And they hated him because he spoke the truth. Phones being disposable is something we just accepted. A POTS phone bought in the 1890’s would work without modification until the 1990’s and still will work today with an adapter. Why? Because we didn’t have continuous protocol churn. If it was invented today in 2 years there would POTS/2, KETTLE, and a draft spec for POTS2.1 written on a used napkin but somehow already in production at Google.
Our stuff turns to trash because everything is built on shifting sand with no thoughts given to supporting it long term and for some reason we like it this way.
Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
But new shiny thing! Alright, that’s great. Is it so
much better that you want everyone in the world to throw away their old devices? Probably eventually but you’re daft if you think those kinds of events should be every few years. God can you imagine if we did that to cars? Sorry, Honda dropped support for your Civic, you can keep using it for a bit but in a year we’re gonna change the roads and it will be undrivable.
Some of it is to do with your so-called "protocol churn" but also the fact that a phone from the 1890's is order of magnitude less complex than a modern smartphone. It's really a ridiculous argument.
Many of the required updates to a device are security related, perhaps they could write said software better so that there are never bugs...but software is complicated now; millions & millions of lines or code and dozens and dozens of different chips. It's better to make phones much more recyclable than it is to make them last longer.
And to that I point to cars, devices that also have millions of lines of code (some luxury cars apparently have 100 million lines of code) that drive security and safety critical systems. They are also an amalgam of far far more parts and chips than any phone is.
But here’s the thing, the complexity isn’t even relevant, the thing that would make phones last for ages is just committing to some basic set of hardware interfaces. You can pull an ancient desktop out of your basement and run the latest Linux on it and you ought to be able to do that with phones too.
> Do y’all not long for a future where you can get off the upgrade treadmill because the developer facing API is fixed? Not backwards compatible because that implies you ought to be moving to the next, like once it works you can call it done.
No. We want modern APIs that prioritize modern concerns, usable with modern toolkits and frameworks and taking advantage of modern programming principles. Even if we had an API intended for longevity, once its creators die we will tear it down completely and replace it with something that suits our newer-therefore-better tastes. For them it was the cornerstone of an industry's worth of innovations; for us it is but a millstone around our necks and must be replaced. I know this because I've seen it happen many times. Once the people who've staked their entire careers building upon $THING, and developed some truly remarkable software, grow old, up rises the chorus of people who are sick of $THING, who can't even fathom how anyone got anything done with $THING, who give talks at conferences about how $THING is fundamentally broken and how we should be using $NEWTHING instead. And these voices grow louder, their chants more thunderous, until it's generally accepted that $THING is a relic and $NEWTHING is the future. Even the things we thought would last forever -- POSIX, C, X11 -- are now, if anything, well past their expiration date.
This is how things are. This is how they must be. There is naught we can do but be like a Japanese person observing the seasons, contemplating, with some sadness, the constant change and the endless cycle of death and rebirth.
There's such a thing as lasting too long without deprecating old cruft.
POSIX isn't too bad, but is still kind of a mess. C has a lot of broken features. X11 doesn't fit how hardware works these days and trying to force it with extensions isn't a good fix.
There are real problems with faddishness on the scale of 5-10 years, but there are also real improvements that happen across decades, and if 40 year old tools don't get updated then they should be replaced.
But you forgot to mention how this requires ignoring the old devices. Can X11 replacement not work on old hardware? What critical improvement in POSIX would mandate the same?
Unless that's slowly=unusable that's not a good example (would also help if this poor support was a result of some "modern programming principles"). Otherwise that's way too early to retire in Japan
We should have several decades of support for all cheap electronics at least…