Another bricked device

Ars Technica report how Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers’ stuff:

In a somewhat anticipated move, Belkin is killing most of its smart home products. On January 31, the company will stop supporting the majority of its Wemo devices, leaving users without core functionality and future updates.

[…]

The company said that people with affected devices that are under warranty on or after January 31 “may be eligible for a partial refund” starting in February.

The 27 affected devices have last sold dates that go back to August 2015 and are as recent as November 2023.

Every one with a common sense would have told the executive that basing the functionality of the device to running servers they have to operate wasn’t sustainable. Seems like they didn’t care and what everybody with common sense predicted happened. The cloud is just someone else’s computers.

And some of the devices were sold less than two years ago. It’s not like they only discontinue the old ones.

But I’m sure the decision making process was aware of:

In a recent Consumer Reports survey of 2,130 American consumers, 43 percent of respondents said that when they last bought a connected device, they were unaware that it could lose support.

Either they abandon users like that, or they turne users into a revenue stream changing the terms.

Now, what is needed, is regulation that would curb e-wasting. One that at the minimum would require a fully unconnected operating mode, and possibly open the firware so that third-party support can be offered.

Previously: e-waste sneaker, Humane’s AI pins