>Samsung can do it because they're smart, but Apple does it because they're evil?
Nobody said Apple are doing it because they're are evil, calm down.
Your parent said Apple can afford to give you longer support because they not only make money when they sell you the phone HW, they also keep making money from your iCloud, iTunes and every other third party subscription or SW you buy on Apple App store. Basically, they double dip and monetize you over the entire period of you owning the device. That's exactly what your parent said. Apple's walled garden affords them enough revenue to keep funding SW updates for your old Apple devices which Android makers can't do.
All the other Android makers, apart from Google, don't make any other money after they sell you the phone HW, since Google is the one earning 30% off Playstore sales, not Samsung, or the others HW makers. Therefore they can't afford to pay teams of SW devs to keep pushing you SW updated for your old phone, so many years after you stopped giving them money, especially since they depend on Quallcomm and other semi vendors giving them up to date drivers, which they won't do for free since semi makers also want to sell newer chips rather than supporting older ones for free.
Google could do like Apple in theory, since they own the whole ecosystem stack apart from the SoC and they do have the cash for it, but they don't want to do it because Google sucks at maintaining anything "old" long-term, especially HW, so they keep doing what Google does best and focus on the new shiny while sunsetting the older shinys.
It's ironic that Samsung offers longer Andorid updates for their flagships S-series, than Google themselves do for the Pixels. That says everying about Google.
No, Google just sucks at maintaining an ecosystem.
Microsoft figured out how to license an OS to third party OEMs and still allow end users to update their hardware without depending on the vendor for literally decades.
Heck I was able to just throw a Windows 7 CD in my old first gen Mac Mini x86 1.66Ghz Core Duo and run it for years after Apple dropped support.
They arguably never did. Android updates are all-encompassing, unlike Windows. You still depend on manufacturers of your hardware (motherboard, CPU) to provide firmware updates (BIOS, Microcode). How old is your Motherboard's firmware? You probably don't even know, because most people don't consider these things important, which is a mistake. On Android, generally, firmware updates are included.
You are just describing why Android's update/support model is broken, which is agreeing with the parent comment.
Cleaving the hardware support from the OS support is precisely why the PC ecosystem can sustain much longer support periods, because those are separate concerns. Yes, at some point BIOS feature updates will cease (although usually they will crank out an update for everything going back a decade+ if there is some major vulnerability) but that doesn't mean Microsoft or Canonical or Red Hat can't keep rolling out OS feature updates for another decade on the existing BIOS feature level. And while BIOS security updates are occasionally a thing, the attack surface is much smaller, just like the hypervisor reduces Xbox/PS5 attack surface too.
The problem with Android's model is specifically that it ties these two together, so when the SOC vendor or the phone vendor get bored, the OS updates also cease.
Google has been moving towards changing that, by packaging more and more things as Google Service updates/etc rather than OS updates, but fundamentally the Android model is like your PC not getting Windows 10 because the motherboard vendor doesn't want to package it in a new BIOS image. And that's different.
Sometimes there are genuine feature cliffs, like 32-bit support, or UEFI support, or Windows 11 starting to move towards mandatory TPM. But if the OS vendor is willing to live with the old BIOS feature level, the BIOS vendor or the System Integrator doesn't need to keep packaging the updates for microsoft.
My Mac Mini built by Apple without using BootCamp was able to run Windows 7 just by sticking a DVD in.
How much more all encompassing can you get than that.
I assure that Apple never went out of its way to release firmware for the 1st gen Intel Mac Mini so it could work with Windows 7.
Windows 7 supported all of my Mac hardware - Bluetooth, gigabit Ethernet, wifi, and it found the IR sensor for the remote. I never tried to use it.
Even before that, I had more obscure x86 hardware - a 486DX/2-66Mhz “DOS Compatibility Card” for my old Mac that came with Windows 3.1 and had a built in Soundblaster card. I was able to our Windows 95 on it without any updated drivers from Apple.
Part of that is the OS kernel design. Unlike Linux, Windows has a stable device driver API which makes it easy for hardware vendors to release drivers separately and maintain them across versions.
>Microsoft figured out how to license an OS to third party OEMs and still allow end users to update their hardware without depending on the vendor for literally decades.
You're cluelessly comparing apples to oranges. ARM smartphones, for better and for worse, are not like the Windows based IBM X86 PCs in any way when it comes to boot process, OS and drivers interactions.
ARM SBCs which is what all smartphones are, are completely different than X86 PCs which have more open standards when it comes to booting and driver support, versus ARM where it's mostly proprietary blobs different from vendor to vendor.
Nobody said Apple are doing it because they're are evil, calm down.
Your parent said Apple can afford to give you longer support because they not only make money when they sell you the phone HW, they also keep making money from your iCloud, iTunes and every other third party subscription or SW you buy on Apple App store. Basically, they double dip and monetize you over the entire period of you owning the device. That's exactly what your parent said. Apple's walled garden affords them enough revenue to keep funding SW updates for your old Apple devices which Android makers can't do.
All the other Android makers, apart from Google, don't make any other money after they sell you the phone HW, since Google is the one earning 30% off Playstore sales, not Samsung, or the others HW makers. Therefore they can't afford to pay teams of SW devs to keep pushing you SW updated for your old phone, so many years after you stopped giving them money, especially since they depend on Quallcomm and other semi vendors giving them up to date drivers, which they won't do for free since semi makers also want to sell newer chips rather than supporting older ones for free.
Google could do like Apple in theory, since they own the whole ecosystem stack apart from the SoC and they do have the cash for it, but they don't want to do it because Google sucks at maintaining anything "old" long-term, especially HW, so they keep doing what Google does best and focus on the new shiny while sunsetting the older shinys.
It's ironic that Samsung offers longer Andorid updates for their flagships S-series, than Google themselves do for the Pixels. That says everying about Google.