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Comment by WheelsAtLarge | Hacker News Reader

I get it. It's hard to maintain hardware forever but the current trend of making hardware obsolete is just wasteful. These companies need to find a business model for old hardware. I'm open to paying a maintenance fee that would give me critical updates after a certain point in time. Maybe 5%/yr of the original cost after 5 years.

Sending working hardware to the dump is not a long term fix.

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It'd be nice if more hardware had like a "logic board upgrade" capability, but the business incentive just isn't there. Obviously most of the value in high end audio is the audio components, and those are probably not obsolete. If you buy a smart TV, most of the value is in the display panel which is probably not obsolete.

But old processors, old software platforms, etc. tend to doom a lot of these types of hardware, and I'd love to just replace the "computer part" of them. But the only way I could see that making financial sense for these businesses who'd rather just sell you the whole thing again, is if there was some sort of financial penalty/tax for bricking hardware.

(I am currently lamenting that my 2016 TV, only around three years old, can't get the CBS All Access app, even though it got Disney+. Apparently CBS and LG thinks only people who bought TVs since 2018 want to watch Picard.)

This reminds me of how my bathroom fan was designed. I bought a new house recently, and the old bathroom fan was covered in gunk, loud, and had an older light bulb socket. Fortunately Broan [1] designed this thing well. I could take the fan and light portion out of the metal box fairly easily, and replace it with a newer, updated unit that fit the existing metal box perfectly.

This saved significant time installing the thing. I did not have to rewire it or reattach the exhaust. Sure, I did have to waste the old, defunct parts, but it's better than wasting the big metal box too.

I think there's a lot of long term value in making semi-modular appliances. What if you could take out the logic board of one of these speakers and replace it with something more current? That saves the speaker itself, the mesh on top, and the entire enclosing.

Trick is I don't know if most consumers would care / be savvy enough to do this. Laptops have been doing a semi-modular design for a while in 2005 - 2015, but no one really updated it - they just threw the entire laptop out and bought the latest and greatest. Makes me wonder why the same mentality doesn't apply to these Sonos speakers.

[1]: https://www.broan.com/Bath-Vent-Fan/Fans-with-Lights

It might even make for a good law: the "smart" parts shall be removable and replaceable

At least with the TV, you can likely just add an external device pretty easily. Though I would love a TV with a device bay that was designed to supply a third party module power and an HDMI port - fewer wires to route would be a selling feature for me..

If you open a modern TV it's just an lcd display with a small motherboard that has an Arm SoC with an integrated AV switcher and tuner built in. It's a crime that cant be replaced with something more useful.

Commercial TVs used in airports and museums often have device bays that can interact with at least power and HDMI, sometimes much more. The problem is they are quite expensive. Partly due to fewer being sold, but also engineering the modular bus, fancy connectors, etc. Some of the plug-in boards are as expensive as a whole consumer TV. Part of what we get now is simply the result of our desire to buy a massive 60 inch screen for under a grand, a 95% price reduction in less than 20 years.

I don't want a complex board interface, just DC power and an HDMI port... but yes, unless some mass volume set builds that in, you can only get the low-volume version of that.

NAD receivers are pretty good with a pluggable design.

For example

https://nadelectronics.com/nad-previews-t-778-reference-avr/

And example modules

https://nadelectronics.com/products/mdc-modules/

Anecdote to that:

I was involved in a project where we had to measure certain changes in the ground and the climate above.

The station which measures how much the ground has moved broke.

We didn't know what broke, so we called the company as we had already invested quite a bit in a new software from them as the old one had issues with the server.

Instead of replacing the whole station(without any sensors, just the base station) for around 2000€ we send in the "CPU Core" and got the newest version for around 600€ I believe and it works fine.

Keep in mind that the station was brought about ten years ago, and thanks to the new client side software still works fine with windows server 2016 and beyond.

Why can't we have that in things like this in other parts, where space and energy efficienty is also not that important?

I have the feeling more and more api,software and hardware change are just for the sake of changing and not for any benefits.

Edit: Wording/formulating

That would be the perfect solution, even if the upgrade boards came at some kind of premium for those of us who aren't into yearly TV upgrades.

For what it's worth regarding CBS All Access: If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can subscribe to the CBS All Access 'channel' in Prime Video, and use the Prime Video app to watch those shows.

I'm in the same exact TV situation, had to find this workaround to catch Star Trek Discovery, really lame.

I get it if I wanted new features.

I don’t get it if I just want to stream music, the very reason why I bought a Sonos speaker in the first page. Threatening to just discontinue this service for no reason is just not cool.

I see my mistake to have bought an all-in-one package instead of an external streaming device.

It might also be sufficient if manufacturers open-sourced devices (designs, firmware, software) at end of life.

Even if they left some of it as binary blobs and cut off the older systems from the Sonos ecosystem I'd be happy with this solution.

I need the speakers to talk to each other so I can play throughout the house over wifi but as I have a Sonos Bridge to my old hi-fi I don't need them to talk to the internet themselves.

Its just the next phase of capitalism. Once you have sold your product to the entire target market where do you expand from there? You have to remove the previous products so you can sell it again.

This comment makes me think you didn't read the linked article.

No hardware is being made obsolete, or getting sent to the dump.

>No hardware is being made obsolete, or getting sent to the dump.

I assume this is in response to Sonos' program where they brick perfectly-usable devices (which then get sent to the dump) to prevent re-use after you take part in a trade-in program.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191231/07584043658/sonos...

I guess I went too broad with my comment about this blog. They are saying that they will maintain them as much as possible. This means that the updates will eventually end and they will stop working. I have dumb speakers that are 10 years old that work great and will continue to work but Sonos will stop working because of a lack of software but they are still in working order. My point is that we need a way to conserve resources rather than sending them to the trash.

It's not just Sonos. Hardware manufacturer's business model is to make their products obsolete so we replace them. And it's only going to get worse with the wave of IoT gadgets that are coming in the future. It can't work forever.

The link is dead for me but what I assumes it says is that they aren't instantly killing these products but they won't update them which means eventually the API on the other end will change and these devices won't work anymore. Speakers are a product that should in theory last an extremely long time. The surround sound system in my grandmas house is some bose system from at least 25 years ago and it still functions perfectly fine because it relies on no software updates or external APIs.

Do you think these sonos speakers will still be fully functional in 20 years?

> Do you think these sonos speakers will still be fully functional in 20 years?

I expect the ones with audio inputs ports will still be usable as speakers in 20 years.

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