Society requires a level of stability that no tech companies is willing to provide. There is a lot of money in forcing users to buy new stuff, and to force them to be connected to central servers that monitor their usage and allows them to sell more stuff to their already existing clients.
As everything becomes a subscription and all items are just rented (even if you purchased them) people owns nothing, and the real owners of everything are the corporations that build them.
That is unsustainable, wasteful and abusive behavior. Only new laws can stop tech corporations lack of long term support. I can buy a normal lamp and use it 40 years later. Tech products last less than a decade and force updates and upgrades all the time. Everything is just getting worse.
So true. It is abuse because the customer is largely trapped. I try my best to avoid subscriptions and tech for everyday things, but I have done the thought experiment for a possible future and it's kinda scary. Say I like photography - what happens when cameras get so "advanced" that they need a subscription? I'm basically screwed because the average Joe can't build a camera from scratch (or maybe you can if you go to extremes like devoting 10 years to it). What then? Bye bye all hobbies which involve nontrivial tech?
I'm glad these days one can just get a Zigbee button for 5$, and connect it to Home Assistant without internet connection required. I refuse to buy anything that has a mandatory dependence on cloud services.
At the same time that’s great… for you or I. To someone grabbing “a button to do a thing” on the shelf at Best Buy, Home Assistant might not be where it needs to be for them.
The only reason this actually comes to mind is my own experience updating my HA instance recently. I’m not a big HA user - I only control 3 bulbs and a BedJet and a Yale smart lock, and expose it back to HomeKit to my Apple devices. But even something simple as an HA update can cause integrations to break or require additional behind-the-scenes repairs that an end user just would be too confused to do.
You or I can sit down and understand that the error message means we need to reconnect our Yale integration’s OAuth after a HA upgrade, then figure out that it didn’t work, then figure out that we had to delete and re-add the whole integration, but will Bob and Jill figure it out just as easily in half an hours’ time?
About half the people I know who dabbled in “smart home” tech have a half-working remnant that they can’t be arsed to fix, but isn’t annoying enough to replace.
So it just kind of works somewhat.
I’m even in that boat; and part of it is a Home Assistant that is somewhat still connected, enough.
I mean we could've voted to outlaw proprietary protocols/cloud requirements. Make it illegal unless they support a minimum of common functionality with a standard spec, closing up loopholes like only doing a half-assed job of it because executives can't be trusted not to salivate over where their next bonus is coming from, the parasites.
These companies are fucken happy to use USB, Bluetooth, Wifi, etc specs because it benefits them. So we should be forcing them to have everything else interoperate.
The EU need to move to E-waste such as this next. Either hardware that has no functionality with a subscription or permanent support needs to be banned, or there should always be a provision of access to SERIAL commands, an api, or the code needed to run these devices should be able to be use these devices locally. This doesn't stop companies offering more value, say an app or something to manage things, so you stick with them, but it does mean the whole device isn't bricked when the original manufacturer stops offering the service.
Logitech’s build quality is now terrible. I bought some Logitech 2.1 speakers, not the cheapest ones either and the power button is broken so I have to tape it down or put a weight to lean on it. Also the volume nob makes a lot of static, I have to find the sweet spots for it not to produce constant static noise. While the sound quality is decent, I won’t be buying anymore Logitech products ever again.
As everything becomes a subscription and all items are just rented (even if you purchased them) people owns nothing, and the real owners of everything are the corporations that build them.
That is unsustainable, wasteful and abusive behavior. Only new laws can stop tech corporations lack of long term support. I can buy a normal lamp and use it 40 years later. Tech products last less than a decade and force updates and upgrades all the time. Everything is just getting worse.
reply