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nitrohigito t1_j45vv37 wrote

This may blow your mind, but upkeep is not free.

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ennuinerdog OP t1_j462hkn wrote

Exactly, paying for long-term upkeep is the fundamental concept of the company. Imagine if all phone manufacturers ensured handsets were repairable and kept software updated.

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nitrohigito t1_j46b6z5 wrote

Did you grasp the conversation above?

They implied Fairphone is ending software support for the device because of corporate greed borne planned obsolescence. I reminded them that upkeep has costs: Fairphone wasn't charging for their software updates, so (since upkeep has costs) they'd eventually run out of money to blow on it, even if they were a saint and a non-profit.

This is even ignoring how the costs of said upkeep is not a constant or even a linearly increasing curve, but an exponentially surmounting one, since you keep losing the levels of support from earlier and earlier on in your software supply chain (see the article).

Neither the production of outdated and specialized hardware, nor the indefinite maintenance of specialized software is economically sound. This is why standardization and reuse driven design is key, otherwise you get people screaming muh capitalism and related circlejerk. And even then there are limits, which humanity tends to ignore using the famous "double down" and "looking away" strategies.

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