My phone is basically living on borrowed time. And honestly, the next time it dies, I'm done with high-end devices. Having had to replace my phone twice in under two years has convinced me that I should treat my phones as if they were disposable, and so I'm going to buy my next phone at "disposable" prices. My next phone will probably be a Moto E4 or something in a similar price range (and I'd be willing to buy a $50 Chinese shitphone if only I could find one with AOSP and not some shitty custom UI).
> full metal body
Metal bodies fuck with my synesthesia—the feeling of metal on my fingers makes me ill—so that's a total dealbreaker. It has to be plastic.
But mine's running perfectly so far. I even slightly overclocked the big cores. Changed to underclocked right now :D
From what I saw trawling the XDA forums, there's a small percentage of bootloop victims who have all cores affected and not just the big ones, and I was part of that unlucky few.
Feature updates stopped, security updates did not. The phones are still receiving monthly security patches and will continue to do so. Google did not stop those.
> The Nexus 6P and 5X launched with an update policy of two years for major OS updates and three years for security updates
And then using software that has known exploits (so old versions of Android/iOS) will be illegal...
And then they will censor comparisons of Winnie the Pooh with the dear leader...
>You buy a piece of hardware that could trivially keep working for 5-8 years, and it becomes actively dangerous to use
Dangerous to use? In case you weren't aware, the majority of the damage inflicted on consumers and businesses is perpetrated by IOT botnets and infected Windows computers.
- You're going to end up paying for that support in the cost of the phone or through annual licensing anyway. Would you really prefer that vs buying a new phone with latest gizmos vs buying a second-hand phone with semi-latest gizmos?
- You've just created a moat for larger companies who can absorb the costs of maintaining older systems.
The only issue I see here is the bot-net threat. That's a negative externality that no one's responsible for currently, and we can definitely be more creative about the policy than forcing people to support old tech.
Maybe we force users to run software without known vulnerabilities? Perhaps then people would then demand more open technologies, but perhaps it'll further entrench the disposable tech paradigm.
Maybe we just force companies to open source unmaintained software? Maybe we do this in tandem with above?
Maybe we only penalize companies and organizations with a certain sized user base?
The possibility space is really massive, and we technologists really need to sit down and think through the ramifications of each proposal.
The simple way to make it illegal to produce potential botnet-hosts is to force manufacturers to remotely brick all hardware they no longer support.