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Comment by nikolay | Hacker News Reader

No USB-C version and no way to upgrade my other 4+ YubiKeys I've got for more than $50 each! I think YubiKey has been abusing its monopoly recently! They've been working on this for quite some time and clearly new they're not going to make their old premium keys support it so that people can waste time and money to upgrade! Is there an alternative more conscious company - I'd pay even $200 for the piece of mind that I won't have to change this key 1-2 times per year!

P.S. Obviously, no. Neither Nitrokey [0] supports it, nor it's a sturdy one!

[0]: https://www.nitrokey.com/

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YubiKeys are non-upgradable by design. This is occasionally annoying when new standards come out and you need to go buy new keys (which is not something that's gonna happen a lot), but it significantly reduces the attack surface of these devices. They've been pretty good about giving out free replacement keys whenever major flaws have been found, and webauthn is pretty good about remaining backwards-compatible with U2F keys, so I don't think it's something they handled particularly badly.

I get that, but my point was that they just released expensive new products knowing they'd be obsolete in just a couple of months and people will have to throw old ones in the garbage and buy new even more expensive ones. I do not doubt that a product with an immutable core and mutable interfaces is both possible and even more secure as when flaws are discovered (like last year), some may decide not to replace them - even with free replacement. I spent over $100 just last year, and I think this is a bit too much. I give my old keys to my kids, but, still, I'd appreciate some form of subscription service, which both reduces my recurring cost and possibly improves Yubico's bottom line, too, primarily by building loyalty instead of pissing customers off.

I will point out, NitroKey also doesn't have a USB-C version.

True, nobody seems to offer USB-C. Also, I have to point out that YubiKey 4C [0] is not sturdy either unlike the rest - it disintegrated on my keychain in less than two months without any abuse.

[0]: https://www.yubico.com/product/yubikey-4-series/#yubikey-4c

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