Unsustainable and short-lived goods

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This is the complement of the BifL (buy it for life) communites. Here we call out products (tech and non-tech) that:

are designed to fail early
feature anti-repair tactics (booby traps, self-destruction mechanisms, circuit boards submerged in silicon or plastic, denied documentation access)
are designed to make you needlessly dependant on an unsustainable proprietary service (typically in the cloud), which risks:
① remote kill switches where a supplier pulls the plug on singled-out individuals (e.g. Amazon sabotaging service to your thermostat, doorbell, vaccuum, etc whenever you have a billing dispute),
② the company disappearing, or ③ the company deciding to decommission a server and boot everyone who depends on it.

Related communities:

[email protected] - Buy stuff that lasts a long time, if you must buy something
[email protected] - Buy stuff that lasts a long time, if you must buy something
[email protected] - fix it, don’t replace it
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[email protected] - exercise your right to fix stuff
[email protected] - exercise your right to fix stuff
[email protected] - sustainable technology
[email protected] - To discuss computing that’s not resource intensive
[email protected] - To discuss computing that’s not resource intensive
[email protected] - To discuss waste avoidance
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TomTom desktop s/w phones home (and nobody home).. self destructs. (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I have an old TomTom. Abandoned by TomTom with no map updates available. They claim the maps are too big for the storage space (apparently they don’t know they could distribute smaller regions to overcome that).

Anyway, I connected the standalone TomTom device to a PC running the old software, which normally syncs points of interest and manages the data. The piece of shit software decided to go to the cloud and discover a lack of map maintenance, and then took the liberty of removing the maps from my device with no replacement maps. The desktop software basically sabotaged the device.

So I reinstalled the original factory desktop software from CD and kept it air gapped -- with an expectation to at least install the original factory maps. The software refused to run until it could check for updates. Would not move forward. Once I let it connect, TomTom had taken their server offline. So I’m dead in the water.. no way forward and no way backward.

Regarding lifetime updates: IIRC TomTom and Garmin both advertise free map updates for a “lifetime” on their not-so-old devices. Don’t be fooled.. it’s not your lifetime they are talking about, but something they have defined as like 10 years or something. Read the fine print.

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[–] Cheradenine 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Could you try reinstalling and firewalling the connection to the update server? Sometimes the software sees a difference between "no internet connection" and "failed to check for updates" where the failed check will still let you install.

That does not excuse their behavior of course.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I’ll have to give that a try the next time I am fiddling with it.