It seems the main stumbling block is Qualcomm not supporting their chips beyond 4 years, as described by Fairphone here, that tries to push support of their phones to 7-ish years

https://www.fairphone.com/en/2020/06/18/fairphone-2-gets-and...

I never fully understood that. Kernel drivers have to be open source, right? Maybe not mainlined, but the source should be available. So what prevents someone from taking that and then getting it into a shape to be upstreamable? Why exactly is support by qualcomm needed?

I'm not an OEM but I'll hazard a guess: long term hardware support assures that field replacements will match the exact specifications your are expecting. Large scale implementations have historically relied on a reference device to make sure you don't have a thousand different profiles running around.

Combine this with a JIT supply chain, and nobody making phones is going to want to stockpile a bunch of old Qualcomm chips they aren't sure they'll ever need.

Have to be, and are not. It's amazing what simply refusing can accomplish.

> And they are the richest company on Earth, or something on that level.

Aramco surpassed them last week.

I'm not sure if I would define 6-7 years of support as capitalism working. Apple has differentiated themselves by offering more longevity than the competition, but instead of competitive a race to make phones last longer, we've just got a choice between no longevity and a little longevity. This is the devices serving the company that makes them, not the devices serving the people who use them - which is how I define success.

I'm hoping for 15 years of usable life out of this PC. I'm expecting the iPhone I bought in sept 2020 to last me another year, maybe two. Not because Apple drops support, but because carrying something around in your pocket for years is hard on any object - and this one is not built to be repaired.

>but instead of competitive a race to make phones last longer, we've just got a choice between no longevity and a little longevity

What if it is not possible to make a phone that lasts long enough at a price point that is competitive with iPhones?

I’m sure there are physical limitations that come into play, but there’s no doubt in my mind we could do exponentially better with different market forces driving the direction of design. Look at the framework laptop, for an example of progress on longevity in a space where people have expressed similar doubts.

The bit you said about price is, I think, the key. Except I don’t think it’s so much the price as the profit margin. There a millions of people who buy a new $1200 iPhone every 1-2 years - those people could be served by a $2400 iPhone purchased every 2-4 years - but they probably wouldn’t go for that, since one of the things you’re buying when you spend the $1200 is having the new hotness, status, a perception of “luxury” etc.

Which is why I pointed the finger at capitalism in my earlier post. This system rewards what is profitable, not what is good for people + the planet.

It is possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31495844.

The iPhone 1 was pretty much the start of this whole revolution of mobile computing - cut it some slack. We have seen huge improvements in camera, CPU and battery performance since, so I wouldn’t be surprised if an iPhone X would work just fine a decade after, especially that there is hardly any conceivable difference between it running ios vs the newest device and also due to the whole field slowing down in improvements as we are now in the diminishing returns territory.