A1-840 lollipop

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saywot wrote:

I'm don't understand why this company doesn't update their machines, they get the OS for free, it's not as if they have to pay for anything like they do to Microsoft.

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The bulk of the cost for an Android OS is porting it to the hardware, not in licensing fees. Microsoft does the porting for you so you only have to look at any specialized hardware you've added and even then most of the hardware manufacturers do drivers for you. With Android you start with an OS that works on the reference design, but you have to port pretty much everything to your hardware. You can get a bit of it done for you by the hardware manufacturers, but that only helps some. It's a significant task to get everything running, using hundreds or thousands of man/hours which equate to lots and lots of personnel expenses.

To do an update to the OS is basically starting over again, redoing that port for every part of the OS that has changed since the reference release you started with when you first designed the product. It's not unusual for an update to requires essentially the same costs as the original port, since so much of the OS has been changed.

If the company does enough volume to support those costs as a percentage of units sold, they can do updates. If the costs outweigh the profits then you can't do updates. Unfortunately, though Acer is a large corporation, the sales of Android tablets are a small enough percentage of total revenue that they can't justify porting new versions of the OS.

At least that's what it looks like to me... Since I'm not an Acer employee (and even if I were it'd be unlikely that I would have access to real data) it's just speculation. But it's speculation that seems to match what we see happening in the real world.