More devices we no longer own and that are bound to become trash in a few years, and for what reason? So companies can make more profits?
Rather than see it go to landfill I donated it to a friend who's happy to use it but what an absolute waste.
Bought a Pixel purely because they are committed to updating their phones for a long time.
Has this been your experience as well, or have your phones been OK with responsiveness? Seven years is a long time, I imagine the phone must have been unusable by then.
The Pixel is slower than the Xiaomi in benchmarks but I can barely tell any difference in day to day usage.
Maybe if I went back to the Huawei it would feel slow but honestly I would still be using it if it had been updated. Unless the new OS slowed it down.
Phones are electrowaste. Recyclability of electronics is... not good.
As much as I hate it, the strongest incentive would maybe be to legally define vendors who supply hardware with a non-interchangable OS-ecosystem as service-providers and put restrictions on the price they can charge for the hardware to render the service (like i.e. a cable-modem from an ISP).
This could force the large players to decide between high-margin hardware or high-margin OS-ecosystem instead of aiming for both.
Come to think of it, these market-dynamics would be interesting to observe...
It's also anti-consumer that CPU vendors don't let customers who own the CPU perform whatever updates they want because they don't give out signing keys.
As it stands, besides preventing the user from making modifications to CPU functionality, the user is also forced to "trust" updates that might be created for specific anti-consumer purposes (say, compelled by government security services).
That would be less of an issue if the updates were auditable (that is, security researchers could read and study them), even if users weren't able to modify them. Unfortunately, other than some early CPU designs, AFAIK microcode updates are always encrypted. I suspect that their reason is to protect "trade secrets" on details of their CPU design.
> You can physically do it with a microcode update.
Do these ARM CPUs even have microcode? Unlike on x86 CPUs where there are some very complex instructions which have to be microcoded, on ARM all instructions are simple enough that their decoding into micro-operations can be completely hard-coded in the decoder logic.
Do you know of any ARM cores used on smarphones which actually have updatable microcode? I've never heard of any. All errata fixes I've seen are of the "set this bit in a specific register" kind.
... with your property, with is a violation of your rights in most western jurisdictions.