Earlier quoted context omitted.
And they hated him because he spoke the truth. Phones being disposable is something we just accepted. A POTS phone bought in the 1890’s would work without modification until the 1990’s and still will work today with an adapter. Why? Because we didn’t have continuous protocol churn. If it was invented today in 2 years there would POTS/2, KETTLE, and a draft spec for POTS2.1 written on a used napkin but somehow already…
Some of it is to do with your so-called "protocol churn" but also the fact that a phone from the 1890's is order of magnitude less complex than a modern smartphone. It's really a ridiculous argument. Many of the required updates to a device are security related, perhaps they could write said software better so that there are never bugs...but software is complicated now; millions & millions of lines or code and dozens…
But here’s the thing, the complexity isn’t even relevant, the thing that would make phones last for ages is just committing to some basic set of hardware interfaces. You can pull an ancient desktop out of your basement and run the latest Linux on it and you ought to be able to do that with phones too.