Voyager 1 has been in space for 16,900 days and is still getting software updates 24 billion kilometers away, but Google stopped supporting my phone less than 3.5 years after they started selling them (and just 2 years after they stopped selling them).
From 1977 to 1989 the Voyager program cost taxpayers approximately $865 million in 1977 dollars. That works out to about $2.50 per person, roughly $12.50 today.
I can't find an estimate for the maintenance cost since then, but I assume it's also substantial. So let's say $20 per person in the USA.
Your phone cost you anywhere from $400 to $900 every three or four years.
The lesson here is that structures like privatization, consumerism and capitalism don't actually do great things for anyone but their investors.
@mycorrhiza Thank goodness you don’t have to use a Voyager I probe as a smartphone, or that your smartphone wasn’t sent on a one-way interstellar mission then!
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