As opposed to "being free in all senses of the word", which is what the comment was talking about.
And now you're running a two year old phone and it's effectively obsolete.
If they would just upstream their firmware into the Linux kernel, you could upgrade these phones for years and years. Until the hardware is actually physically incapable of running the latest features.
Some vendors, like Google, promise to provide updates for a long time. But it's just that - a promise. There's no technical guarantee or mechanism for this, it's purely based on trust.
The Precursor is promising, but software is not there yet.
I sit down at my desktop computer and send emails and type messages like this one. Then I get up from my desk and spend time with my family offline and present. It's pretty great.