Comment by TheJoeMan
2 hours ago
Regarding hardware, it's not entirely true that it doesn't need maintenance/development. See "stepping" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepping_level. There are sometimes ways to tweak the masks to fix a "silicon bug".
Yes, but that still costs significant money in a way that software deployment doesn't. IME most chips get maybe one or two metal layer revisions then a rev B consolidated bugfix - and then get left alone.