> Why can you run a cutting edge commercial OS on a 12 year old PC but not a 2 year old phone?
Because Windows isn't open source.
That is absolutely the answer. Because hardware manufacturers couldn't just take Windows and recompile the kernel for their own custom hardware they had to support the IBMPC standard bios interfaces and ACPI.
With Android, when hardware manufacturers can get away with not standardizing the hardware platform to be OS generic, they make custom shit blobs they stick in a Linux kernel and leave for dead after 2 years.
Because it sells new devices. If you could keep an old S3 updated to the latest Android effortlessly there would be no artificial software based pressure to buy a new phone as long as you still liked the old one.
I actually find it really fascinating that it seems that hardware vendors are aggressively trying to create new modes of planned obsolescence as Google ramps up efforts to reduce their ability to abandon updates. User irreplaceable batteries are the biggest one to me, where vendors take the extra step to be truly devious and make hard-to-access batteries in sealed phones actually impossible to replace because they either solder the battery in or make it break the connectors when you try to remove it.
Because Windows isn't open source.
That is absolutely the answer. Because hardware manufacturers couldn't just take Windows and recompile the kernel for their own custom hardware they had to support the IBMPC standard bios interfaces and ACPI.
With Android, when hardware manufacturers can get away with not standardizing the hardware platform to be OS generic, they make custom shit blobs they stick in a Linux kernel and leave for dead after 2 years.
Because it sells new devices. If you could keep an old S3 updated to the latest Android effortlessly there would be no artificial software based pressure to buy a new phone as long as you still liked the old one.
I actually find it really fascinating that it seems that hardware vendors are aggressively trying to create new modes of planned obsolescence as Google ramps up efforts to reduce their ability to abandon updates. User irreplaceable batteries are the biggest one to me, where vendors take the extra step to be truly devious and make hard-to-access batteries in sealed phones actually impossible to replace because they either solder the battery in or make it break the connectors when you try to remove it.