> 15 years of security updates
How much do you think that will add to the cost of a product? Software engineers are not cheap.
How much do you think that will add to the cost of a product? Software engineers are not cheap.
PCs are the proof that manufacturers don’t have to push security updates for decades. But in the phone world, they would have to because they don’t want to open the platform. So the user is dependent on the manufacturer for updates. But it don’t have to be like that.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/l74hto/this_is_app...
Surprisingly this is not the case. The x200 can run coreboot and related forks like libreboot: https://www.coreboot.org/Board:lenovo/x200
> unsupported Pixel phone will not get modem or sensor/wifi firmware updates
That's a good point. The removal of 2g/3g made the modems in a lot of phones non-functional. Even without cell support a phone would still be useful as a small wifi tablet if it could run up-to-date software.
Yes, yes, BIOS is supported by third-party vendor. Still leaves the microcode problem.
>That's a good point. The removal of 2g/3g made the modems in a lot of phones non-functional. Even without cell support a phone would still be useful as a small wifi tablet if it could run up-to-date software.
That's not what I'm talking about. Some phones required a modem update to work around a bug caused by broadcasting a different LTE signalling message they couldn't handle. It would crash the phone's baseband. Similarly some security group like Google Project Zero could figure out vulnerabilities in the modem (maybe unprivileged code execution using specially crafted status messages or something of the like). This is the sort of thing you will not get updates for, and the updates you've received til now won't detail much because SoC vendors have all that shit under NDA.
The only time I see problems, is when the system-level software requires new hardware features that older models do not have.
The solution already exists, it’s called a PC. Just make standard and compatible hardware. And it works.