Obviously the cycle has to be longer for companies that keep older phones on the market as a lower cost option.
Apple has been supporting iPhone models for 6 years without any fanfare about it. iOS 15 supported the iPhone 6S, which was 6 years old at the time. iOS 17 that just got announced will only now drop support for the iPhone 8 released in 2017, 6 years ago. At certain points 7-year old phones have received all updates.
Google's excuse about driver and firmware support does not and should not apply to the Pixel, which is a first-party device. I applaud Google for getting better here, but the linked article and the general reality of the Android ecosystem continuing to be a shitshow is really inexcusable in the face of their primary competitor doing the right thing for over a decade, quietly and competently.
The SoC/Modem at the heart of the (pre 6) pixels is not first party, though. If qualcom says "yeah, we're not going to bother backporting $newIssueFix to the kernel fork we used during chip development/bring-up" then there's not a _lot_ that google can do about it unless there's a contractual agreement in place.
Apple has been using "first party" chips for their phones since the A4 processor (~ iPhone4) which is why they're able to keep compiling new OS/Kernel for their older hardware so long as the device is performant enough to actually run it.
It's not a coincidence that google has been investing _heavily_ in making most of android super composable; large chunks of the HAL and system level components can be updated even if qualcom/mediatek ... etc don't do the work to get a newer kernel working.
1. They should have a contractual agreement in place.
2. Google is one of the world's largest companies and one of the largest tech companies, they're also one of Qualcomm's largest customers alongside Samsung (who is also an Android-based handset manufacturer) after Apple started making their own basebands. They have /significant/ market leverage.
It's excuses. Where there is a will, there is a way. The problem is that there isn't a will. Apple cares about device longevity and quality, Google does not. It's market segmentation in action. There is no reason anybody that can afford an iPhone should ever buy an Android device, because Google and their partner companies don't respect you as a customer. Consequently most Android devices are sold to people who can't afford an Apple device, otherwise they wouldn't submit themselves to this mistreatment.
Not really. QCM is in a position of power here. Where _else_ is samsung/google/apple going to go? This is slowly changing, but QCM modems are still in a league of their own... and they know it.
> Apple cares about device longevity and quality, Google does not. It's market segmentation in action.
This is a tenuous point at best. Apple isn't exactly rushing to make repair of their devices easy / accessible which is essential for a product to have a long life. Google doesn't have a lot of say over what other OEMs do w/r/t their hardware support.
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My whole point is that it's not a happy/meaningless coincidence that as soon as an OEM moves away from QCM for the CPU, the promised support period grows.
Apple absolutely repairs their devices or replaces them for customers at reduce/no cost and recycles the components. They have an entire program for this called AppleCare. Millions of devices have been repaired by AppleCare. The only thing Apple is bad about is allowing independent third-parties to do repairs.
Google is stating here they won't even do first-party repair, nor will they supply parts for third party repair. This is not even in the same ballpark. You are making a false equivalence to try to distract from the fact that Google is uniquely bad here and has no respect for their customers.
"You support it for 6 years or give us code, else we will take our million chip order to competition" should be enough
I severely doubt that if you offered qualcomm a trillion dollars they could not support the hardware for another 3 years. In fact it would be much less than a trillion dollars in practice.
What you're fundamentally saying is, qualcomm isn't going to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, and google is not willing to write the check to make it happen, and that's still on them.
So QCM should just get to name their price and google should pay it?
I said that this wasn’t a “not available at any price” situation, it’s a matter of figuring out a cost that works.
Google (and other phone vendors) want to pay zero ($0), and the law currently allows them to externalize this cost onto their customers and society at large (e-waste going into landfills, unpatched OSs promoting malware, etc) instead. And they do.
QCM has:
a) YEARS of RnD -> Patents on cellular tech. b) YEARS of experience making the modems (on both ends of the link!)
compared to the other players in the space.
Where is google going to go here?
Can't do huawei because sanctions. Can't do MediaTek or Samsung because their modems are inferior in almost every way (speed, bandwith, power consumption ...).
Intel never was a serious player and I don't think they're in the space at all anymore.
sadly nobody cares about the ways in which android generates its copious e-waste streams with its own planned obsolescence, the “but the e-waste!” deflections stop the moment you suggest that maybe android vendors should be legally required to provide first-party parts supply and software updates. All the communism and “it’s what’s right for the planet” vanishes in a poof of fanboy.
nobody really cares about cables generating e-waste or whatever horseshit, it was always about finding a way to use the legal system to resolve the arguments the android fans couldn’t win in the marketplace of ideas, and sticking a thumb in the eye of their fellow man.
> Can't do huawei because sanctions. Can't do MediaTek or Samsung because their modems are inferior in almost every way (speed, bandwith, power consumption ...).
Google has been using Samsung modems since the Pixel 6.
"This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move." (with apologies to Douglas Adams!)
The various google/android/pixel discussion forums are _full_ of "the p6/7 is a regression compared to p4/5" threads. I can confirm that I get much more reliable connectivity with my p4 compared to my p6 and my p7 is only marginally better than the 6.
Regardless, my *whole point* is that it's not a coincidence that we start getting "extended support periods" when QCM isn't supplying the CPU. Up until ~2020 (when the p6 would have been under development) there was no serious competition in this space and that's why google and pretty much every other android device used QCM. Now that there's a second option that's even remotely close to QCM in performance, the OEMs are taking it ... and we're getting extended support as a result.
Samsung will have "won" when even QCM has to capitulate and starts offering extended support.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/qualcomm-to-supply-apple-wit...
Not sure your argument holds as much water as you'd think.
Exactly :). QCM likes to sell both but also recognizes that selling half is better than none.
It's better nowadays as Samsung is providing even longer support than Google itslef
> "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
If you can afford an Apple device, there's nearly no reason why you'd submit yourself to the mistreatment of being an Android customer, consequently those who buy Android devices, especially the bottom-dollar ones that never receive a single update post-purchase are those that can't afford better in the moment. Exactly like the cheap boots vs good boots in this classic allegory.
Vines' theory doesn't try to analyze /why/ things are the way they are, it's an observation of the higher cost of being poor. I am simply pointing out that the allegory extends to mobile phones, apparently, because there is a higher cost to being poor when your device gets security (and other) updates for half the length of time or less, or is made with lower quality and less powerful components, so has to be replaced more often.
A base model iPhone is $800, a typical base model Android phone is around $200. That base model iPhone will get full iOS updates for 6 years, and security updates for 8 years, and is made of high quality components, and apps on the app store will generally work on that device for its entire lifespan (~8 years). That base model Android phone may never receive an update after release, but is generally guaranteed at most 1 year of updates, it is made with the cheapest components available as a low-margin device, and there are many apps on the play store that won't work on the device on the day its bought because it's not powerful enough, it will require replacement in roughly 1 year when it can no longer be updated (or more likely becomes broken, with no support). Over the same 8 year span that the iPhone base model user spends $800, the Android base model user will end up spending $1600 to maintain a phone with updates.
Of course, there are flagship Android phone models as well. But even in that case the story is worse for Android, because you'll spend $1000 on an Android phone instead of $1200 on an iPhone, and you'll get 3 years of updates and no support, vs ~8 years of updates and support. In time-adjusted dollars, the iPhone is actually cheaper than Android, but it has a higher entry cost in the general sense than the Android phone. It's matching nearly identically to the allegory, which is why I pointed that out.
The fact all modern devices, technologies, and our society in general is going to hell in a handbasket doesn't really matter in the context of what I am saying, but yes, I agree, enshittification ruins all.
Until very recently, Google did not own the SoC, so it shouldn't be surprising that Apple is better at support given their vertical integration. At Apple, if the hardware isn't working as expected for a SW team, they send an email to a manager and it gets fixed or someone gets hammered by senior management. But the relationship between Google and a chip vendor isn't so smooth; that's just the nature of organizations.
Google has made a smart choice by trying to bite off the SoC and try to be more vertical. It will make support much easier for them in the long run.
That doesn’t make sense to me. There may be classes they can’t fix, but there must be many they can.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/02/apple-agrees-to-settlement...
US carriers want postpaid customers, because they're more profitable and less likely to churn.
Having an incentive to swap phones at the end of a (typically 2 year) phone upgrade cycle helps them sell renewals back into a new postpaid plan.
Google, in typical Google fashion, probably doesn't care. It's used to end users not being its actual customers.
It's not really 5 years. For example, if you buy a Pixel 6a today, a product that is not yet discontinued, you'll get less than 4 years support.
Unless you accept Google's misleading framing of "from when the product was first sold", rather than the more reasonable "from when a consumer bought it, unless they bought it after it was discontinued".
"When the product was first sold" is a meaningless date to a consumer who chooses to buy a product and this framing needs to die.
This makes me wonder if we instead should be counting number of years of OS updates from when it's last available new.
Meanwhile, Microsoft released a security update to Windows XP in 2019