I volunteer at a place where we restore old desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets and then forward them to people in need who can't afford them. Many of the Windows laptops are over 10 years old, up to 15 in some cases. Sadly, we can't afford the time to restore devices that are 20 years or older, but at least in theory, they could be brought back to life and be used.

On the tablet side of things, Apple or Samsung, things are different. A couple weeks ago, I had an iPad Mini 1st gen that was borderline useless. One no longer can update the software, download any apps, or use most of the provided apps. It can solely be used for browsing Wikipedia or watching YouTube videos in a horrendously low quality, 360 or so, while the screen is almost 1080p. The device looks like new, feels like new, the battery works fantastically, yet the device is relegated to e-waste because using it only for the camera and browser is something nobody really wants. If the people could at least download newer versions of YouTube, a game or a navigation system, the device could still be used.

Another case with Samsung as the representative of the Android side. "Hurr durr Android freedom no walled garden"-BUUUULLSHIIIIT! The device is barely 10 years old and stuck on Android 4. You can't update the software, you can't update the apps, the apps refuse to work in their old versions, and you can't update the Playstore. The device is basically e-waste. THEORETICALLY you can install LineageOS or some other bullcrap, but doing that on an Android device is 4 times as difficult as installing Windows on a normal PC and nobody wants to deal with that crap except for the hardcore enthusiasts. The device is relegated to e-waste for NO REASON other than Samsung's greed, and Apple's greed, and general capitalist-corporate-greed.

What prompted me to write this rant was a random comment I stumbled upon while searching for a solution. The comment went something like "There is no good reason to use an Android 4 device at [current year], move on and buy a new device."

The degenerate morons like the commenter are the reason why modern devices suck, die way too soon, or are killed off by force; they are the reason why fighting climate change is an impossible task and why humanity is going to suffer a genocide executed by the fucking Sun; and I don't have any problem with calling that kind of people degenerate morons no matter who gets offended or thinks that that is ableist or a slur because that is what they fucking are - DEGENERATE MORONS.

There are many, many, many good reasons why you would want to use such an old device, and I will list some of them:
you want to experience old games or video media in the way it was experienced in the past, similarly to why people still use MP3 players or record players;
you want to experience using older versions of existing software for the thrill of it;
you are actively using a software that no longer receives support but works on that device, but you don't want to deal with all your other apps not working (might disproportionally affect people with disabilities);
you want to have a functioning backup device;
you want to give an older device to little children or people with disabilities and not be sorry if they accidentally break it;
you want to experiment with software and hardware on an older device so you are not financially ruined if you break it;
and the most important of all: you don't want to create unnecessary e-waste when you can use a device that still fucking works.

Do I think companies should be forced to support a 10 year old device?

HELL NO! I can understand that companies need to innovate and earn money and sell new products. I want them to do that.

What I don't want them to do is to wall-off functioning devices so that is nearly impossible for casual users to install an OS. People still use Windows XP era machines (both with XP and other OSs, regardless if Windows or Linux distros) for various reasons, including creating backups, digitizing analog media, or for retro gaming.

Companies should be forced to unlock bootloaders and to make installing an alternative OS super-easy and even provide tutorials on how to do it once they decide that their old device is not making them money. Companies should be forced to provide documentation. Companies should provide minimal server infrastructure to update the software to the newest version or release the needed files to the public so we can store it somewhere else.

If a company can't provide the minimum of keeping an old device somewhat running after 10 years, if that is really the straw that will break the corporate overlord's back, then I not only don't care - I want that company fucking gone off the face of the Earth, never to be remembered again.

All the most popular phones are naturally from large conglomerates (BBK, Apple, Samsung, Transsion, etc.), so it's hard to gauge for me.

And to my knowledge, Nothing phone (which is independent) is still unprofitable and surviving off investor money.

So how much would independent companies need to sell to stay alive? 500K units annually? 1M? 2M?

Are the figures the same for independent laptop companies like Framework?

Hello smart people of reddit!

Today I had an A-level computer science lesson about internal hardware. I learned about buses and the 3 buses between the CPU and memory:

• Data Bus
• Address Bus
• Control Bus

The address bus was explained as having as many wires in it as you would need to address every memory location so a memory stick with 64 locations would have a address bus width of 6. I then thought about the memory DDR standards which have a standard pinout. So, do each of the memory generations have different address width sizes?

Some questions I would like some detail on (please) are:

• Does each generation have a set bus width and if so what are they?
• Does this theory actually limit the supported memory size of each generation?
• How does the memory controller that sits in the middle interact? Some theories I have are that the memory controller translated the signal from the CPU and splits it to each stick so to the CPU it just looks like the largest memory address is "no. of location per stick x no. of sticks of RAM" or the CPU has multiple separate channels to directly interact with each RAM stick.

I did try googling this but to be honest, I don't know what to search - do you have any resources you could direct me to? - so thankyou so much if you have a big enough brain to help me out and of course don't hesitate to let me know if I'm all wrong! Computer science is an extremely complex field.

It seems to me that foveros is superior in every way. The yield rates of tsmc's wafers ensure that at least a couple of the chips on the wafer need to be disabled. The on die interconnect density is around 20000 per mm on the edge of the chip. That's obviously a lot higher than the 1200-1500/nm^2 of foveros. But by just having 14~mm of interconnect on each side of the chip, you have equal interconnect density. Sure there is propagation latency, but it seems to me that Foveros and TSMC silicon interposer are superior.