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by davidzweig
888 days ago
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"In 2022 alone, the South Korean company sold almost 260 million smartphones worldwide." Say there's a model that sold 10m total. I think it's fair to say Samsung could reasonably increase the price by $1 (~0.75c minus tax) for 10 years of support instead of ~3 years. That's $7.5m. I used to flash Cyanogenmod on my phones (motorola defy etc.), IIRC it was often a single guy making the roms, I guess part time, doing a decent job of it. $1m/year for years 4-10 should cover a team of 5. I think difficulties arose when newer kernals wouldn't work with the older hardware drivers that were available. But there's fewer SOCs than smartphone models.. I guess maybe $0.10 to Qualcomm for every SOC sale should cover updating drivers. Not sure I'd want to be using a 10yo (2013) phone now, but a 5yo (2018) phone with fresh software would be fine. Todays higher-end phones should still be usuable beyond 5 years. Here's Android 12 on Samsung S4 (2013), looks okay but probably marginal once you put a few chonky apps:
https://youtu.be/lySu841rNgg?si=LyONyyUP8mcCa67L&t=783 |
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That's a problem of Samsungs own doing. They can mainline their drivers and force their subcontractors to do the same if they want to sell to them. They're definitely big enough to be able to do it if they wanted to.
Samsung doesn't see this as a problem.