Long-term updated devices might be OK for your wallet and the environment, but they're not good at making profits. They also slow down "innovation", and what would we be without 100s of useless ("necessary") functions in our modern phones? We'd have to (gasp) talk to each other at restaurants or also use proper dedicated devices like a camera and would miss some selfies!
Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data.
Long-term updates to old devices are a drain on the people updating them. You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
>Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data.
No, they just have (Apple 2022 iPhone revenues alone vs 2023 NASA budget) 10x the amount of money of NASA's budget (or 3x, if we stick to net profit), and around 1000x more money are depended on them.
>You start a hardware company and let’s see how long you and your little team of really expensive engineers keep updating last year’s product.
As long as the law mandates updates and bugfixes for older products, which, in a civilized society that actually did care for waste and the environment would be decades.
> Old mobile phones aren’t transmitting priceless scientific data.
Aren't they though? Clearly it's not on the same scale, but a 5 year old phone is still perfectly capable of transmitting very valuable data and providing utility to the user.
