In an ideal world, my preference would be for the government to enforce some sort of standardized driver interface and user-modifiability guidelines, such that users have the ability to update their own devices.
Apple comes closer than most. The most recent unsupported device is the 5C, which was released 5 years ago and discontinued in 2016. Their end of support appears to be mostly in line with major architecture changes and not "too old, too hard, just buy a new one" as appears to be the case with Android.
You do realize that phone is only available for preorder? They may not even be around in 3 or 5 years. The OP likely suggested Apple (5s is in its 6th year of updates).
>You do realize that phone is only available for preorder?
Yes, it is only for preorder, but the devkit already exists [0].
> They may not even be around in 3 or 5 years.
If they manage to make the final version of the phone (which is quite likely), it won't matter anymore, since the OS is just GNU/Linux. Correspondingly, the updates do not so much depend on the phone manufacturers.
So how does that solve a problem lineage os doesn't?
You're buying into a phone that should get continued support for years to come, assuming the company survives, and they don't end up finding the maintenance burnden utterly untenable (once they on model version 3, I can't see it being the easiest thing to support the older models - Apple does, but Apples huge). It seems to be relatively underpowered (though that's really up to how many resources the system uses), and I can't imagine will age well. There will be little to no mainstream app support (they seem to be touting "just run it in a browser" as a solution to that - I thought we left those dark ages).
It seems like a neat, niche product, like a raspberry pi phone, but it doesn't give me a lot of hope for the future.