So they may support a single old version because the effort of upstreaming the support would be expensive.
The blog post says that the Librem paid 15 developers full time for 2 years on the project.
That's a huge expense and most of all the customers of the SoC won't be demanding upstream support.
Of course also what happens is that you get into a rabbit hole of patching your fork until it becomes a huge task to reintegrate.
For the first tier customers they get a custom solution developed for them, and have access to all the specs under the NDA, but since that is the case, they cannot develop stuff for mainline and just produce blobs.
I spent days hunting down issues in the launch iOS 13 simulator that turned out not to happen on real hardware (and had never happened worth the iOS 13 launch).
Their UX is on a downward trend for several years now, IMO.
Historically I've heard Apple described as a software company that uses hardware to achieve competitive advantage.
Apple sucking is relative, obviously - their stuff is still better than most other products, but it's not add good as it used to be, IMO.
I wonder if the iPhone's success has transformed them into more of a hardware company?
- Doing a hard fork of the software stack for every product family/generation/platform, because it's assumed up front that hardware differences/bugs and changes in product definition will require non-portable changes throughout the stack (e.g. things like GUI element sizes and line lengths are often hardcoded to fit the layout to a particular screen, various GPIO pins/buttons/LEDs/connectors change identity/significance, hardware gains/loses capabilities needed for a feature so UI elements related to that feature need to be added/removed/altered)
- Expecting the vast majority of development effort to be on shipping new products because already-shipping products are "in the can" and the big deals have already been closed
- Management belief that hardware is hard and software is easy (which is arguably sometimes rational from the perspective of managing product-dooming risks)
- Upstream vendors wasting developers' time with shenanigans around stuff like documentation (oh, you wanted the real manual that actually says what the registers do?) and firmware (some vendors apparently forget to mention that there is firmware until you ask your SE/FAE why something isn't working)
- Uncertainty around whether a given problem ought to be fixed in hardware or software
I’ve always heard it as the exact opposite, hardware company that uses software to achieve competitive advantage. If you look at what they actually “sell”, the version I’ve heard makes much more sense.
But yes, they do seem to straddle the divide somewhat, and they have wavered to one side or the other in the past. But is does seem that even Apple can’t go against the stream; they either seem to do bad hardware and good software or vice versa at any given time.