Sammy and Teddy Bear wouldn’t stop meowing, and Chris Cillo couldn’t figure out why. “My cats are never annoying. They’re very chill.”
Eventually, it dawned on the 31-year-old Merrimack, N.H., resident that his Petnet SmartFeeder, a $140 internet-connected device designed to automatically dispense meals, had stopped working. He couldn’t determine when it last fed his pets—a week might have gone by.
Mr. Cillo was just relieved that he was working from home, and wasn’t on vacation.
Over two years ago, he programmed the Petnet to provide two feedings a day. Aside from occasionally topping up the device’s reservoir, Mr. Cillo hasn’t had to think about feeding Sammy and Teddy Bear since. That is, until the device went offline sometime in April. “The company didn’t notify anybody, except for a Twitter post,” he said.
Later that month, Petnet sent an email to customers that detailed a dire situation: The company was struggling financially because of the coronavirus pandemic, all staff was furloughed and a service provider was offline, causing the feeder to malfunction. The company sought feedback on a proposed $30-a-year subscription fee. The feeders started working again with limited functionality on June 10, after a two-month outage.
Sammy, left, and Teddy Bear, two cats from Merrimack, N.H., went unfed after their Petnet SmartFeeder unexpectedly went offline.
Photo: Chris CilloAppliances built to last are of a bygone era. My decades-old record player is still functioning, after surviving three moves, several music-distribution platforms and many bad music phases. Today’s gadgets, meanwhile, can quickly become expensive paperweights.
There’s a trade-off with connected devices. They’re incredibly useful when they work—although annoying when they pause for a software update. And lately it’s become clear that a business deal, tech breakthrough or pandemic-induced economic slump can mean sudden digital death.
Flywheel’s $2,000 Fly Anywhere stationary bikes, for instance, stopped working in March after the company settled a legal dispute with Peloton over technology theft. And shortly after Google acquired Nest, the smart-home device maker killed the $300 Revolv hub, a leftover from a company it had previously acquired. It didn’t provide customers with a replacement. The hub and its app went completely dark, and the company voided its products’ warranties.
Petnet's $140 SmartFeeder stopped dispensing pet meals for nearly two months after its internet-service provider suffered pandemic-related financial losses.
Photo: PetnetThe purchasers of these products weren’t given warnings that their products might, in a few years, cease to function. Many would likely have chosen not to buy.
Most hardware, like the laptop or phone you’re reading this column on, requires a one-time payment from you. For manufacturers, the cost of that tech can continue for years after you make that purchase: maintaining servers, customer service and firmware updates are a must for most hardware companies. Device makers can run out of money incurring those costs, especially if you aren’t paying a regular service fee, or spending money with the company to offset any losses.
Petnet wasn’t the only company that suffered during the pandemic. Automatic, which makes a connected car adapter, sunsetted its operations on May 28. “The Covid-19 pandemic has adversely impacted our business,” explained the company’s website.
The company released the $130 Automatic Pro in 2016. It came with five years of 3G cellular service for real-time location tracking, along with a crash-notification service, check-engine-light decoder and driving statistics. Bill Zanetti, 33, of Orlando, Fla., said the product’s main draw was that lack of a monthly fee. He said the location sharing once helped his sister find him when his phone died.
Automatic, maker of a wirelessly-connected car adapter, closed operations in May, citing financial impacts from the coronavirus pandemic.
Photo: AutomaticAutomatic’s devices collected billions of data points that were processed in the cloud and converted into alerts, as well as stats displayed in the product’s app, said Automatic co-founder, Thejo Kote, who left the company in 2017 and is now chief executive of expense-management tool Airbase. During his tenure as Automatic’s CEO, the company’s cloud-hosting and computing costs made up “a meaningful amount” of expenses, he said.
“Connectivity brings a lot of value, but there’s a cost to it. With all technology, once you buy it, it’s not guaranteed forever,” Mr. Kote said. ( Sirius XM, which acquired Automatic in 2017, declined to comment.)
Another case in point: Belkin Wemo Netcam security cameras, which launched in 2013, will be decommissioned on June 30.
Only a small number of users signed up for Belkin’s $10-a-month premium cloud service, while the rest relied on the free tier, which included motion-based email notifications and mobile access to the camera’s live feed. The costs of video hosting and pushing necessary security updates piled up, said Brian Van Harlingen, the company’s chief technology officer.
“Traditional products run until there’s a mechanical failure. [Internet of Things] devices are very much a different world. There are ongoing costs that have to be factored into the business plan for those products,” he said.
In this case, the back-end video partner changed hands and its new owner decided not to continue providing the service. Moving to a new one would have incurred huge costs, said Mr. Van Harlingen. Belkin offered refunds to customers who purchased devices after April 1, 2018.
Belkin is shutting down its Wemo Netcam security cameras after seven years on June 30 because of a back-end business deal.
Photo: Belkin“Sustaining a product comes down to pricing the services into the product in the beginning, charging a monthly fee or finding a way to monetize the data, which we’ve never done. Sometimes it’s good for consumers to think about each of these models before they buy,” Mr. Van Harlingen said.
Another alternative for smaller tech companies: Turn to the tech giants for help.
For example, all the video from Logitech’s $160 Circle View security camera runs on Apple’s Home app and iCloud, freeing Logitech of the burden of hosting. There is still a monthly cost for the customer: Apple requires at minimum a $3-a-month iCloud storage plan to use the camera. (Camera recordings don’t count against your storage limit, however.)
Similarly, for hardware manufacturers, there’s no charge to integrate Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service into their connected devices. Companies can also leverage Google’s voice-activated Assistant services and Android TV entertainment system, instead of having to develop and maintain their own.
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Of course, this model advances the consolidation of Big Tech’s power. But that’s another issue entirely. And even the tech giants won’t support every product forever.
Apple is expected to shift from Intel processors to its own custom-designed ARM chips for its Mac computers soon. Apple declined to provide comment on the coming change.
Eventually, the company would drop MacOS support for the current Intel-based machines. When Apple made a move like this before, switching from PowerPC chips to Intel chips in 2006, it pulled support for PowerPC only three years later.
Steve Baker, the primary hardware analyst at NPD Group, a tech-industry research firm, believes this time, the transition will be more gradual, because the company has greater market share.
That’s the cost of the pace of technology today. The vinyl record has gone mostly unchanged for over 50 years, and my record player has never required a firmware update. All of our newer gadgets will likely be obsolete within three, four, or five years, depending on the abilities and willingness of the companies that make them. We pay for new gear, gumming up landfills with our retired, defunct cyber curios when we fail to recycle them properly.
But there is an upside: A free software update, like the one expected to be announced Monday at Apple’s annual developer conference, can make your old phone feel brand new again. Until Apple stops supporting it, anyway.
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