You just purchased a new smart refrigerator with lots of cool features: a touch screen interface that can display a calendar, play videos, send and receive texts and even track when food supplies are running low! A key question: how long will the new fridge last? If you’ve grown up in the past six or seven decades, you probably assume that – with proper upkeep and maintenance – this fridge will last well more than a decade – even two decades or more. That’s a good thing: keeping food cold is important, and its long life allows you to amortize the relatively high cost of the appliance over many years.
Not your father’s (sturdy) refrigerator
But modern smart fridges aren’t the same as the sturdy, “dumb” devices you purchased two decades ago. A key difference: the software that runs the refrigerator and powers its smart features. For many appliance makers, plans to support, maintain and patch the smart appliance software don’t extend more than 5 to 7 years, if current business practices are any measure. And – honestly- that’s a guess. In the U.S., there are no requirements that manufacturers support their software for any period of time. The result: manufacturers are selling costly, software-driven “smart home” devices with the freedom to “brick” them when they no longer deem them worthy of supporting, or suddenly erect paywalls and monthly subscriptions to use features that were sold to consumers as free to use.
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We’ve seen that recently: Spotify informed customers that it was bricking it’s Car Thing smart device, less than two years after it began selling it to the public for hundreds of dollars. Around the same time, toothbrush maker Oral B announced that it was discontinuing software support for a pricey, $230 “smart” toothbrush that was integrated with Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant and that it launched in 2020. The company’s decision effectively killed off a range of smart features, including voice recognition and AI-powered oral care advice, that convinced owners to pay a premium for it. Even more consequential: Microsoft’s plans to end support for the Windows 10 operating system in October, 2025 could send close to a quarter billion otherwise functional devices including laptops, desktops, servers and tablets to landfills – a tsunami of e-waste that will cause irreparable harm to the planet.
EOL…RLY?!
The question is: what to do about the abandonware problem? How can we end the epidemic of bricked and abandoned stuff that is plaguing societies across the globe? That was the subject of a panel discussion that SRFF President Paul Roberts and board members John Bumstead of Roadkill Inc. and Lodrina Cherne of SANS participated in at the most recent Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) Conference in Queens, New York (HOPE XV).

In this panel discussion, we’re joined by Lucas Gutterman, the head of US PIRG’s Designed to Last campaign. We dig into the growing phenomenon of “bricked and abandoned” devices – everything from toothbrushes and streaming devices to robot vacuum cleaners- and talk about what’s driving the phenomenon of “abandonware.” We also talk about possible solutions – both market and policy based – to the problem that will help us build a secure and resilient future for the Internet of Things.
Check it out! If you want to learn more, read about our campaign to abandon abandonware!