Item — HN Reader

(This may be a very ungenerous reading of your comment, so my apologies if this is not what you mean.)

The phrase that jumps out at me is:

> being able to cut off support for a 12 year systems would make my life much more full of joy

I think this is a nearly-poetical capturing of the core problem.

The focus is on the joy and well-being of the maintainer, not the impact to all the people who will be impacted by this change. Possibly some people rely on these devices and it adversely impact their joy and livelihood when support is ended.

This happens over and over again in tech.

3 comments

  > Possibly some people rely on these devices and it adversely impact their joy and livelihood when support is ended.
    This happens over and over again in tech.

its true and i agree with you as a user

on the other hand, some software gets harder and costlier to support the longer its out there (think spec changes, security issues, updates in law etc), and even paying a normal subscription for it can cause roi to go negative, especially when factoring in opportunity cost for a business (help the old users or spend that time/money making a new feature for the majority)

my thought on it is if its a subscription, maybe for some software, the longer someone uses the old version the subscription cost could go up slowly, or if its a one-time purchase, after x years they could just buy a support ticket or something...? for ad-supported software i have no ideas...

This reminds me of the time we needed to support IE6.

We only had to, because some buerocrats certified IE6 for some processes and did not bother to update with the real world that moved beyond that piece of garbage. So ... thanks for bringing back bad memories.

Gives me PTSD too!

You try building software with a version of Delphi that wont run on something newer than windows 7 and tell me how well that works out for you.

Some of those customers cannot be upgraded without hardware replacement, we can sell them a brand new system that will do everything (and more) their old one will, but they dont want to spend the money, and we are happy to take the money for support (the old CAPEX vs OPEX argument).

Some of this is sorta easy, its COTS hardware, but we also have much older systems that due to component obsolescence I simply cannot build replacements anymore. 10+ years of support ought to be enough for 90% of the products out there, at some point the answer really is “upgrade your hardware” - we didn’t sign up to indefinitely support not just hardware (much of which we cannot build spares for) much less the software ecosystem around the hardware.

Long term I plan on increasing support renewal costs for systems that are older than 10 years old to encourage hardware refreshes.

Like I still have to have XP VM’s to build firmware for older products, when is it reasonable to cut off service and support?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.