Featured Image Credit: Cesc Maymo / Contributor/ NurPhoto / Contributor / Getty
As promised, Google is turning off support for a few of its legacy gadgets next week, sparking up a conversation about obsolete tech.
The three devices in question are pretty old, and Google became their owner when it bought Nest and Dropcam in 2014, as part of its push into the world of smart home technology.
Nest reportedly cost Google some $3.2 billion, while Dropcam was believed to be smaller at $555 million, but both were pretty major acquisitions.
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Now, the Dropcam and Dropcam Pro cameras will stop working, along with Nest Secure, which was an alarm system.
These devices had all been tied into the Nest app for a few years now, but Google announced a year ago that they'd stop working on 8 April 2024.
That day is now nearly upon us, and Google has reiterated that there's been no change in plan, so when that day arrives the devices will stop being able to record footage or monitor for intrusions.
The reality is that the Dropcam, for example, has been in some people's homes for more than 10 years, and hasn't been available to buy for a long while, making it technically obsolete.
However, despite the arrival of newer cameras and products, it's been working fine for more than a decade, and if you had one or more monitoring parts of your home, there might be no real need to upgrade.
So, this change seemingly doesn't come as a result of technical failure, but rather because Google has decided to move its support on to more recent hardware.
Smart home technology has a spotty track record when it comes to obsolescence so far, with the number of buyouts and acquisitions that have resulted in defunct hardware slowly growing over time.
Any hardware that relies on a cloud service to function could be at risk of getting bricked if that cloud service ends for any reason, which is the downside to the convenience of a connected cloud-based home security system.
While some names in the space now provide guarantees about the length of service that they'll give for a piece of hardware you buy, it's ironic that a disconnected old-school CCTV system could, in some ways, be more reliable than these newer and fancier networks.
