In principle, a complete product would ship with no defects. You could run it for 1000 years unpatched and it would be no less secure than the day it shipped.
Manufacturers ship security updates because the original product was defective. So it makes sense that they remain on the hook for security updates -- we paid them full price up front.
That's fair. But what about a product which doesn't turn a profit? The iPhone could have been a total flop, no one knew in advance!
I worry that if releasing a hardware product carried an unlimited support burden, companies would release far fewer products. Less risk taking would lead to less innovation, and so on.
I think I would be more on board with a rule like "once you stop releasing security updates, you must share hardware documentation and unlock the bootloader", so consumers can install their own (presumably patched) operating systems. But this wouldn't actually affect most of society, because 90% of consumers (I'm being generous) are never going to install Linux on their phones.
My Nokia N800 runs the exact same as it did when i bought it, used, about 4 years after the release. I can even stream transcoded video to it, still. The camera works. The terminal works fine. That's probably why apple has trillions of market cap or whatever and Nokia is making $50 feature phones with touchscreens (i haven't seen any nor do i care, the n900 (910?) should have been a bigger deal and i'm still mad)
100% tariffs? Every outdoor IP camera, for example, is either Chinese manufactured or outlandishly expensive. even a 200% increase in purchase price makes these devices competitive, still.
“If you doesn’t follow rule X, you can’t import the cheap IP camera into America”
It also doesn’t really matter whether updates are fixes or features. Somebody has to do the work, and they have to get paid, and only so many years of that work can be baked into the original purchase price, before buyers go to a competitor who offers less support. You paid full price for X years of support, but what happens after that?
Not necessarily. Something could be perfectly secure today and for the next 100 years but be trivial to crack in 1000 years because the landscape changed so much. Something that is inconceivable to crack by brute force now won’t be as compute power keeps rising.
It’s impossible to cover every base from the start and forever. Who would’ve thought that soundproof glass could be beat with a camera filming an object?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25999-caught-on-tape-...
> We were able to recover intelligible speech from maybe 15 feet away, from a bag of chips behind soundproof glass
If they stop supporting the device, they should release the drivers for the hardware.