…Then you’ve been wronged… Someone has injured your ability to use your property. Whether Verizon is liable for that injury, or the FCC, or someone else is hard to say, but whoever it is morally, legally, and ethically, owes you another phone.
I didn’t ask when you bought it because that’s not relevant.
If you bought a house in 1925 with knob and tube wiring, you could walk in today and plug in your super modern phone’s charger right in btw. It is hyperbole to say because something is “old” you should expect it stops working or is no longer compatible.
Go to a car show sometime and look at the cars from the 1960’s or earlier that might not even have seat belts, and guess what… they still drive on the road just fine.
The airplanes we fly in today are easily 20-30-40 years old and guess what, the airports can’t just say no to planes older than 8 years “b cuz, old stuff is old yo”.
Plenty of products through out the history of man have lasted decades or more unless physically damaged. And it was not until the boom of IoT and “cloud dependency” that all the sudden we’re supposed to expect our belongings become valueless waste after a few years.
This trend is not normal. It’s not okay. It’s destructive to nature, and a violation of property rights and people need to be held accountable. It’s something I speak with my legislators about and I’d encourage anyone reading this in the future to do the same.
If we can compel companies to warn us that eating a WyzeCam could result in cancer (calif prop 65) then we can by god have mandatory expiry dates , and civil or criminal penalties for violating them, or for violating property rights when there is no label. It should take the form and commonality of ‘BEST BY’ labels we see on all food and medicine for instance.
ALL cloud-dependent electronics MUST be labeled pre-sale with a good-thru date, until which time the manufacturer will take no action to prevent its use in the condition or at the feature level at which it was purchased.