Hacker News Reader

Okay, but from my perspective as a consumer, I can buy a dumb programmable thermostat that will almost certainly keep working for 20 years for $25. If you, as a company, want to convince me it's worth 10x that for a thermostat I can adjust from my phone, the damn thing better work just as long. When you brick other "smart" devices because you don't feel like supporting them anymore, that makes the $25 dumb white box look like a much better value proposition than the $250 shiny circle that might stop working whenever you decide it's time for everyone to buy shiny circle 2.0.

> If you buy a $50,000 car new, sure, a reasonable person could expect it to last 5-10 years.

I just had to pick this one. Five years for a car? I expect clothes and computers to last 5 years, for $50k car I'd expect 20-30 years with proper maintenance and repairs. Not that I'd likely use it myself that long, but the expectation would still be within that timeframe.

Are you actually telling me you'd go back to your car manufacturer after 20 years, and demand they fix your car for free?

Or if you buy a shirt and wear it for 5 years - you'd go back to Kmart after 5 years and say, your shirt wore out, give me a refund?

The sense of entitlement in that statement is...pretty high. I'm just going to leave it at that.

This was about expected lifetime for a product, not the warranty period. I don't know how you came up with that.

If I expect shoes to last 10 years, I'm also prepared for some basic maintenance such as regular polishing and the odd sole replacement. The same obviously applies to car repairs.

"Are you actually telling me you'd go back to your car manufacturer after 20 years, and demand they fix your car for free?"

If they sold it to me with the claim that the drivetrain had a lifetime warranty, and the fault was there?

Yes.

> And a lot of armchair commentators seems to underplay the amount of sheer engineering effort or cost involved in these sorts of things - it's not a case of spinning up some AWS instances, and hacking together some PHP on your weekend and deploying.

I see this all the time with people that know zilch about technology, but it really disappoints me when I even see my fellow technologists underestimate the amount of engineering effort it takes to get something simple like a server up and running reliably.

Here's the thing. Creating and updating a system costs a lot more than leaving it alone. They already did the expensive part. To abandon basic maintenance is pretty disappointing.

No, it really doesn't.

Computers don't exist in a vacuum - the environment is constantly changing.

Let me put a real-life example.

Say there's a new SSL vulnerability or zero-day discovered - you go and check to make sure all your servers and packages are patched. Or maybe there's no patch yet, and you need to run a mitigation.

You better go check all your logs, to make sure nobody got in already though. Hmm, maybe you should contact your NOC as well, just in case.

Load just increased - you better spin up some new servers. Whilst AWS might like you to believe this is all one-button and it works with no human intervention - it probably isn't.

Oh, drat, one of the uptream endpoints you rely on just broke their API. You better whip up a patch. Then you need to test it, and make sure your CI server passes all the tests for it. Oh, and then hire some testers.

The point is - things are more complex in the real world, particularly running at any kind of scale.

This sort of logic is enshrined in consumer law as well - the courts idea of a reasonable lifetime for a product is tied to the amount you pay.

Not exactly; in the UK it's tied to "reasonable expectations" for that kind of product. Certainly non-smart heating controllers would have an expected life time of 10-20 years, so why do the more expensive smart ones get away with a lifetime of less than 3?

Are you actually saying that you'd be able to successfully take a company to court, because their non-smart heating controller stopped working after 10 years?

Heck, even 5 years?

All of this for some cheap widget? (I assume from your description it's cheap).

If you can find a single case (or similar case) where this happened, I will stand corrected.

If this was a $2000 laptop, I can absolutely see that - e.g. Apple Macbooks in Australia have a statutory warranty longer than the manufacturer's 1 year warranty. But I think you'd be hard pressed trying to claim after 3-4 years that it should still apply there. And this is for a $2000 laptop.

The consumer protection law stands for 6 years. Price is taken into account. What's "reasonable" is certainly something that can be argued one way or the other. http://www.whitegoodshelp.co.uk/faulty-appliances-sale-of-go...

Here's an example of how it often works in practice, although on a shorter timescale: http://forums.pepipoo.com/index.php?showtopic=52242

Laptop power socket fails within 6 months. Is repaired, fails again. Demands refund, is refused. Takes company to small claims court; they fail to mount an effective defence and are in any case in the wrong, so he wins £400+costs.