You would have seen, a few days ago, that Amazon is pulling support for some of its older Kindle models. Moving on from older tech isn’t anything new in the industry. Everyone from Apple to Samsung does it. Microsoft is famous for it, but it’s also famous for providing extended support for entities (usually government ones) intent on keeping those old embedded systems alive.
NASA has one of the largest problems of this type. The Voyager program has been running since the 1970s. Software has changed considerably since then, but since upgrades are impossible, the agency has to keep the legacy tech around. For consumer articles, however, there’s nowhere near this level of urgency.
Once, this wasn’t a problem. A PlayStation 2 is still a PlayStation 2, no matter when you buy it. It’ll function whether there are servers or not, with repairability being your only real problem. But a Kindle or an iPhone, or a video games library can, the way they’re set up, completely cease to function if the underlying systems go away.
Smashed to Kindle-ing
In the Kindle’s case, older models that have reached end-of-life (in Amazon’s opinion) can stop functioning entirely if factory reset or de-registered. The physical product you’ve paid for still exists. It’ll still power on. There may be nothing physically wrong with it. And yet, because the company that made it altered the support structure, you might as well have run it over with a car.
Something similar happened with the Celestron Skyscout Personal Planetarium, which ceased being useful in 2015 after the optics company cancelled support for it. Spotify’s ill-fated Car Thing is a more recent example of the same problem. South Africans got an extreme lesson when a TV product called the Kwesé Play, which was based on Roku hardware, stopped functioning overnight. A licensing deal had gone sour and completely fried the ecosystem. Stuff may still have one of these entirely dead and completely useless products in storage somewhere.
Question everything
These situations illustrate how people aren’t really buying items anymore. There’s no longevity allowed. Your R40,000 smartphone? That’s a rental. It’ll last three years if you’re lucky. It lasts longer if you’re incredibly lucky. Assuming you bought a new smartphone every three years at that price, over a 40-year adult span, you’ll wind up spending R530,000 or so on temporary hardware.
There are a couple of solid reasons why products are designed with obsolescence in mind. Customers allow it, and it makes phenomenal amounts of money. Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Ultra made, in six months last year, around R5.5 trillion for the company. My math is likely a little over, but it’s probably not far off. If you could do that every year while launching a product with a limited shelf-life, you would.
It’s why you’re encouraged to trade in your car when the service plan runs out. It’s why some vehicles are famously unreliable. Some of those instances are engineering blunders, sure, but others are intentional choices. And, with the rise of smarter systems in cars, vehicles run the risk of a similar problem — your ten-year-old car may stop working because the software support and online infrastructure have to go away. Premium brands in that space already lock the vehicle down if someone unauthorised fiddles with it. What happens to your ChatGPT-enabled car if ChatGPT suddenly goes away?
Some good, some bad
These problems — and they are problems for the people handing over money — exist at the goodwill of the company making the product. Some video game titles that have been sunset have had patches issued to allow them to keep working after the fact. Not enough, however. The Stop Killing Games movement turned up because of how infrequently this takes place.
Amazon may take similar action for its older Kindle range. One final Kindle update that prevents the device from committing suicide. It’s highly unlikely, though. The company will see every legacy device as a potential lost sale. Without external pressure, it’ll risk the goodwill of older Kindle users in hopes of converting them to a new device with a higher margin (and more strictly-controlled software, but that’s a different conversation). A similar calculation is applied by every company looking to end support for an established product or service.
Some will arrive at a consumer-friendly solution. Most won’t. It might be pure arrogance, it might be external circumstance (see the Kwesé Play), or it might be that uncoupling a device from its previous requirements is impossible. Whatever the reason behind it, the technology you pay for today is, almost without exception, designed to stop working. And, if it doesn’t, it’ll stop working anyway because you don’t actually own the thing. You just own the concept of it, for as long as its creator is willing to rent it to you.
