away anytime soon. But much of it is just embedded developers being masochists and embedded tool developers being sadists. For phones, the pain is probably 90% avoidable. 90 percent!
No, I don't know why we live with it either.
The reason your phone is different than your PC is that the PC's OS has all the drivers for everything built in, then loads whichever drivers your specific machine needs. Embedded Linux images are built specific to one model of hardware, with weird crappy OEM-provided drivers baked in and nowhere else available. It doesn't _have_ to be this way. But it is.
So to support your phone, the vendor basically maintains a custom-patched kernel with a bizarre build process. And that's done more or less independently for every model they're supporting. It's a huge headache!
Why deep embedded is this way is a little more understandable. (It's also where I prefer to work if I'm doing software; I don't like embedded Linux. It's just not my thing. So if I'm wrong when talking about it, that's why.) Deep embedded is often working with very limited hardware, custom circuits, and general strangeness. It also can serve the industrial, automotive, or medical markets, which naturally tend to longer product cycles. So the product is generally less standard, meaning it makes more sense (at least to me) why the support flow is so bespoke.
Not really, Google applies the same disposable approach to supporting ChromeOS on bog-standard x86 hardware. I have an x86 Chromebox that Google suddenly dropped all support for - including security patches - with a generic message that "your device is out of its support window". This basically rendered it useless as a ChromeOS device, because you can't browse the public web with an unpatched web browser. Yet I can run up-to-date Linux in Crouton.
I don't see how this is technically any different than Microsoft deciding to stop all Windows 10 patches on PCs older than a certain age not because of any blocking compatibility issue, but just because they've passed a certain age threshold and they don't want to do it anymore.
I used to evangelize ChromeOS as a great, simple solution for non-technical users who just want to browse the web without the hassle of maintaining a full-fledged PC, but I won't do that if Chrome devices are part of the smartphone "time based support model" rather than the "compatibility based support" model we've had on PCs for decades. A PC for basic use can easily last 10 years, OEMs who arbitrarily shorten that are not helping their customers.
After TI left the Android SoC space, most OEMs and Carriers are beholden to Qualcomm, who write their own drivers and will never mainline them, if they can help it: long upgrade cycles will hurt Qualcomms bottomline, planned obsolescence via kernel incompatibility is how they achieve that. I don't think customers will upgrade from Snapdragon X05 to Snapdragon X20 for the minor gains in performance, if their old device could get the latest Android features.
1. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2018/11/an-update-...
Not incidentally, "Qual" is german for "torture".
Done. You don't have to support the device for an eternity and, as a bonus, you can benefit from OS improvements to your drivers/etc. Hell, you and other manufactures using the same broadcom SOC (and hear me out... this might sound crazy) wouldn't have to spend the same engineering effort building drivers!
Of course, that would require manufactures to actually give a damn about driver quality, whereas the current situation allows them to push out the most broken patch imaginable to pass whatever conformance tests google asks for.
That would also cut into manufactures bottom line which is why I suspect they've not gone down this route. Gotta sell them phones every year... (they'd cut support to 1 month if they could)
"If only the bad people would just stop being bad!"
This mantra continually assumes goodwill from people who continue to show that they have none. At some point one needs to stop gaslighting themselves and their users and make the system more robust to bad actors. Manufacturers don't want to mainline their drivers? Fine. You can work on getting drivers mainlined while also stabilizing the interface so that it doesn't injure a billion customers when they don't.
They could force the OEM to play ball, like they require Google Play Services to be pre-installed.
I think Google really has to walk a fine line here. Android OEMs are already not thrilled with their lack of freedom when it comes to changing the experience on their phones. The more restrictions Google adds on, the closer some of them (especially Samsung) will be to cutting ties with the Android name and forking.
They are not powerless. They simply made the decision to treat carriers and device makers as the customers they cared about and not the people using the devices.
Huawei only stopped shipping the Store because they were legally obligated.
Google seems like the natural point for that. Maybe a law is needed? Too bad most law makers are completely tech illiterate.
But I agree, it won't change without some central force to kibosh it.
> Yup, and to that point, the fix is really stupid simple, push the drivers into the linux kernel mainline and give google (or whoever) a kernel build profile for your device.
Yeaaaaahhh... I don't see most companies doing that.
1. It is a lot of work to clean up your driver (that will only ever be used on one product) enough to be accepted into the mainline kernel. It takes time, effort and skill. Companies don't want to pay for that, because it doesn't contribute to bottom line. The MO is: get the product out... yesterday so we can sell it and make some money.
2. Even if it was accepted, does that mean it is going to work forever afterwards because the Linux kernel fairies / pixies / whatever will maintain it? No. If you're going push out a new release to end users, you'd better make damn sure it works. So that means each Android release has to go through a long round of QA. Who's going to pay for that?
There's only a couple ways out of the current mess we are in. Only one is likely to actually work.
Option 1: Release the IP! Have basically all phone SoCs (system on chip) use the same IP blocks for the display, I2C, SPI, memory controllers, GPIO, various sensors, power management, etc. Then you can be more like a PC where the system can basically boot up, and you can then download additional drivers as needed. This will never happen.
Option 2: Fuchsia style microkernel. Create a device driver API for the various SoC hardware blocks, and make it good and flexible enough that you never, ever have to change the API. The device driver binary is written once during initial product development, and can be carried into newer OS updates with no changes at all.
People need to realize that the SoC world is not like the PC world. Hardware interfaces change all the time, with every release of a new family member. Some stuff doesn't change much, like a USB host controller, because the SoC world has standardized that somewhat. Other stuff like power management is a total pain.
You know, your PC has BIOS/UEFI and PCIE busses and other ways for kernel to discover what it is really running on, which drivers to load and so on.
ARM devices have none of these (except for servers, where Redhat had enough clout to say, that if your ARMv8 server has no UEFI, it will have no RHEL). Not only they add up to energy consumption (it is extra hardware, after all), they add up in the BOM as well (again, it is extra hardware). So we are stuck with kernels targeting only a known hardware (which today devicetree describes to some degree) and where a poke on a wrong port could mean that the entire device hangs. And after all, no consumers base their decision on whether a third party can replace the operating system, so why make a worse (=worse battery) and more expensive (=more BOM) than the competition?
Maybe it's the profit motive.
If companies are not incentivized to change, then nothing is going to change. If companies pushing OS and hardware refreshes every year means people are going to buy more phones, I'm not sure why they would have any reason to stop.
Anecdotally, I needed a new phone because my Pixel XL was getting 4 hours of standby time and was constantly overheating. I had just gotten back from an overseas trip and was nearly stranded several times from finding myself in remote places with my backup battery dead. In the end, I settled for a OnePlus 7 (ironic, I know). I would rather have used the Pixel for many more years. hate not having a headphone jack or bezel, and I know that some product manager is going to use my purchase as evidence that those "features" were the correct move and continue to propagate the belief that nobody wants headphone jacks or bezels anymore. But I was in serious need of a smartphone that was actually reliable over one that had a headphone jack or bezel, so I got one without those features anyway.
People like me are now reliant on smartphones to do things like make calls, navigate unknown places or look up things on cellular data. In my book, if people need to have a cellphone in order to function in modern society, or are at least strongly incentivized to have one, then planned obsolescence only increases profits. Companies can market this as "upgrading" to new phones with a festureset that doesn't have to be a significant improvement over the last generation, and if people are used to this and don't mind spending the money to upgrade, then this will continue. And there are surely a lot of people who will buy the lastest model anyway even if they don't absolutely need to upgrade.
Always check exact version/model (US model, Indian Model, etc) before flashing ROMs
Full Guide to unlock - https://gearallnews.com/how-to-unlock-the-bootloader-of-sams...
Your phone's XDA page - https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-2
Check out what Custom ROM you want here https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-note-2/orig-developm...
Use TWRP to flash ROM - https://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1938733
So of course you can upgrade to windows 10.
Phone hardware has. Very much so.
Windows works on 10 year old hardware because hardware manufactures don't get to modify the windows kernel. Instead, they have to push out drivers which work with the windows kernel.
It's really that simple.
There are several solutions here.
Google could make their own kernel which is closer to the microsoft kernel methodology (Fuchsia is basically just that)
Google could ban devices that with custom kernels from the play store (They MIGHT be able to do that now, then again, Android could be forked).
Google could create a private kernel repo and have manufactures submit to it. They could have their own kernel build profiles. (if getting things into mainline linux are deemed too difficult).
Compare the best PC from 1990 with the best one from 2000. That change makes 2010-2020 look like it was standing still.
Phone evolution for maybe 5-10 years after 2007 was more like the nineties, though it's definitely starting to slow now.
And Windows 2000, from 1999, for instance, only supported ~4 year old hardware. Windows 10 has it much easier!
The OP was claiming that there’s barely been any change in performance in the 2010s, which is just not true.
The biggest improvement, from a most people perspective, in the last 5 years is power usage. They run cooler, and batteries last longer.
The laptop was bought in 2011. It was a fairly cheap one then, and has a dual-core i3 with hyperthreading, and it came with an SSD. I added another some RAM I had laying around so now it has 8GB.
After getting a fresh copy of Win10 on it, it's surprisingly usable. Webpages loads just fine, YouTube is accelerated so is smooth. I could totally use that for my daily laptop had it not been for the rather lackluster 1366x768 screen.
This was my work laptop in 2010 with 8GB of RAM and a 2.66Ghz Core Duo. They let me keep it after the company folded. Until late last year, it was my Plex server and I used it occasionally since it sat right by my work computer.
https://www.cnet.com/reviews/dell-latitude-e6500-review/
The only time that it felt slow compared to a modern computer was disk access. I could have upgraded it with an SSD if I wanted to.
I use the 5s as a Spotify player and when I wiped it and set it up for the task, I was pleasantly surprised at how snappy it still felt and how everything I tried with it continued to work.
The hardware doesn’t have to be incredibly fast to support most of the functions supported - it’s only a small subset that really benefit from extra CPU speed and hardware acceleration.
Still probably worth the trade off though - Lineage OS is great.
On the other hand, comparing the useful life of this to the iPhone is entirely reasonable, particularly since its the price of a mid-high end iPhone. It's pretty sad when you realize that the new iPhone SE released just 6 months after the Pixel 4 will almost certainly be supported for 2-3 years after Google has abandoned the twice-as-expensive Pixel 4.
Based on support period, one can easily justify the most costly iPhone over the seemingly temporarily supported Google/Samsung etc. flagship.
Non-professional developers support Android Q on the original Pixel, but Google is too resource-starved, apparently.
Unfortunately I still wouldn't be happy with an iPhone as I'm just not a fan of iOS
Also not a fan of face unlock and wish they'd implement a fingerprint into the screen. I usually block out the front camera and any sensors that I don't use.
The irony is that early Android phones were built to last, but quickly got obsoleted by more recent models. Now, progress is much slower, but the thing that kept devices alive (removable batteries and community ROMs) are dying. Real obsolescence is replaced by planned obsolescence.
how long is "way beyond OEM updates"? one year? two years? three years? five years? The main problem is that third party roms can only update so much. Without OEM support, you're not going to be getting updates for the proprietary bits of your phone. This includes blobs, baseband, and even the kernel (technically it's open source, but all android phones run off a customized kernel that's specific to that SoC. When that SOC gets EOLed, the updates stop coming).
I have far less trust in a random community. Plus, their EOL could be completely unexpected.
I do not want my phone to be reliant on community updates, personally.
The Android phone market is distributed. You can get almost anything there you can get from Apple, in particular wherever the competition regulators had done their work.
The stuff Google itself is participating in is a different matter. Honestly, with respect to consumer products and UX Google is generally a failure. It's like Google is full of engineers and analysts but lacks talent in every other profession. Even Microsoft which has been so often a late-comer and the death for so many brands seems to be better at it.
When you see "guaranteed support" by a manufacturer, you can be sure that it actually means "guaranteed end of support" timeline. Which Google follows exactly.
https://www.statista.com/chart/5824/ios-iphone-compatibility...
While Google may end support as soon as they can, not all manufacturers do.
This is sort of true.
It is true that Apple dropped support for older devices much faster in the past. But it is also true that the older devices were way underpowered.
As an example: when Apple introduced home screen backgrounds on the iPod Touch, they released the same software upgrade for all iPods. However, since the older generation didn't have enough compute power (most likely GPU), they disabled the feature for older generations. I thought they were trying to force people to upgrade, but after a jailbreak and force enabling the feature, I realized that it was not the case. It was not smooth, so this is why they disabled it.
Same goes for, say, iPads. The first iPad quickly got obsoleted, but it was also very underpowered compared to subsequent devices.
They will not hesitate to drop hardware if it turns out to be insufficient, but they are just as likely to disable a feature if there is insufficient hardware support and allow the OS upgrade anyway.
The performance of my personal Pixel 2 on the other hand has not held up nearly as well by comparison and my next personal phone will likely be an iPhone even though I'm not a great fan of Apple.
Google's attitude to customer support and brand loyalty, on the other hand, is a different story...
My girlfriend's Pixel 4 screen cracked and was a huge PITA to fix even though we paid a ton for extra warranty. Trying to get that fixed was far more painful than any experience I've had with other brands.
Worse than that, there is a software bug that can / will irreversibly brick your Pixel 2 rear camera. You can find a ton of info on it by searching. It doesn't seem to affect everyone, but I was unlucky enough to hit it last week, presumably from a recent update. Google has been absolutely silent on this issue. Unethical at best, and probably worse.
There was a time where I would have scoffed at paying a premium for Apple or other brands that sell an experience more than just a device. That's completely changed now. I don't have the patience or energy in my life to deal with what I perceive to be Google's cold / impersonal / numbers oriented approach to customers. It's just not worth the stress. If anything, I'm willing to pay a pretty big premium for the opposite. If that means switching our household to Apple products, so be it and good riddance.
Did you leave in plugged into the AC adapter overnight? anecdotally that killed my previous phones and there's also (anecdotal?) evidence that it isn't great for it.
Have you checked what apps are eating all the battery? On older phones, newer versions of certain apps seemed to turn them into pocket warmers, getting stuck in a tight CPU loop and efficiently turning 3000mAh into heat at about 5 watts
Don’t most people do exactly that with their phones? If that’s something that actually breaks a phone, that’s ridiculous and they should fix it.
It's kind of a drag that once they finally got the fundamental hardware and OS good enough to really last for a few years, they also made it nearly impossible to do what should be simple maintenance.
After it was stolen, I bought another Pixel 2 used and while the battery life is worse, it still runs perfectly well as far as I can tell.
But what I'm saying is that my iPhone 6 is still running mostly fine as well.
If Apple didn’t throttle, the phone would restart every time it’s power requirements outstripped the batteries declining capacity.
I think it’s pretty clear which use case is better.
Apple gives performance beyond what you would expect for a similar phone, in terms of battery life and responsiveness. Then, as you burn through your battery's age beyond what even other phone manufacturers would warrant, the OS slows down the CPU to let you continue using it. So it's actually giving you more than you would've gotten otherwise.
But all the complaints are that iPhone sucks, I guess.
Your standards are in the basement.
>the past couple of months have seen a sudden increase in Nexus 6P battery complaints, with many users reporting that their phones suddenly shut down, even though there was plenty of battery life remaining
It's not a simple system crash, because your phone will stay dead until you connect it to a charger.
https://android.gadgethacks.com/news/nexus-6p-battery-random...
That seems especially problematic if you are on the go and need to make an emergency call to summon help.
A working phone seems preferable.
This isn't an "Apple vs Android" discussion. Maybe that's where you got confused.
When users complained that their phones died while showing a 50% charge and would not work again until connected to a charger, Google did nothing to fix the problem.
>The processor easily overheated, a bootloop bug made quite a few units die prematurely, and lastly, a battery problem surfaced that led to early shutdowns anywhere between 50 and 0 percent. At least the remaining owners of this Nexus device don't have to worry about the latter issue anymore — according to Google, that is. An engineer just marked the early shutdown entry in the company's issue tracker as "fixed."
I don't know about you, but when I just retrieved my Nexus 6P from my junk drawer a minute ago, it didn't have an update pending.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/11/16/nexus-6p-early-shut...
I'm not an Apple hater by any means. I understand they had their technical reasons, I was just pointing out the dichotomy between their perceived willingness to support older models and the lawsuit that says they are slowing them down.
>This seems like an odd thing to say about a company that was caught purposefully slowing down older models <END>
That is a half truth and considered lying through omission. It's misleading because as written it implies that they slowed down phones without a valid reason, AKA to force upgrades.
1: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-iphone-x-environmental-repor...
2: https://sustainability.google/reports
3: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
https://phys.org/news/2018-08-ways-smartphone-environment.ht...
It's disingenuous for Google to start counting when the product is released. As the buyer, I don't care when it was released, I care when you sold it to me as new. I could buy a Chromecast Ultra (the current-generation 4K Chromecast, released November 2016: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_ultra) and, by this standard (which may not even apply to Chromecasts, FWIW), they could discontinue it and drop support for it tomorrow.
That doesn't mean OS support. Apple sold the iPhone 6 until September 2018¹ but it did not get iOS 13 only one year later.
Perpetual donations to debian and apt update; apt dist-upgrade keep it in tip-top shape. The same cannot be said for a growing drawer of phones/tablets that are no longer supported/updated.
(I was glad to see that partial postmarketos support is present for at least some of those devices now. Looking forward to trying that out when I get a chance.)
My daily driver desktop, from which I do all of the rsync.net CEO things - from terminal to VMWare - is an octo-mac-pro from early 2009.
Currently running el-cap. Nothing is ever slow. 11 years and counting ...
What's amazing about the PII is it's the oldest "modern" computer in a few ways. USB came out around the same time, and i686 is the oldest x86 architecture still supported by modern distros out-of-the-box. i686 will be 25 years old in November. The fact that it's still supported is incredible.
In terms of security updates for motherboards and other hardware, they're very rare. For my phones/tablets, some are literally pinned to ~Android 6, with just oodles of known security holes.
My pixel 1 is basically stuck on a 3.18 kernel forever, even if I go and compile AOSP myself, because of Qualcomm's nom-free drivers.
At a certain point, companies like Google have to decide how much they want to backport fixes to older systems. Apparently they've decided on 3 years.
Wait...
These are issues totally within their control. These excuses shouldn’t be acceptable.
Even in their datacenters they use third party CPUs. It's not surprising that they haven't made their own for phones.
They need more like 5/6, but no one seems to be willing to pay for it.
They don't even need to design the chips themselves. They could partner with Samsung / LG / Motorola to form a hardware consortium.
Nowadays 5 years is really not that old for a phone.
Phone manufacturers should release the specs and/or an open source version of the phone's os so people can provide their own support.
Do a lot of people ignore their carrier's emails about upgrading at the expiration of the contract? I know I do, but I always assumed most people just upgraded almost right away to the new version.
I still run iOS 10.3 on mine, and really don't care about the latest one, probably would run very slow anyway.
I’ll keep a windows desktop for gaming, but once Apple settles down through its processor changes I might just get a personal iPhone and a MacBook Pro
Also the form factor and screen to size ratio are very important criteria for a lot of people, if not the most.
This seems incredibly dubious as an excuse (for a variety of technical and business reasons), but has been the Google get out of jail card for a decade+ now.
More likely Google loses interest, the devices no longer make them any money and they want to wipe their hands of them.
> Love it or hate it, Apple still supports the iPhone 6s Plus. A phone which is almost 5 years old now.
You're comparing what Google guarantees up-front for all devices to what Apple has done for the one device. Did Apple give a guaranteed support date for the iPhone 6s Plus at launch? In a quick search, I couldn't find one. I did find articles (eg [1]) from January speculating if Apple would include the iPhone 6S in the iOS 14 update or not.
Google still may support the Pixel 4 for longer than three years.
edit: forgot to add the disclaimer earlier that I'm a Google employee. I don't work on Android or hardware.
[1] https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/ios/story/don-t-ditch-y...
Apple (in my observation) tends not to say what length of support will be given, but offers it well beyond when an average person would throw away a device 2-3x over.
When Google says 3 years guaranteed, you can be damned sure you're done at 3 years.
No, they say at least and have extended support dates before, eg: https://chromeunboxed.com/chromebook-end-of-life-extended-13... (That's Chromebooks; I'm not sure about Nexus/Pixel phones in particular.)
It is now possible to use a decent[0] 3rd party keyboard on them and the XR is actually not that expensive compared to a number of other phones.
And for the first time since Samsung SII I'm happy with my phone :-)
[0]: the Apple keyboard doesn't support autocomplete while showing Norwegian letters, and it is also hilariously bad it seems wrt autocorrecting correctly spelled sentences into embarrassing ones and even going as far as autocorrecting one medicine name to another at some point. On SwiftKey one can at least turn of autocorrect.
(On my iPad). User error?
Not user error. Bad QA from Apple and/or third party keyboard.
Even expensive phones are cheaper than their wireless service contracts in the US. A good rule of thumb is they depreciate about 50% in their first two years (at least for iPhones).
That means your $800 phone is costing you less than $20/month: A $1400 phone less than $30/month.
Right now I’m paying over $40/month each for service for four phones right now.
- One got stolen
- Two broke while hiking/kayaking
- One was a lemon and the battery started working funny after a year and a half, it's one of the pixels that came with a high capacity battery and the replacement one is lower capacity so I didn't risk spending money on servicing it
I'm on my fifth phone now.
Unfortunately, you have no options at all for having a modicum of control / openness over your firmware if you want to use a smartphone. Gotta use/build your own odd device if you want that.
It's just not a priority for them.
From our perspective, sure. From the manufacturers perspective, it costs money to port, build, and test new releases. And if people are happy with their up-to-date 5-year-old phone, they'll be less likely to buy the latest shiny new one.
Not saying those are good excuses -- they're explicitly customer-hostile -- but they're completely understandable.
Bump up the price of Pixel by additional $100, and you get an 5 years guarantee upgrade.
Not to mention the Pixel isn't that powerful. iPhone 6s despite being 5 years ago, is probably as fast or still faster than some of the sub $300 Android Phone released today. ( Excluding Chinese Brands )
(1) Battery life goes down while wear and tear build up. After ~3 years you are looking at spending money replacing a battery for a banged up phone. Or you can spend another $200 and get a new phone.
(2) Cameras are still getting better. Going from a Pixel to the Pixel 3 was a phenomenal upgrade in the camera.
I'd guess people aren't replacing a ~$500 phone with a ~$200 phone, but I get your point. Who wants to replace the battery on a phone worse less that the battery?
That's fair. I buy used/refurbished 1 model behind the current flagship. For me it was ~$140 more to get a lightly used 3 XL than replacing my battery.
Apple makes their own, so...
Or an aggressive business model that is fair only to the top 10% of customers who are not concerned with spending $250 per month in effective charges to have a wireless handheld computer with 4G.
A lot of stuff on Android is delivered directly by the Play store/services, for many years after the end of OS updates for a particular device.
anyway in Pixel case the phone will have already after 2 years completely unusable battery, not that it would be satisfactory for heavy user even out of box
just because it gets YOU through the day, doesn't mean it gets others, people use phones differently, for starters their phones have different Screen on Time per day, so while 1-2 hours is fine for you and gets you through the day, for others 7hrs is not enough and phone will die for them before dinner
Google stack ranks employees regularly. Lowest of a group is always fired. Doesn't matter how good you are or how much satisfaction you give to your customers, you're basically asked, "what have you built that could be the next billion customer thing?" If you're not answering how you're part of the next big thing, you're going to lose. So, once something is acquired or released, consider it deprecated.
The sliver of truth is that Google's once-or-twice-yearly performance evaluation system asks colleagues to stack rank folks they are reviewing. I wish they'd get rid of it, but it's not used for much. It's only a partial order of folks they're reviewing, nothing really enforces that people actually do it, I suspect some people just rank all the people trying for promo this cycle above the people who aren't, and the many reviewers' stack ranks are never reconciled into one authoritative stack rank of the folks in a group. I don't know why it's still around.
I think you may be confusing the stack ranking at google, that doesn't result in dismissal (Google were in fact, right up until Covid, still on a hiring spree with a shortage of engineers); with what Microsoft historically did (and stopped doing in 2013).
If the company high prioritized environmental concerns, stack ranking would reward those who figured how to keep products in service longer.
I owned an iPhone 5S, my phone terribly slowed down in just a year to the point of becoming unusable. Opening the camera app would take 10 seconds. It would randomly freeze during calls and in the end, started having random shut downs. At the time, I didn't know they were throttling the phone. Funnily enough, my battery was replaced a couple of times and had no impact.
I paid $1000 at the time for it. I wrote it off in a year and a half due to all these issues. The manufacturer DID support with updates, but in the end, it didn't really matter because they just kept introducing more bugs and did nothing to address the throttling until very recently when they were caught in the act.
In contrast, I still own an Android 2.x HTC Desire that works flawlessly as a backup phone till date. I got it 8 years ago and is absolutely stunning - be it the beautiful OLED display or usability, and solves my needs perfectly.
I would say, software support for older phones is overrated. If you thought I am lucky with the HTC, then how about my other Android - Xperia X. I've dropped this thing so many times and not once had the screen gotten a single scratch. Supports dual sim and camera is great for low light. Still fluid to use. Again, software support for long term is really overrated in my opinion. As long as you can make calls, surf the web, check emails, take photos, I'd say the purpose of the phone is complete.
My 5S is still very usable.
-Download offline google maps files on it and use it as a gps in my car. Smooth as butter map animation and everything. -Use it when I'm doing yard work, Podcasts, audiobooks.. The latest overcast app is a little bit hiccupy.. but very usable. -Take pictures with it once in a while...
Still on original battery... On the latest iOS that Apple is currently supporting the 5S with.