If you bought a hammer 8 years ago and the hammer company had a way to "deactivate" certain uses of the hammer so it only worked in a few situations, would you say "8 years is long enough for a hammer, it's perfectly reasonable they force you to buy a new hammer in order for it to work properly." ?
Philips has the resources to keep this up and running.
A Hue Bridge is not like a hammer. Your analogy is cute and appealing, but not actually analogous (the biggest problem with analogies...)
> Philips has the resources to keep this up and running.
See how your analogy doesn't work? A manufacturer of a hammer doesn't have to continually expend resources to keep your hammer operating, secure, and compatible with other devices. Because it's just a hammer.
That's not right. You've just based your assertion with a faulty assumption that a bulb has to be smart - sure the analogy breaks down. But, the parent is making an analogy about a "dumb" bulb - both hammer and bulb are tools. Hammer is used to hit nails and a bulb is used to illuminate dark spaces.
A manufacturer of "dumb" bulbs doesn't have to continually expend resources to keep your bulb operating, secure, and compatible with other devices - simply by the virtue that the bulb isn't a smart bulb.
To fail your analogy criteria, the bulb just have to be a "dumb" one or the hammer can be a smart-hammer (you can concieve that for the sake of a thought exercise).
What? I never said anything about bulbs. A Hue Bridge is not a bulb at all. And “dumb” bulbs still exist, you can buy them, most people aren’t really complaining when they don’t last forever, and frankly they’ve got nothing at all to do with my comment or the one I was replying to.
In this case, I'd put it on the buyers. It's a lightbulb, and like many home appliances it doesn't need any cloud stuff. Or rather, it can work just fine with self-hosted software.
Buy it and never use their cloud services or knowing that it can always disappear - if it doesn't work without Internet connectivity, don't buy it. Doesn't take a genius.
Philips has the resources to keep this up and running.