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After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat
(www.theverge.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
16 years old? That thermostat has sure had a run, must have been designed pretty well to last this long without some electronic failure.
Assuming it's cloud connected, anyone aware whether it got updates for the newer versions of TLS and root certificates? As an example I'm aware quite a lot of android and similar devices from that era have expired certificates now, and outdated/vulnerable SSL libraries...
Edit: Edit example
I have game consoles that are more than twice that old and still play reliably. Apple really skewed our idea of lifespans for electronics, didn't they? It's a thermostat, they should be designed to install and forget for the next half-century. It's a core part of a house, like the plumbing and breaker box.
Apple's a weird pick for this.
If you're talking desktop/laptop hardware, I had a 2009 MBP running just fine as a personal server until a couple of years ago and would probably still be doing it except the battery turned into a spicy pillow and I wanted more performance anyway. And I've got a 2016 that's going strong as a daily driver for personal projects.
If you're talking phones, that's even weirder. It's pretty well known that Android users change phones more frequently. Which makes sense, cuz Android phones tend to get stuck on old major versions and stop getting security patches.
For instance if you got an iPhone 5s in 2013, running iOS 7, you could still be using that today on iOS 12, which received security patches as recently as 2023.
If you got a Galaxy S4 in 2013, you could update from Android 4 to 5, which stopped receiving security patches in 2017.