On 9 December 2024, Spotify made every Car Thing device stop working. The hardware was intact. The speakers functioned. The circuit boards had not failed. But the company had decided the product line was no longer commercially interesting, so it sent a remote command that rendered every unit inoperable. Owners were told to throw them away.
No malfunction. No warning. Just a business decision, and a physical object people had paid for became landfill.
The Car Thing is an obvious example because Spotify was transparent about it. Most cases are quieter: a firmware update that removes features you relied on, a cloud service retirement that turns a connected appliance into a basic timer, a subscription gate introduced for functions that used to be included in the purchase price. This piece names the mechanism behind all of them, and points to the category of objects it cannot touch.
The mechanism
Every major consumer hardware brand is under pressure to convert one-time unit sales into recurring subscription revenue. The physical product, increasingly, is the entry point to a service relationship. When the company needs to cut costs, discontinue a line, or pivot its business model, the service can be withdrawn. The device, which was sold as a product, reveals itself to have been a licence.
The list of shuttered services that have bricked functional hardware is now long. Revolv smart home hubs, acquired by Nest in 2014 and shut down two years later, left owners with $300 paperweights. Amazon Halo wearables were discontinued in 2023 with no device refund and no replacement product. Insteon went offline overnight in 2022, leaving an installed base of smart home hardware non-functional with no advance notice. Spotify added to the list at the end of 2024. There will be more.
Why this is a structural problem
The conventional framing is that this is a consumer grievance. It is that, but the economic problem runs deeper. When you buy cloud-dependent hardware, you are not acquiring an asset. You are buying a licence that expires on the manufacturer’s schedule. The object can be in perfect working condition and depreciate to zero in a single business announcement.
This matters as the category expands. Networked appliances. Smart thermostats. Subscription-gated performance modes in vehicles you have already purchased. The direction of travel is clear: more dependency, not less. Objects that function without ongoing permission from their manufacturer are becoming rarer, which means they are becoming more valuable. That is not a coincidence. It is a consequence of how the hardware business model has evolved.
Three things it cannot touch
A Big Berkey gravity filter requires no electricity, no account, and no active subscription. Fill the upper chamber; gravity does the rest. The Black Berkey elements last approximately 6,000 gallons before replacement, at a running cost of roughly two cents per gallon, which works out to around $20 per year for a typical household. A Brita pitcher costs approximately $48 per year in filter replacements at six times the per-gallon cost, and the pitcher itself depreciates to zero. The Berkey is 304 stainless steel and functions whether the company’s servers are running or not. For a full breakdown of the category, see Water filtration: Berkey vs AquaTru vs SOURCE.
The Leatherman Wave+ illustrates the same point in a different context. $129.95 for a 25-year warranty, 18 tools in a single unit, replaceable components, no firmware, no account, no recurring cost. Labour inputs for precision manufacturing do not deflate. That price will not be lower in five years. The same cannot be said for whatever connected wearable or smart home hub is being sold at the same price point this season.
Portable power stations, covered in detail in Portable power stations: EcoFlow vs Bluetti vs Jackery, operate on well-understood battery chemistry with standardised connectors. None of the leading units require an active subscription to discharge stored energy. You are buying a productive asset: capacity that generates utility on demand, independent of any vendor’s commercial decisions.
Why now
The shift towards subscription dependency in consumer hardware is structural, not cyclical. Manufacturers have strong incentives to maintain it. Most buyers have not yet priced the difference between genuine ownership, the kind that does not expire, and a licence dressed up as a product.
Objects that operate without a vendor’s ongoing co-operation are becoming structurally scarce. The manufacturing base for repairable, serviceable hardware built to a standard rather than a price point has not expanded. The materials inputs have not become cheaper. The skilled labour has not become more abundant. If anything, the regulatory and competitive pressure on manufacturers runs in the opposite direction.
The tools, filters, and power assets that cannot be bricked will matter more in five years than they do today. The time to own them is before that becomes obvious to everyone else.
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