[tonyarkles]

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...

[wmf]

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.

[tonyarkles]

> 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