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Comment by q-rews | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, sure, technically any vendor can push updates to brick your device, but that doesn’t happen because of the law. This stuff often gets through because it’s small enough, gray enough, and done by smaller companies. Have Apple pull something like this and you’ll see on the NYT.

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> but that doesn’t happen

Doesn't happen yet. Entire industries are trying to bypass basic property law so you "own" your purchases in name only and the manufacturer has control de facto. The video game industry has been saying "buy or product" when they really mean "subscribe to our service"[1] for a long time. Bricking old multiplayer gamed had been common practice for years, and now some singleplayer games have been unnecessarily bricked when the publisher e.g. shut down the DRM server.

Companies like John Deere have been extending this strategy into their hardware for a while. The damage doesn't even have to be "bricking your device"; HN regularly features stories about forced updates that remove paid-for features.

> Have Apple pull something like this and you’ll see on the NYT.

Apple got close when their devices suddenly stopped running 3rd party software in the recent "OCSP Apocalypse".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

> and you’ll see on the NYT.

And then what? It might generate a bit of outrage, but at the end of the day, users have no leverage (without legal support).

No one wants to lose their device or the data on it, so for individual users, there are not a lot of options apart from doing whatever the vendor wants

Then it depends, maybe 4 years later it will be discussed by the EU and Apple will be forced to pay 1% of what the change brought them. /s

Not quite the same, but there was a story yesterday about Apple doing this with a "Try the new Safari" notification. I think this falls under your "gray enough" category, but it is interesting they violated their own design guidelines.

Apple discussion: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252412228

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28361730

I didn't follow it super closely but if I recall right Nest bought a competing brand of smart home devices (Revolv). They kept it around for a year or two and then in 2016 turned off the servers that mediated between the phone app and the device, bricking the devices.

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