Comment by diggum
A relatively small ongoing investment in a phone with which they earned billions of dollars in profit. Doesn't necessarily require new feature updates, but security updates should be available for a far more significant length of time than the single-digit years the have self-regulated themselves. As an alternative, perhaps these companies should be held responsible for the e-waste of their prematurely expired hardware...
> 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.