Comment by qwertycrackers

> A relatively small ongoing investment in a phone with which they earned billions of dollars in profit.

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.

First gen "Google" Nexus tablet, factory restored before being put in storage and it's got 15 seconds between touching the screen and the UI even attempting to update. It was a decent small tablet when i bought it, too.

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)

Hollywood accounting says no movie is ever profitable. Your proposed law would just create a perpetual copyright for companies with sufficiently creative accountants.

Sounds great, how do you enforce this with the deluge of things like IP cameras and the like from Chinese companies?

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.