During the pandemic, when some components had suply issues, Asus released a few weird SKUs in that market segment. The RT-AC68U_V4 was another one of these, it was basically a cut down version of the RT-AC86U. It was EOL within around 3 years, which was a shame because I thought that for its price, it was really nice hardware. The RT-AX56U has also been EOL for a while already, and had a fairly short life cycle.
The fact that we got RT-AX53U, RT-AX55U, RT-AX56U (two versions I believe?), RT-AX58U (two versions), RT-AX59U and RT-AX3000 seem weird to me. Hard to believe that a model that's 10$ cheaper would make the difference between a sold product and a lost customer, and justify the development of a separate SKU.
The problem is made bigger than it actually is because Asus is looking bad when compared with... themselves. What is par for the course in terms of support for the vast majority of the competition in the same market segment is the exception with Asus's select SKUs where it happens. People expect that if the RT-AC68U could get 10 years of support, then any other Asus model that gets "only four years" is an international diplomatic incident worthy of a forum bloodbath.
It isn't.
People should appreciate that at least, Asus is making it official, rather than just silently stopping the release of firmware updates, leaving people to wonder.
People should instead be outraged at their $1000 smart TV that stops getting software updates after three years, or their $1000 Android phone that stops getting updates after two years. These are far more annoying than a $150 router losing support after four years.
In an ideal world, Broadcom and Qualcomm would actually start trying to cooperate with the OSS community, and provide open source drivers to the community, so that projects like OpenWRT can cover for manufacturers who eventually drop the ball on a perfectly functional piece of hardware.
These SoC manufacturers are the real source of the problem here.
Well, I don't disagree with you here, but I also try my very best to avoid brands that drop their products like a hot turd after a year or two, when possible.
My TV is a 2021 model that is still getting regular updates (also, it wasn't anywhere near $1000), my phone is a Pixel 6 that is getting regular updates and after my old Netgear R7800 died after seven years and somewhat regular updates, plus Voxel's much more regular updates, I got the RT-AX68U as a replacement, as it was what I could afford at the time.
That was in August of 2022, so to me, it's only a year and a half old and now it's EOL. That just doesn't seem fair, as I didn't buy a five year old model, I bought something that was still fairly recently released. However, as it had some kind of hardware issue that made it fall over after about a weeks uptime and my SO who was relying on it for work ended up making me get another router, so I got an RT-AX86U Pro, as it had come down significantly in price and it hasn't missed a beat so far, although by now it's still sitting in Taiwan, while I had to get a new router here in Sweden.
The GT-AX6000 I got here, without double checking properly, has a firmware that's nine months out of date now, which also feels like poor support, but according to some people on this forum, I should just suck it up and be happy, as it's working and I'm just a consumer, so why should I be concerned about security threats?
Obviously I'm running your firmware on it now, but why are these companies so crap at issuing regular updates? I'm not asking for new features, just bug fixes and security updates. I know it can be done, I worked at a company that did just that, because the company saw it as something that mattered for its customers. Clearly no-one else in this business does and as you point out, Asus is the best of the worst.
I feel sorry for Asus customers who bought some of their MTK and Qualcomm based models and got TP-Link level support on those products, or worse in some cases. These types of products shouldn't be allowed to be sold with less than five years of guaranteed security updates. I'm not asking for monthly updates like many phones get these days, but at least a quarterly update. Is this asking for too much?
As for the SoC guys, I fully agree. We reported an issue to MTK when I worked at the router manufacturer, explained to them what the issue was, after having spent a couple of months finding the exact issue and it still took them three months to issue a fix for the problem. It made the entire WiFi radio stack crash, so not a small problem.
The others appear to be no better and for those with a somewhat longer memory, you might remember that QCA abandoned its first generation of 802.11ac chips, as they had a hardware bug that was unfixable in firmware. Luckily, only TP-Link had managed to release hardware based on said chip.
All three of them are overly paranoid about their intellectual property, so that will most likely never happen, even though I fully agree with you on the software side of things.
