Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can’t produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That’s prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.
A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it’s not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.
It’s pretty shitty that the company didn’t produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can’t expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.
This isn’t exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.
In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.
However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.
BrazenSigilos@ttrpg.network 1 month ago
Because to them, it is no different. They aren’t making money off what they have deemed ‘out of production’ equipment, so the search for endless profits means they need a ‘new’ machine to be bought at a frequent pace.
It’s about profits, not people. Bottom line rather then bottomless life.