>This provokes me. Are we supposed to be happy with two years?
As someone who buys a new phone around every 2-3 years, two years is perfect for me. I know the developers are focusing on making the update work as well as they can on just the last two years' worth of hardware, and not "wasting time" on making it work well on lesser/older hardware.
Take "wasting time" here defined as selfishly as possible. If I'm buying a new phone every 2 years, any amount of development time that goes into making sure that update works on 3+-year-old phones is wasted on me, and explicitly means less development time was spent on features that are actually relevant to me.
Honestly, I'd be just as happy if updates were guaranteed for just 1 year (though I'd probably just sit for a year without updates between upgrades), and I'd definitely be less happy if they were guaranteed for 5 years because I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.
> I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.
In what ways do you feel that cell phones need to be pushed forward? Phones have been capable of doing everything I want and more for many years now. My biggest complaint is how quickly they become insecure.
Do you just throw away your old phone? Mine become hand-me-downs.
Until her birthday this year, my mother-in-law was using my old iPhone 5S, a 6-year-old phone which still runs the latest iOS. Now she got my wife's old iPhone 6S (4 years old), and my wife has my old iPhone X (3 years old).
Throwing away a phone after 2 years is incredibly wasteful.
I usually sell or give them away to friends that need them, with anything that isn't wanted sitting in reserve in case I ever need a backup phone (I always keep an extra one in my backpack in case my current driver breaks).
The only phone/tablet I've actually thrown away was my 2012 Nexus 7 that finally completely died last year. Everything else finds a home somewhere. :)
As someone who buys a new phone around every 2-3 years, two years is perfect for me. I know the developers are focusing on making the update work as well as they can on just the last two years' worth of hardware, and not "wasting time" on making it work well on lesser/older hardware.
Take "wasting time" here defined as selfishly as possible. If I'm buying a new phone every 2 years, any amount of development time that goes into making sure that update works on 3+-year-old phones is wasted on me, and explicitly means less development time was spent on features that are actually relevant to me.
Honestly, I'd be just as happy if updates were guaranteed for just 1 year (though I'd probably just sit for a year without updates between upgrades), and I'd definitely be less happy if they were guaranteed for 5 years because I feel like a significantly larger portion of development time would go towards backwards compatibility instead of pushing tech forward.