The Technology Tax You Pay Every Time You Buy Something ‘Smart’

My father advised me many years ago that it is better to be patient and invest more in good quality than to be expedient and end up with cheap products that need to be replaced. I didn’t know it at the time—and maybe he didn’t either—but he was sharing an interpretation of the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” from Terry Pratchett’s novel, Men at Arms.

In the book, Sam Vimes does the math. A good pair of boots costs $50 and lasts about ten years. A cheap pair costs $10, but the cardboard soles let the water in after a season or two. The poor man who can only afford the cheap boots ends up spending around $100 over the same decade and still has wet feet. The man who could afford $50 up front stays warm and dry and comes out ahead.

It applies to a lot of areas of life and explains a lot about the gap between wealth and poverty. It also seems relevant to the trap of consumerism we face with technology today. My father bought a very expensive Kirby upright vacuum more than 30 years ago, and at the time I thought it was crazy to spend that kind of money on a vacuum. He still has it, and it still works.

Meanwhile, I’ve gone through thousands of dollars’ worth of vacuums of every shape and style in that same time, and a lot of them were robots. In early 2023, I wrote that Neato was the most dependable brand I’d used. A few months later, Vorwerk, the German company that owned Neato, shut the brand down and said it would keep the cloud service running for at least five years. Last October, it turned the servers off about three years early. Vorwerk told owners that security and compliance rules had made the old platform too hard to run safely. The vacuums still clean if you press the button on top, but the app, the schedules and the no-go zones are gone.

Simple Machines and a New Way to Fail

Strip away the electronics and most of these machines are simple. A vacuum is a motor, a fan, and a brush, and a refrigerator is a compressor and an insulated box. Machines that simple can be kept running for decades, which is why people still swear by old Speed Queen washers and dryers.

“We are transitioning from an era of perpetual ownership to one of terminal dependency. While traditional machinery—like my 1970 Jaguar E-Type—can be maintained indefinitely through standardized parts and conventional mechanics, modern connected appliances are tethered to opaque corporate support lifecycles,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group.

Software and a cloud account give a product a second way to fail. The motor can be fine while the service that tells it what to do no longer exists. Google ended support for the first two generations of the Nest Learning Thermostat in October 2025. You can still turn the dial, but the app and remote control stopped working. Those units were more than ten years old, but a thermostat is something most people expect to install once and forget about.

In November 2024, Federal Trade Commission staff looked at 184 connected products and found that nearly 89% didn’t say on the product page how long they would get software updates. A couple of months earlier, Consumer Reports checked 21 appliance brands and found only three that said how long they’d guarantee updates. You can find the wattage and the warranty on the box, but good luck finding out when the company plans to stop supporting the thing.

The Screen on My Refrigerator

I have a Samsung refrigerator with a touch screen on the door. In theory, it can do a number of cool things. It’s also the only way to change the settings on the appliance.

It worked fine for a couple of years. Then the screen stopped responding to touch. It still lit up, but you couldn’t do anything with it. I searched the internet and fiddled with it off and on for years and got nowhere. About a year ago it started working again. I hadn’t done anything to it, and I never found out why. About two months ago it quit again, as suddenly as it had started.

Thankfully, the refrigerator still refrigerates, and the freezer still freezes. But I can get that from a much cheaper refrigerator that doesn’t have a glitchy screen on the door. The only thing that has failed is the tech consumers pay a premium for.

More Money and a 12-Month Warranty

“When a vendor’s cloud infrastructure inevitably sunsets, consumers are left with stranded physical assets, realizing they paid a premium hardware price for a temporary software lease,” Enderle said.

Even before the cloud goes away, the hardware coverage runs out fast. A one-year limited warranty is common on these products. Roborock’s US warranty, to pick one example, covers a new robot vacuum for one year. Some devices or appliances proudly boast longer coverage periods, but that is more marketing than actual peace of mind. The fine print usually specifies that only a certain, limited set of parts or functions is covered beyond the basic, much shorter warranty.

I said in that Neato review that most of the vacuums I’ve owned or tested had some kind of catastrophic failure well before the three-year mark, and usually right after the warranty ran out. That hasn’t changed.

I have a robot vacuum right now that’s about two years old and doesn’t work. It reports an error with the LIDAR turret, the spinning sensor on top that maps the room. We’ve removed every screw we can find and still can’t figure out how to get to the turret or its motor.

If I pay $800 or more for a vacuum, I expect it to work for more than two years. An $800 robot that lasts two years costs $400 a year before you buy a single filter or brush. I pay more attention to total cost of ownership now than to the price tag, and a lot of smart products don’t hold up well by that measure.

Who Else Can Fix It

I had a better experience with my 2005 Prius—but not thanks to Toyota. When the hybrid battery died after more than 100,000 miles, my mechanic quoted $4,033 for a new pack. The dealership wanted about $3,000. Then I found an independent shop in Houston that came to my driveway and put in a reconditioned pack for $800. The pack has 28 cells, and usually only a few go bad, so somebody outside Toyota was able to build a business around fixing them. I use that as a test now for anything with a chip in it. If it breaks, or the company walks away, can somebody else keep it alive?

Texas, where I live, has a right to repair law that took effect September 1. It requires makers of many consumer electronics to offer parts, tools, and repair manuals to owners and independent shops. That should help with problems like my LIDAR turret. It only applies to products sold from that date on, though, and as far as I can tell, nothing in it makes a company keep a server running.

Cars Have the Same Problem

Cars are connected devices now, too. People still drive and restore cars from the 1950s and 1960s, and I’ve wondered whether anyone will do that with a Tesla Model S 60 years from now. The first Model S sedans were delivered in 2012, so the oldest are 14. In February 2022, AT&T shut down its 3G network, and Model S cars built before mid-2015 lost their cellular connection unless the owner paid for a modem upgrade. AT&T made that call, and Tesla kept sending updates to those cars over Wi-Fi. But it shows how many companies a connected car leans on. There’s the automaker, the wireless carrier, the cloud provider, and whoever runs the app store.

Fisker filed for bankruptcy in June 2024 and left roughly 11,000 Ocean owners with cars that relied on its cloud. According to Electrek, about 4,000 of them formed an owners association, reverse-engineered the software, and built their own tools to keep the cars working. I admire that, but it’s a lot to ask of someone who just wanted a car.

So will there be a classic Model S on the road in 2086? I think there’ll be a few, kept going by hobbyists with rebuilt battery packs and software they’ve had to work around. I have a harder time picturing the ordinary kind of old car, the one that’s still running because nobody ever had to do anything clever to it.

What You Get for the Trade

Some of this is on us as buyers, too. I’m on my third Apple Watch. My Apple Watch Ultra 3 isn’t even a year old, and I already have FOMO about the Ultra 4 because it has more advanced technology and features mine doesn’t have. Nothing is wrong with the one on my wrist. Meanwhile, a Movado, a Tag Heuer, or a Bulova just keeps on ticking and can be handed down decades later as a family heirloom. I can’t see anyone doing that with an Apple Watch.

I don’t think connected products are a mistake. Over-the-air updates fix safety recalls without a trip to the dealer, and a connected device that no longer gets security fixes is a liability. I’d rather see a vendor shut a service down than run it insecurely. Old machines weren’t all built to last, either—even without the additional technology. We remember the Kirbys and Speed Queens that survived and forget the junk that didn’t.

Microsoft ended support for Windows XP in 2014, but the PC still boots up, and many businesses and consumers continue to use it. You could also install Linux on the underlying hardware and extend the life of your investment. Most smart appliances don’t leave you that option.

I’ll keep using robot vacuums, because in my house they earn their keep for as long as they work. But now, before I buy anything that needs an app, I want to know how long the company promises to support it, whether someone else can repair it, and what it becomes when the servers go dark. Most companies don’t put those answers on the box or the product page. They should. If a company can’t tell me how long I can count on the thing I’m buying—or whether it will still be mine when the app disappears—the price tag doesn’t tell me what it really costs.