[saberdancer]

I think it's better to say - if your phone was 12 billion miles from Earth and used to send sensitive scientific data - it would get updates as well.

[randomdata]

Not when you only paid on the order of $1,000 for it. For so little, nobody is going to bother to support your device for decades, no matter how near or far away it is from you or what you happen to be doing with it.

The original Voyager budget was $865 million (~$5 billion today), and has paid out even more for maintenance and operation since. Spend that much money on an iPhone and not only will updates be available for decades, but someone from Apple will come and personally install the updates for you.

[leptons]

In your scenario there also needs to only be 2 iPhones in existence and making more would cost significantly more than the first 2 did, and you would have to wait decades for them to do anything noteworthy that the first 2 units aren't doing right now.

Instead, iPhones are like the basic bitch of devices and are mass produced to the point they are ubiquitous and still 99.999% of use of the device is pointless drivel.

[jabradoodle]

Apple made more than 100 billion on iPhone sales in the first half of 2023 and the marginal cost of an update is essentially 0, so what your saying doesn't make sense.

[saberdancer]

The point is that they are getting updates, not because NASA paid 865 million in 1970s but because it is doing scientific work that no other spacecraft is able to do currently. If Voyager was orbiting around Earth it would get no updates at all, no matter how much NASA paid to get it into orbit.

So my point stands - if Voyager ran on an iPhone it would get those updates.