I was recently reading https://wp.josh.com/2020/01/22/wtf-sonoson-the-evil-companies-do-and-good-people-coming-together-to-stand-up-to-them/ where the author expressed an unpopular opinion on what was then the early problem of hardware becoming unusable when the companies lost interest. This is a bit off-brand for my posts here, but by definition, it’s my stage and I’ll write what I want.
(I’ll also come back to this article and link it up a little more than the original format of a response to a blog post would allow.)
It’s easy to seem smug here in the future of 2024, four years after this was written, but it’s a bit funny that one particular example was given:
Someday Spotify might kill an API and then you will not be able to Spotify with your old Sonos anymore. Disrupted access to services and overall functionality? Yes. But not bricking.
Since this article was written Spotify DID built a hardware thing (Literally named, “The Spotify Car Thing”), reliant upon an API, and DID kill software support and thus, that product. They probably learned from the noise and smoke around this and just offered refund prices to purchasers who were then free to dispose of theme.
“But wait! i am mad h4x0r! I’ll port ${SOFTWARE} to it and it shall regain former glory!”
Knock yourself out. There was even a burst of such reverse engineering effort. The reality is that a 4-core, underpowered, undocumented, ARM SOC was underpowered in 2018 and would have been on part with a humble phone from about 2013, but with half the RAM. Talented people would rather work on a NEW $9 SBC that’s WAY more powerful and better documented.
The result was that a few of them surely landed in hacker junk drawers but it’s likely that most of them went to that same landfill.
Google did something very similar with Stadia and Q, also. They couldn’t keep the required services up, so they just refunded them wholescale. They actually released new firmware to make joysticks and headsets turn into plain old bluetooth versions of the same. Lots of people were grumpy, but it was hard to see it as a financial loss.
For every company that offers a refund, an apology that it didn’t work out, and a recommendation to recycle the product we have a dozen IOT and Smart Home product-makers that disappear in the night and silently DO brick the product. If it’s your thermostat, you probably notice. How long can your camera or security system be offline without you noticing? It happened to thousands of people. In some cases it’s wishful that the companies could have prolonged the device’s life *to some users* by providing enough source code and doc that hackers could, say, keep the security cams streaming to a local NAS, but even providing that may require resources a company facing an abrupt end may be unable to provide.
This week, Fisker Auto is in bankruptcy and liquidating. What happens to firmware that routes the vehicles, monitors safety, may need changes to comply with laws or safety changes when the server running ‘secretserver.fiskerauto.com’ gets recycled itself? (A Tesla would be WAY less awesome without Tesla’s servers being around for traffic and charging updates. Certainly FSD – such as it is – relies heavily on the presence of the company being interested in providing the service. We certainly have nightmares of a Fisker-like ending.) I thin I remember Peloton faced a similar fate.
Insteon took a lot of heat for this, bricking Every Product they ever shipped. A group of Insteon customers actually purchased the remaining rights and all the rights to domains and servers to bring the lights back on – literally! This is a very rare instance.
Amazon is pulling support for the business edition of their robots, leaving 10-month old $2400 robots useless. https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/3/24190410/amazon-astro-business-robot-discontinued-refunds That’s not very awesome. Amazon didn’t shutter; they could do better.
Its a relatively new era of physical devices outlasting the online services that they depend on. As a consumer, we all want our purchases to last as long as possible, so there’s some natural disappointment. Some companies handle this well and some aren’t.
KInd of by definition, if you’re reading anything I wrote, you’re probably one to take things apart, look for JTAG pins, look for schematics, and see if you can go on your own. That’s fine for a $35 camera whose demise merely made you sad. But what’s your expectation when you have a lot invested in that product or company, such as this guy that had invested thousands in Insteon products?
Companies able to issue full refunds are pretty clearly hard to get too mad at, but that clearly doesn’t work in every case, such as products sold through retails or like Peloton, where the company just folds.
I don’t have great suggestions either. It’s messy and it’s a fairly new problem for us in technology. I think the lifetime subscription for our 1st Gen Tivo was about my earliest encounter with a device that actually relied on an online presence.
What are your expectations?