Magic of compartmentalization of concerns.

It turns out that getting a bunch of programmers to do careful modifications to some C code base over a couple of months is more work than getting great many thousands of people across multiple companies to manufacture, distribute and sell new hardware to millions of customers.

> I guess they gotta stop doing that then, huh?

Why would they? They get paid to put out crap, so they'll continue doing it.

Bottle water continues to come in plastic bottles, even though glass if far cheaper/easier to reuse or recycle. Plastic bottles are literally trash, yet it'll continue being produced if people keep buying it.

Near-disposable phones (both hardware and software) won't stop being manufactured if they continue being in high demand.

> I don't see how consumers and society benefit

Actually, you do see. The price of your phone would be higher if Qualcomm had to hire competent engineers to make properly designed kernel changes for their hardware.

How much higher though? If you were to take the total extra expenditure on increased salaries for those engineers, and divide by the number of phones produced, the result is what? A dollar?

Sure, but when applying Marketing Math™, remember that all prices need to end in "49" or "99" to "sound cheaper" than the next incremental bump. So you'll end up with a device that is either $50 or (more likely) $100 more than otherwise.

Or they'll eat that $1 from their profit margins…eh, who am I kidding?

If they're rounding to the nearest $50, they're doing it based on the final cost. They're not going to base it on a what-if scenario of having a cheaper development team. So it's more or less a 2% chance of the price going up $50.

The price of your phone would be much lower if the software stack was truly Open Source, allowing distribution to remove clutter and spyware, and make older phones perfectly usable again.

Planned obsolescence is designed to increase TCO