So I want to point out that I wasn't thinking of hiring some outside company to make you look good, I was talking about Bob in PR putting in a link to the press release when they retire product X. There's no bias in "On January 15, 2013, Initech announced end-of-life for X[12]".
Yes, nobody says "we'll make sure this product breaks in 5 years."
Instead, they say, "We're going to have to support this for 5 years. Design it so that almost all of them survive that long, and don't bother trying to make them last longer. It's too expensive."
In the end, it's the same thing, just without the tint of evil.
Comment is pretty generic, I am not claiming it to be unique but I'd say there's precedent of such product retirements and lots of it and that is why it gets repeated a lot. :)
Planned obsolescence is the key take away here. In the current economy if you make a product that lasts—at the same time benefiting the planet, you'll put yourself out of business.
It’s being shutdown after 8 years. That’s not a bad lifespan. Most electronics are obsolete but that age and replaced with new ones. Especially at businesses - it’s already amortized by then and reached end of life.
Google sucks, but I think you’re blowing this out of proportion.
“Old devices are phased out sooner” seems like an OK solution with some caveats.
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.
> But as tech improves it seems the life expectancy of the
> product are taken less into account.
On the contrary. The life expectancy has never been more important: it has never been more important to time the death of a device in such a manner that it hits some generational sweet spot to make the customer buy the same product over and over :-)
Oh no! Now you're giving companies the green light to produce shittier products so they need to be replaced sooner!
I hope this marks the end of an era where people feel compelled to buy the 'latest and greatest' just because it's going to make them stand out in front of their friends.
> But then again, isn't it reasonable to expect some sort of deprecation or end of life for most products?
In a cell phone? Sure, because the replacement process is a somewhat annoying sales appointment at $carrier. In a thermostat? No, because it should last years. Maybe decades if it's a good one. IoT falls apart in this arena because the hardware is designed to be replaced often, and that's exactly what house hardware should not be.
And if the software is too complex, then don't do it. Do it right or don't bother.
There is probably a useful life of ~10 years on most types of consumer internet-connected hardware. I doubt these are 10 years old, but it would probably be in everybody’s interest to just say “we’ll support this connecting to the internet and requisite services for 10 years.” - Especially for hardware that could seriously infringe on a persons home privacy.
That is the point I was making. The devices last (as we both have experienced), but today it is "fashionable" to dispose of them and buy new ones on a schedule much shorter than their lifespans (because of some new gimmick that provides an inconsequential improvement in the usability of the newer model).
> There's an ebb and flow to these things. If new technology is making my headset obsolete every year, designing a 10-year headset makes no sense. Once headset technology settles down and people realize they keep buying the same thing over and over, then the customer starts to value reliability more. Unfortunately customer behavior updating to the reality that underlying technology of a product has stopped evolving lags by a few years, but it happens.
However, business really like the income that comes from regular tech refreshes. Once technology stops making their products obsolete after N years, they'll often start designing them to reduce reliability (e.g. going for cheap parts that will fail faster) or incorporating planned obsolescence features.
IIRC, this is what's happened to consumer printers and many types of home appliances.
For some systems that people who couldn't really do a proper change and the businesses promised they were actually end-of-life, it was a reasonable choice (there were probably bigger fish to fry). 20 years on and it looks like some replacements didn't happen.
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.
I wasn't being too serious, but you're correct, usually things age out for other reasons, like old WiFi access points becoming obsolete or shoes getting worn, and the occasional cheap electronic crap from some startup that outsourced to China's lowest bidder.
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