I really have to hand it to NASA. Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 and it's still getting updates but we're supposed to be okay with the cell phones that launched 5 years ago no longer being updated.
Long-term updates to old devices are a drain on the people updating them. You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
Aren't they though? Clearly it's not on the same scale, but a 5 year old phone is still perfectly capable of transmitting very valuable data and providing utility to the user.
No, they just have (Apple 2022 iPhone revenues alone vs 2023 NASA budget) 10x the amount of money of NASA's budget (or 3x, if we stick to net profit), and around 1000x more money are depended on them.
>You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
As long as the law mandates updates and bugfixes for older products, which, in a civilized society that actually did care for waste and the environment would be decades.
It is just about money. Cheap out and buy a budget phone and you will also get budget support.
The original Voyager budget was $865 million (~$5 billion today), and has paid out even more for maintenance and operation since. Spend that much money on an iPhone and not only will updates be available for decades, but someone from Apple will come and personally install the updates for you.
If you only pay $1,000 for an iPhone, you are going to get $1,000 worth of support. Don't be such a cheapskate if you want greater service, I guess?
Instead, iPhones are like the basic bitch of devices and are mass produced to the point they are ubiquitous and still 99.999% of use of the device is pointless drivel.
So my point stands - if Voyager ran on an iPhone it would get those updates.
There is no incentive for Apple to provide longer term support because nobody is ponying up the money to see that support happen. People cheap out and are only willing to pay for short term support – probably because they know that they can afford to buy a whole new, better phone (most likely for less than longer term support would cost!) again in a few years, so they don't care to brunt the cost of longer term support.
NASA knows they can't afford to buy a new Voyager every 5 years – no amount of money can place a new one to replace what is out there that far out in space – so they are buying long term support instead.
Your point only stands if NASA paid Apple enough to see them agree to update an iPhone for decades or more. Simply buying a $1,000 iPhone off the shelf and sticking it into a Voyager probe would not make Apple care or change their updating tune. And if that is your point, what is the point? You would be just restating what was originally said, which seems rather pointless.
--- open source enters the chat ---
Opensource: if you had the means to swap the code with a new version, you should do that instead.