[fffrad]

Many years ago, I owned a Radio Hub from Westinghouse. It required an internet connection for it to work and I was totally fine with it. I got my weather info from it, set my calendar reminders, and it had a bunch of other small features. Pretty neat!

One day they stopped supporting it, and the whole thing became a brick. I couldn't even play CDs on it because it used to get the CD info online.

Today's IoT may barely work well on a good day, but wait for when a company drops support and you will be left with a brick.

[massysett]

I have an automatic cat feeder. You program it by connecting to it through the Internet. Using a Web browser to program it certainly beats punching some minuscule buttons on a device and deciphering blinking lights or a small LCD display. Unfortunately you have to go through the company's WWW site. If they go out of business I am bricked. At least they could have baked the interface directly into the device itself so that I could connect to the device rather than to a company Web site.

It's from a small company and right now there's no other device that comes close to solving the problem I have, so I just grimaced and bought the thing.

[forgetsusername]

>but wait for when a company drops support and you will be left with a brick.

How many times do you think this happens before the public wises up and the market corrects the issue? My answer is "not many".

One bricked item, or knowing someone with a bricked item, will change people's demands. Sort of like how it changed yours.

[TeMPOraL]

How many times SaaS startups have to disappear without a trace but a single post about their and yours great journey and founders being happy you helped them drink their drinks on a beach in hot summer, before people wise up?

Answer: quite a lot apparently, since it keeps happening and people don't wise up, and it has reached the point where the behaviour described above is a standard practice (known as "exit"), and it's the reason many start a startup in the first place. Such people pretty much intend to screw their customers from day one, and apparently customers are happy to being screwed time after time.

I don't see this changing for hardware.

[frik]

I doubt that. Look at all these devices that rely on cloud connections. Be it your brand new burglary alarm system, your Tesla S, your new home automation system, your Samsung fridge with a display, etc. ...if the company stops the support or goes out of business, your device is more or less an expensive brick. And then there is planned obsolescence, given the internet connection such companies can turn on the kill switch or release updates that add new features but make the older devices so slow that you will have to buy a new one.

There was a recent story on HN about first generation Samsung smart fridges that stopped working correctly after a software update.