Yes and no. Installing last version of android on a pixel 4 is most likely absolutely fine. And keeping at least security support is likely not a big deal. 3 years of security update support it is clearly a finance department decision. Why 3, why not 3 and half? Why not 4?

Just because they need predictability in sales, and they attached the support to the “classical” number of years after which you’d like a customer to buy a new tech product. 3 years has always been a magic number for hardware companies, since forever

No not really, formula is no more than 10% production costs pa unless w produced poorly to begin with. It’s even less if you’re running multiple versions of roughly the same thing then the costs are spread over those versions.

That’s why the bootloaders of phones should be required to be unlocked by law. You can always root your phone and install a custom ROM on it to keep up to date.

It kinda is. Windows 11 won’t run on older hardware and end of life of the latest version of Win 10 is coming up in 2 years or so. And a bunch of PCs weren’t really ready for Win 10 when that replaced Win 7/8 and again, support for those dropped at some point.

Lifetimes are usually more lenient with PCs, but it still happens. You can switch to Linux of course, but then there are alternatives for many smartphones as well.

Because PCs are based on a hardware standard that allows for a standard kernel and pluggable drivers. So you can just take a standard install of a new version of Windows, and toss in the same drivers from the last version, and you’re on your way.

On ARM, there is no such standard that is widely deployed, the hardware is integrated bespoke for each and every device, so building a new version of the OS for a specific phone means using very specific configurations (where in memory is the GPU mapped? where is the sound chip mapped? on a PC the hardware can plug-and-play detect this stuff, on ARM it has to be hardcoded into the OS for every device). This is made worse by the chips used in mobile phones being proprietary hardware where the drivers are only released to manufacturers under NDA, and these hardware manufacturers often don’t bother to supply updates at all and individual phone manufacturers don’t have enough clout to force them to

Hell, I’ve had a £100 phone for 3 years already and it’s absolutely fine. I’ve noticed a little battery degregation but it still lasts a whole day. Plus a cheap batter change will make it last year’s more. I can’t understand why anyone would still sing those contracts for a new phone every 2 years.