Having recently had trouble updating my #Nexus 5 (also manufactured 7 years ago) to #Android 10, I asked myself:

"Why is my e-reader still getting regular OS updates, while #Google stopped issuing security patches for my smartphone four years ago?"

To try to answer this, let us turn to economic incentives theory.

In an effort to support a wider variety of hardware on an existing LTS release, the 12.04.2 and newer point releases will ship with an updated kernel and X stack by default. These newer hardware enablement stacks will be comprised of the newer kernel and X stacks from 12.10 (Quantal), 13.04 (Raring), 13.10 (Saucy), and 14.04 (Trusty). These enablement stacks are only intended for use on x86 hardware at this time. Those running virtual or cloud images should not need these newer enablement stacks and are thus recommended to remain on the original Precise stack.