It’s not economical to support devices used by less than 1% of the user base. Linux only manages it because community members step up to support older architectures. And sometimes when no one steps up the architectures are removed.
Supporting all of these is work. It makes development of new features harder, because it has to account for quirks of older hardware. Older hardware is also harder to get in the hands of developers and harder to test on. That’s why Linux has dropped support for 386, 486, IA-64 and other architectures.
There’s no point saying trillion dollar corporation etc. It comes down to some basic fact - phones must be built with SoCs, that’s the easiest way. The PC way doesn’t work at scale. Now that we are on SoCs you have to draw the line on support somewhere. Just because the costs imposed on future development aren’t obvious to us doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
I think 5 years minimum (and sometimes more) of OS updates is pretty good, FWIW.
It’s absolutely economical. Apple only has to support a tiny number of devices that they themselves manufactured, they have the easiest job in the world.
Think about how many devices Microsoft has to support in Windows, it’s orders of magnitude more.
Apple doesn’t want to support older devices because they don’t see a benefit to themselves.
5 years of support is pitifully short. Pretty much everything I own lasts longer than 5 years, my phone is one of the things I have to replace most often, not because the hardware is broken, but because it stops receiving updates.
> New devices = New components = New Firmware = The updates have to stop sometime
So how does microsoft do it? My PC is about the same age yet it is still supported. And not even barely, but without a hitch.
> Apple is an OEM for most parts on their board, if upstream support ends for the components on the board then its game over as far as firmware updates goes.
But this is not an issue with a chip's firmware. Do you believe apple can't compile code for their 10 year old hardware or how do you think this happens?
>And its certainly NOT economical to keep stuff running forever. Look at OpenBSD and Theo famously begging for money to keep his basement of antique equipment running at enormous expense !
If OpenBSD can do it on a budget that's pocket change for Apple, with much more diverse hardware which they have no control over, then Apple definitely can do it.
Is it really bullshit? Lenovo manages hundreds of laptop models via fwupd, and those work just fine after they lose OEM support. I've got a Thinkpad from 2009 that still gets modern Linux patches (to say nothing of my 2006 PowerBook running Arch/Plasma 5).
Compared to what Apple makes off hardware and service revenue, the cost of opening iBoot and providing basic firmware support would be almost nothing. It's so economical that the volunteers at Asahi were capable of replacing the missing bits via black-box reverse engineering. You want to tell me that Apple is incapable of releasing that firmware themselves? On a technical forum?
> Compared to what Apple makes off hardware and service revenue
Really I wish people would wake up and stop with this bullshit.
Do the other manufacturers do anywhere near as much R&D as Apple does ? NO ! (2023: Lenovo 2bn vs Apple 29bn).
Do the other manufacturers maintain their own OS across multiple hardware platforms ? NO !
Its easy to sit in your armchair and spout crap about "well, Lenovo does it !". Well, the OS on your Lenovo is Windows or Linux. And the parts in your plastic Lenovo are almost certainly 100% off-the-shelf commodity parts.
Meanwhile Apple's R&D is what brings you, for example, the unmatched Apple Silicon chips, which everyone except the die-hard Apple bashers agree are genuinely industry leading.
Really, you've just proven my point. If Lenovo can support their hundreds/thousands of devices on a shoestring budget, Apple can support their few dozen devices easily. They've already written the device drivers and documented their non-commodity hardware, there's no technical reason it won't run other OSes.
I almost feel like you don't actually know what you're arguing against. An optionally-open bootloader is practically free to implement, and releasing driver code (or at least hardware docs) would mostly be an IP-related decision, not an effort-gated one. As-is, it feels like you're defending Apple's right to enforce petty limitations and be lazy with their trillion-dollar IP. It should be obvious why we (former Apple customers, some of us) disagree.
Lmao Apple R&D. Don't know what they're spending it on since they almost always adopt technologies that have already been developed + proven in the market.
So Apple Spends 29bn R&D every year, over many years and ends up developing...a really good version of (if not currently the best, sure) version of an ARM chip, a pre-existing architecture with which they are already intensely familiar? Wow, they're sure being real efficient with those funds.
I believe a lot of their performance gains pretty much just come down to larger die size than most ARM CPUs, making an SoC and colocating memory etc all on the same die, wrangling some of TMSC's newest most transistor dense and power efficient nodes. M1 Ultra=114b, 64 core graviton3=55b, hell people are even building stuff like https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/everything-ive-learne....
Apple went for a bunch of easy wins tbh. Why doesn't every other computer manufacturer do it? Well Apple is a $1T company; they control so many aspects of their products, OS, software etc so very easy for them to offer this. It would require a concerted effort on the part of so many companies involved in the ecosystems of non-Apple products to make a transition the same way Apple did.
>It’s not economical to support devices used by less than 1% of the user base. Linux only manages it because community members step up to support older architectures. And sometimes when no one steps up the architectures are removed.
Again, bugs are this are not hardware specific. You are not supporting "devices". You are supporting the OS which all of them run. Ideally (I'm not familiar with OSX/iOS internals) all they have to do is push out an update that contains the newly fixed libwebkit.so or whatever. They control everything on their own platform so they don't even have to deal with glibc breaking backcompat like we have to in the GNU/Linux world.
If they can't figure out a way to make changes like this universal across devices, it's either deliberate negligence or incompetence.
You're a special kind of clown claiming that it is not economical white Apple profits are somewhere between 20% and 26%. They could build an update, they just prefer making more money.
Shrug. That's their problem. Or it should be, at least.
Don't sell crap you can't support for a decent amount of time. Stop ruining this planet we live on by creating immense amounts of e-waste every few years.
We both know your argument is dishonest or at least naive, though. They could easily support updates if they want to. But it's about money. This way they are forcing people to buy a new phone every few years. It's clever, shame about the planet.
Dishonest? You're saying I'm lying to support a trillion dollar corporation I have no financial stake in and never have? Is such an accusation really in the spirit of this forum?
I will say that certain comparisons (eg. "The PC way doesn’t work at scale") are objectively wrong. Even Apple uses the PC model internally, despite not having an open bootloader or really supporting UEFI anymore. AFAIK, the XNU kernel even uses the same DeviceTree layout as Linux for supporting ARM SOCs. Apple hasn't really broken any new ground that can't be re-covered by modern operating systems.
Also, your claim that it's "not economical" is entirely unproven and arguably false. iPhones are still architecturally supported by Linux and will continue to be for a while (even longer on BSD). Other Apple products (eg. Apple Silicon) received community driver support entirely from donations and volunteer time. There's no reason to assume that iPhones lack community interest, especially since Apple has never given the iPhone community the same leverage they had on Mac.
If that's the sum of both arguments, then you're mostly just leveraging FOMO to support an unproven concept. At best you're jumping the gun, at worst you're twisting the facts to preclude discussion of open iPhone software alternatives.
- Linux dropping support for old graphics drivers (Nov 2023) - https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Drop-Old-UMS-DRM-Infra
- Linux Kernel Developers Discuss Dropping A Bunch Of Old CPUs (Jan 2021) - https://www.phoronix.com/news/2021-Linux-Drop-Old-CPUs
Supporting all of these is work. It makes development of new features harder, because it has to account for quirks of older hardware. Older hardware is also harder to get in the hands of developers and harder to test on. That’s why Linux has dropped support for 386, 486, IA-64 and other architectures.
There’s no point saying trillion dollar corporation etc. It comes down to some basic fact - phones must be built with SoCs, that’s the easiest way. The PC way doesn’t work at scale. Now that we are on SoCs you have to draw the line on support somewhere. Just because the costs imposed on future development aren’t obvious to us doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
I think 5 years minimum (and sometimes more) of OS updates is pretty good, FWIW.