Spyke
On Planned Obsolescence of brain implants. This is effed up if there are no rules preventing such stuff from happening.On Planned Obsolescence of brain implants. This is effed up if there are no rules preventing such stuff from happening.
yd avatar
#TechTonicby@yd

On Planned Obsolescence of brain implants. This is effed up if there are no rules preventing such stuff from happening.

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emperorgeek avatar
@emperorgeek

I had not considered this before. But given past behavior of tech companies, I don’t know why!

“Your hardware is too old, we can’t keep paying the developers to write code for that old thing, upgrade or else.”

I’ve had brain surgery before (I’m fine, I actually now have proof I posses a brain!). The bill for it was horrendeous! I have wonderful healthcare that paid for all but an ER copay and an MRI copay, but it would have bankrupted me to have my head opened up.

I can’t imagine having to go through that every couple of years because some tech company won’t support the old hardware in my head!

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yd avatar
@ydreply

You're right, we as software engineers try our best to be backward compatible with older technology, but that just makes it nearly impossible to add new features.

Life-critical and medical applications however should prioritise backward compatibility over and above adding new features. As you said, it's expensive and underproductive for the consumers when tech companies enforce updates like that.

It would be even better if the companies open-sourced their hardware and software after end-of-support. The open-source community would need maintainers and moderators, but it would at least not force people to resort to explantation.

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