After 16 years, Ecobee is ceasing support for original smart thermostat
theverge.com
theverge.com
On one end: A company can't spend forever supporting a product. It's economical madness.
On the other end: We paid for it, we should be able to use it until it wears out. The company locked everyone else out, so they did this to themselves.
I think we reached the limits of current ownership theory. We have things that are partly a buyable object and partly service, and current law doesn't deal well with that.
Some possible changes I'd like to see:
1) The terms should become explicit. If continues company support is needed, the company should make that clear and specify a minimal end date.
2) Consumer rights should be enforced for services. No kicking consumers out whenever a company feels like it.
3) When a company abandons a product(or ceases existing), the locks on it should be removed so someone else can support it.
4) Things should be safe by default. A hackable internet connected product has a manufacturing defect and should be fixed or recalled for the (published) product lifetime.
An electronic thermostat would probably last about 30 years maybe. That is hardly forever.
Do you know what a trust is? or an annuity? Yes you can with a fixed amount of money provide the funds to support a product forever.
This should absolutely 100% be illegal.
I don’t want to hear boo hoo whiny excuses about how hard it is to keep a server running. If you as a company can’t do it, you have no business selling a connected device that depends on a server.
What do you think an IOT devices guaranteed lifespan should be?
Don't like it? Don't build cloud-bound landfill fodder.
Over dial-up?
To the steam-powered cloud?
Do you realistically expect such a thing to be supported 40 years later at no cost?
Phone companies are literally ripping out landlines or abandoning them in place.
The closest thing I can think of that maintains ancient technology are alarm systems and you pay hefty monthly fees to help pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the infra. It also helps that the manufacturers of the hardware are still around and keeping the designs supported.
We all do tech here right? It’s a simple infra stack to store settings for a device and report on them once in a while.
No one is sitting at home and doomscrolling their ecobee thermostat for temperature updates.
I expect the cloud infra needed to support the thermostat to be so cheap at this point that it’s completely irrelevant. I expect that ecobee spend more money on coffee than the infra needed. Fact is I bet that a free aws account can service a significant portion of the demand.
I can connect up to 100 wyze cams to my account and store footage and remotely access them for the huge sum of 7$/mo.
You are telling me thermostat configs are harder to handle? Bullshit.
That’s a complete fabrication!
I have a laptop from 1999 and it still runs, and it’s smarter than any thermostat. You / they chose to build it in such a way that it requires ongoing labour. That’s on them. They could build it using open standards and connect it to home assistant, and then it would not require labour.
Simply put, they want to have complete control and no responsibility - and they feel entitled to my money.
It reads like the complaint box of a volunteer open source developer who isn't providing you free bug fixes and features fast enough.
They provided a free service for 16 years and I'm sure it was in the ToS that they are under no obligation to do so.
And for people wondering why we need ToS and license agreements for free stuff and lawyers to write them, this is why.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Somehow, for connected devices we excuse this same thing “because internet”. I’m hoping this is just a case of the law moving slowly and not catching up.
The functionality is being removed from the app, which you never paid for.
The device will continue functioning as a local thermostat for many years.
And when you complain that your £50,000 vehicle became useless, they will tell you ‘we removed it from the app, and you never paid for it’
The key difference here is that it’s not a volunteer but a large company which sold a product in a category where service lifetimes are measured in decades - tons of people have thermostats which are pushing half a century old and nobody finds that unusual. I think that changes the expectation in a way which really should require full disclosure up front: service lifetimes and the impact of support ending should be on the front of the box, disclosed before money changes hands.
A $150 device doesn't pay hosting in perpetuity.
Ecobee is a great company that made a better mousetrap with a free app when competitors were still charging monthly fees.
Did everyone here throw a shitfit when 2G cellular was retired? The original iPhone is a doorstop. Should the mobile phone companies be forced to still support your Motorola DynaTac from 1987?
Lots of stuff is engineered as if it will be usable indefinitely (or until it physically wears out), even though it has technical dependencies or financial costs that make that infeasible, and almost almost all that stuff is sold to the public under the pretense that it's just a better version of the same old thing. Very few products, especially among consumer good, openly communicate a window of support or availability and many don't even predict a specific one internally.
You're probably right that there'd probably no teeth to a suit, but that's more because the practice of denying that cloud-backed products are ephemeral is just that pervasive. It's an effective excuse, but also a crappy one.
It is similar to how the original iPhone and iPad are basically unusable with no connectivity in today's world (think: these legacy thermostats may not support modern security protocols due to lack of power to perform the cryptographic functions, or software support in the > 16 year old microcontroller. Let's assume hardware was designed with chips in production a few years before the release so we're talking 2005-era hardware. This is pre-iPhone, George Bush was still president and you had a flip phone in your pocket. Should they never upgrade their backend security so they can support these things in perpetuity?) Sadly, I suspect if this was an Apple(r)(tm) Thermostat the HN crowd would be banding together in their defense.
This should be unacceptable as well.
When you buy a smart thinggy attached to the Internet, the manufacturer is not graciously providing a separate free service, outside of the "real" product. It's selling the smartness as part of the whole product. They shouldn't get to later say, "Ha ha only kidding, we're now cutting features A, B, and C out of your product because we imagine them as a separate 'service'." That's bullshit.
I suggest reading through the EULA next time you click through because it very likely says they are under no obligation to provide support forever and can discontinue it at any time, and if you don't like it you can take it back to the store. <AGREE>
Apple rendered my AppleTV gen 1 completely useless without warning when they decided to end support for it after much less than 16 years (in typical Apple fashion, with no announcement or plan, it just stopped working one day). No coupon, no apology, just a "fuck you, buy a new one" and I paid a heck of a lot more than $150 at the time. They've even done worse: removing music from the iTunes Store THAT I PAID FOR such that it isn't available from iCloud for download anymore, despite the whole point of iCloud being that your stuff is there forever.
Regardless of license agreements (Have you actually read yours?), it’s still a shitty practice, and people are rightly upset.
What upset you about the Apple tactics is somehow ok for other companies…how does that make sense?
One day I flipped on the TV and it no longer worked. From what I could piece together, they made a breaking change to their API and did no testing on the legacy product. Instead of doing the right thing and fixing the bug, they just said "fuck them, they get no updates". No coupon, no nothing, just a brick in my living room and forced to upgrade if I expected to stream content. And Apple, above nearly any other company, had the money and resources to throw at fixing their mistake. But they chose not to.
The other distinction is the ecobee's primary purpose as a functioning thermostat isn't affected.
Gladly buying a new one...
There are a few other options that are pre-made, like this [1], or that offer guidelines for DIYing it [2]
[0]: https://esphome.io/components/climate/thermostat.html
If a person has enough stuff in front of them to make a relay reliably click on and off, then they also have enough stuff in front of them to make a conventional forced air furnace turn on and off just as a thermostat would.
But a relay is already an isolator: There's no path between the switched contacts and the coil of the solenoid that switches those contacts. The coil doesn't know or care how much current or voltage the contacts are switching: It's just a coil that moves a little bit of metal using electromagnetism.
And, sure: It takes more power to drive a relay's coil than it does to drive an LED inside of an optocoupler, but at some point that coil still needs to be driven by something that can accomplish that small amount of work.
Adding an optocoupler just seems like adding extra parts to a circuit that would be simpler without.
KISS?
I usually specifically look for smart devices like this because I dislike the idea of them phoning home for "analytics" or "to enhance my marketing experience" and just firewall them off.
I'm not sure if it's explicitly required, but I've yet to encounter a HomeKit device that didn't work when prohibited from talking to anything outside the LAN.