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Comment by saberdancer | Hacker News Reader

I think it's better to say - if your phone was 12 billion miles from Earth and used to send sensitive scientific data - it would get updates as well.

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Not when you only paid on the order of $1,000 for it. For so little, nobody is going to bother to support your device for decades, no matter how near or far away it is from you or what you happen to be doing with it.

The original Voyager budget was $865 million (~$5 billion today), and has paid out even more for maintenance and operation since. Spend that much money on an iPhone and not only will updates be available for decades, but someone from Apple will come and personally install the updates for you.

Apple made more than 100 billion on iPhone sales in the first half of 2023 and the marginal cost of an update is essentially 0, so what your saying doesn't make sense.

And the vendors who supplied the Voyager program may have made quadrillions across the entire customer base for all we know. But there is no reason for a vendor to use the income from one customer to subsidize another.

If you only pay $1,000 for an iPhone, you are going to get $1,000 worth of support. Don't be such a cheapskate if you want greater service, I guess?

Economies of scale are not a subsidy.

That's right. Now, if you'd like to return to the thread...

In your scenario there also needs to only be 2 iPhones in existence and making more would cost significantly more than the first 2 did, and you would have to wait decades for them to do anything noteworthy that the first 2 units aren't doing right now.

Instead, iPhones are like the basic bitch of devices and are mass produced to the point they are ubiquitous and still 99.999% of use of the device is pointless drivel.

The point is that they are getting updates, not because NASA paid 865 million in 1970s but because it is doing scientific work that no other spacecraft is able to do currently. If Voyager was orbiting around Earth it would get no updates at all, no matter how much NASA paid to get it into orbit.

So my point stands - if Voyager ran on an iPhone it would get those updates.

The point is: It gets updates because people are being paid sufficiently to provide updates. There is incentive given to see them get done.

There is no incentive for Apple to provide longer term support because nobody is ponying up the money to see that support happen. People cheap out and are only willing to pay for short term support – probably because they know that they can afford to buy a whole new, better phone (most likely for less than longer term support would cost!) again in a few years, so they don't care to brunt the cost of longer term support.

NASA knows they can't afford to buy a new Voyager every 5 years – no amount of money can place a new one to replace what is out there that far out in space – so they are buying long term support instead.

Your point only stands if NASA paid Apple enough to see them agree to update an iPhone for decades or more. Simply buying a $1,000 iPhone off the shelf and sticking it into a Voyager probe would not make Apple care or change their updating tune. And if that is your point, what is the point? You would be just restating what was originally said, which seems rather pointless.

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