This is such a sad situation. On the one hand, the tech is legitimately outdated, and the company was struggling to make enough money to keep advancing its development. On the other hand, it improves the quality of life for a lot of people. Not being able to get any support with failing hardware is the worst possible outcome.
It would be amazing if, at the very least, the designs for these devices could be released to the world for free, so that people could find ways to hack on them and offer improvements. I know that there are other companies out there now, which are offering better, more modern solutions…but, being able to modify this tech easily would go a long way towards improving quality of life for patients with implants.
It’s to be expected that the companies behind highly experimental implant technology would get into financial troubles and have to fold on their support for the tech. It’s extremely expensive and the market is way too small.
Those that got the implants should have probably thought about that before getting them and I find it difficult to believe that they didn’t. Perhaps they were just desperate.
It is indicative of a larger problem though. Unsupported IoT devices, phones, tablets, etc are everywhere. That’s forgivable for fairly new tech like IoT, but I fear that in a few years, we’ll have to buy new washing machines and fridges every couple of years because they stop working after support runs out.
It’s also becoming harder and harder to find plain-old-tech like non-smart TVs. I don’t want a device with all kinds of stuff integrated. It takes away my choice. I’d much rather have a dumb TV with a fairly dumb media player so I can replace one or the other when I chose or need to.
Then again, in a few years you’ll probably have to pay monthly fees for usage of your tv, washing machine and microwave anyway, so support might be a moot point.
If it was open source this wouldn’t be a problem. Does the company care about support? If it is just waiting to be bought while holding on to the code (or schematics), then it treats our health no differently from real estate speculation.
Now try telling this to the State.
Why does nobody ever stop to ask what the implications will be of allowing actually-existing capitalism to fuck around with advanced biotech?
