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by bogomipz 2452 days ago
>"Today's manufacturers cannot afford to update software for hardware devices they have already moved on from."

What is this statement based on? None of your links show any kind of unit economics that support the assertion that providing critical security patches for a defined support window is infeasible for manufactures and their business models.
1 comments
tonyarkles 2452 days ago
I agree wholeheartedly, and outright reject the premise of the original statement.

This is a choice that they make. Yes, having a legacy support team is going to cost a bit of money, but not a ridiculous amount. Maybe instead of having a ridiculous number of barely-differentiated SKUs, they could lighten the support burden a bit by making a smaller number of solid well-supported models.

Edit: also, basing the models on a common platform would help too. I assume they generally do this already, but if not...

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wmf 2452 days ago
basing the models on a common platform would help too. I assume they generally do this already, but if not...

They don't, because they save a few dollars by re-bidding each product. So each company is shipping a random assortment of Broadcom, Marvell, and Qualcomm reference designs, all running incompatible software stacks.

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tonyarkles 2452 days ago
> random assortment of Broadcom, Marvell, and Qualcomm reference designs, all running incompatible software stacks

How... what... c'mon! You're totally right [1], and even within similar model numbers (e.g. the DIR-300 B-series uses Ralink chips, but the DIR-330 uses Broadcom). Yeesh.

Well... I guess I'll just keep on picking devices supported by OpenWRT and not rely on vendor firmware at all. Yuck.

[1] https://openwrt.org/toh/start?dataflt%5BBrand*~%5D=d-link

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