Comment by Aloha
10 hours ago
How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last?
Try estimating doing win11 updates on a 20 year old piece of delphi spftware with hardware full go custom ASICs be expected to lsat?
10 hours ago
How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last?
Try estimating doing win11 updates on a 20 year old piece of delphi spftware with hardware full go custom ASICs be expected to lsat?
Supporting is a word that means many different things.
It’s ok to stop providing updates to old software and hardware.
It’s OK to not support ancient devices when writing news software.
It’s not ok to make old devices inoperable if they are using the old software and don’t need updates.
Will my old Kindle stop being able to show me the books I bought and downloaded to it? Or will it become impossible to buy new books? If it’s the earlier, it’s borderline criminal. If it’s the latter, I’m unhappy but understand realities.
Nobody is insisting that the physical kindles last forever, not that the software that they run be upgraded to support all the new bells & whistles of newer devices.
The point is that e-books are basically a data format plus a reader, and if the data format hasn't changed (it hasn't) and a reader is still working, what is gained by preventing that reader from being given new data to present?
amzn doesn't have to "provide support" for old kindles, but they also don't need to prevent them from downloading ebooks.
This isn't about hardware "lasting", it's about basic software functionality on older hardware intentionally being disabled. Somewhat similar to Apple's Batterygate.
This is nothing at all like Apple. This is like having to continue to support BMP files in the browser for the next 20 years while fixing any potential exploits that are discovered and deciding there aren’t enough users to justify that expense and risk.
> How long should a hardware and software product be expected to last?
Until it dies due to unintentional software or hardware defect.
NOT when it is sabotaged by the manufacturer.
This isn’t sabotage, this is deprecation. Keeping old systems working that communicate with servers is a constant expense and a security vulnerability. No one can afford it.
>!