Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.

On the other hand, my more generic gadgets simply never die. My projector, my Bluetooth speaker, my headphones... they all do exactly what I bought them for. There might come a time when that's not enough, but that will be decided on my own terms. It won't be because of a dead server or a useless battery life.

As you say, tools last a lot longer, because they were designed to fulfill a simple role without any bells and whistles.

This is why I don't like the trend of pairing long-lasting tools to short-lived tech. A car or a watch will last a really long time. USB-C and Android 9.0 won't.

Maybe one day we'll reach the times when programming is done by "programmer-archaeologists", as described by Vernor Vinge in "A Fire Upon the Deep", whose job is to dig through centuries of legacy code covering just about any conceivable need, to find the snippets they need and glue them together. But right now, software gets obsolete just as fast as physical products.

GE may have stopped making a radio your parents bought in 1948, but it's perfectly possible it still works. How many perfectly functional devices have GE bricked simply because they were bored of supporting them? MS Windows drivers support just about every ancient crusty device MS ever made - apparently forever.

It's the web obsession with having every trivial action go through an online server - for data gathering - that breaks the consumer's implied contract with hardware devices: That they should simply work until physically beyond economic repair.

Most of those simple web API actions could function just as well on the LAN, so the device could function indefinitely - you'd just lose remote access when the Google API server shuttered. The 99% case of controlling lights or thermostat whilst in the home would still work, just no longer remotely from a hotel 1,000 miles away.

This is why I love the Web so much.

A properly designed site will still work with a 20-year-old device.

If I remember right, there is probably another group 20 more years out that used some date changes to get buy for Y2K. I do hope someone replaces them.

Maybe it's pointlessly romantic but I like the idea of machines and software continuing to perform their job well past their life expectancy. Voyager 1 has to be the most celebrated example. Maybe it's because it makes me care more about crafting things if they are a little less ephemeral than the modern software churn would make us believe.

I feel the same way about computers - like, who gives a damn what apple thinks. I have a laptop that is still going because people keep making it compatible. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.

Even if some cloud service is not needed and it works with "only" a local app on your phone, the phones change quickly and even the OS. Even with backwards compatibility, ten years of lifetime already is ambitious. Devices used to have decades of lifetime. Electronics shortened it, computing elements more so, and now software. The cycles got shorter. The construction also got more and more flimsy. All the devices I got from my grandparents are still usable (cooking, mechanical calculator, photo, film), the more modern it is the less metal and the more cheap plastics that does not age well.

If we had an efficient recycling system, and renewable energy to power the entire cycle it would be doable albeit still wasteful. But we have neither. The cycle is mostly fueled with fossil fuels, adding more and more carbon from deep below ground, and containing the energy of the ancient sun, to the surface carbon cycle. It is not circular, the end products end up dumped somewhere.

It is nice that it makes the cost of not supporting things visible to the users. Assuming “phased out” means the device will actually stop operating; “Company X’s devices have a short lifetime” is an easy thing for people to understand.

I suspect consumers will look for brands that don’t have this reputation, which should give those well behaved brands a boost.

Although, if it does turn out that just letting devices die is the common solution, maybe something will need to be done to account for the additional e-waste that is generated.

Moving toward proprietary OSes; hey, if it solves the problem… although, I don’t see why they’d have an advantage in keeping things up to date.

It is possible that companies will just break the law but then, that’s true of any law.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. In a closed system this should be doable.

edit: one of the reasons I think this is because we are supposed to be engineers, and other engineering disciplines do it (and their disciplines involve computes too). Consider jets and boats.

We're going down a bad road with obsolescence from "yeah, we only expect your water softener to last 8 years" to "your phone will stop receiving updates after 8 years" to "your device WILL CEASE TO FUNCTION after 8 years". Each step takes away a bit of agency for an individual to decide what obsolete means to them.

I, like many, had an Automatic Labs car adapter that simply stopped working when the company decided to no longer support them, and it still makes me mad every time I think about it.

I understand that a company can't be forced to operate a cloud service forever, I would love to see some requirements that if you're going to shut down a service that will make your hardware stop working that you must also provide software to your users to let them run their own servers or unlock their devices.