this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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If Google or Apple went out of business (depending on which phone you have) you'd stop getting updates and it'd stop working.
My NES hasn't received an "update" in the 37 years since it was manufactured, and it still runs fine. So does my Tandy 1000 PC. Didn't even have to replace any capacitors. This is what we want. Some time 15-20 years ago we started taking the wrong path with our tech.
I am old enough to remember appliances coming with full schematics printed inside their cases.
Electronics age out over time. The old stuff, made with more materials, take longer to age out. However, the old stuff does not have even a smidgen of the performance or power efficiency the modern stuff does.
Capacitors age because they are filled with liquid electrolyte, which dries out over time. Batteries age for mostly the same reason, and the chemical reaction slowly becomes irreversible. Those are easily replaceable. However, an integrated circuit is just a wafer of silicon. A piece of sand. It's going to take a long, long time for that to degrade. If it weren't for needing constant software updates and cloud connections to be useful, an iPhone could theoretically last a hundred years. "Tin whiskers" may also be a problem, but we are talking decades before you have to worry about that.
I don't think your theory about old things lasting longer because there is more mass to them is correct though. It really sounds like you are making that up because it sounds good in your head.
The larger components have more space between them... it takes longer for the "tin whiskers" to grow and become a problem. That and these old devices ran at higher voltages, so they have more tolerance to minor voltage fluctuations. Also, plastic does degrade eventually, copper traces can corrode, etc. Build quality matters, too.
Why do you need performance or power efficiency in a car's computer? It just needs to go when I press the pedal, and stop when I hit the brakes. That's not complicated, and something like battery wear leveling and temperature regulation can be a completely closed system and not require any updates whatsoever.
I really don't understand why cars need so much complex stuff, I just want it to get me from A to B, ideally in comfort. My current car that's >15 years old does that just fine with no internet connection, why do I need all the complex software?
Why performance...
Do you like your car's head unit to spend 1-5 seconds not doing anything before responding to your touchscreen or button press? No? Then yes, performance matters.
Power efficiency? Anything to extend battery life.
I don’t even want my car to have a touch screen!
Yeah, I don't need a touch screen. All I want is feature parity with my 15+ yo cars.
Would it? In what way? Sure the App Store would be done. But apps I current have and safari would be fine.
Think of all the Apple shit your phone depends on. iCloud, iMessage, any time you have to authenticate with your apple password. Probably a bunch of other iBullshit that I'm not familiar with because I don't have an iPhone. At the very least, your OS would stop getting security updates, and like you said, you wouldn't have an app store to push app updates. Some stuff would break immediately and other stuff would degrade over time.
Now imagine it's your car
If we look at Android instead, I can just use one of the other app stores. Most of my apps come from F-Droid, and my updates come from GrapheneOS, not Google (though they basically package up Google's updates). If Google completely disappeared, I'd probably just donate to GrapheneOS so they can afford to take over SW maintenance. But even if I don't get any more updates, my phone is already quite secure and I'd still get updates for the vast majority of my apps.
I want something like GrapheneOS for my car. Or better yet, I want my car to be simple enough that it doesn't need security updates to keep going. My car should go when I step on the accelerator pedal, and stop when I hit the brakes. It doesn't need internet access or security updates to do that.
Not at all. It would maintain functionality at the current status quo, and browsers would still receive updates and keep current with server based technology. If anything required additional components to use new technologies or display novel applications, that would be a hardware based change that won't be fixed through a system update regardless.
You can still browse the web just fine on a phone from 2010 running Android 2.3 - many applications are now unsupported, but if Google (or Apple, for that matter) were to stop updating the OS, then application developers would stay at the current technology level that make hardware upgrades unnecessary.
Some apps that require google services (I'm sure there's an equivalent for iOS) might no longer work, but most run just fine regardless.
If security is what you're getting at, at least for Android, there are excellent third party solutions that keep attackers out even on an end of life device (shoutout to Hypatia).