The complete machine, fading

May 3, 2026 - 6 minutes read - 1236 words

My iPod 5.5g is old enough to drink alcohol in any country that has a drinking age. I bought it used, swapped the battery and the disk for an SD card mod, and it still does the one thing it was sold to do: play music. No firmware update has ever taken a feature away. No company has decided the device is too old to deserve syncing. Apple, to their credit, still ships iTunes and Music with iPod sync on macOS. But even the day they stop, the iPod will keep playing whatever is already on the disk. The original purpose has not eroded.

That is becoming rare.

Devices die from the network now

The hardware on my desk has not gotten worse. CPUs are faster, displays are sharper, batteries hold up longer than they used to. And yet the average lifespan of a “smart” thing I buy in 2026 feels shorter than what I was buying ten years ago. The thing breaks first from the network, not from the silicon.

The pattern is familiar by now:

The companion app is removed from the store, or rewritten in a way that drops support for older models.
The TLS certificate the device was pinned to expires, and the firmware that would let it accept a new one was never updated.
The cloud API the device talks to is versioned out of existence. A v1 endpoint becomes v2, and v1 is shut down because keeping it alive is unbillable maintenance.

A speaker, a thermostat, a camera, a “smart” anything. None of these failure modes have anything to do with whether the device can still do its job. They have to do with whether anyone, somewhere else, is still willing to keep the other end of the wire alive.

AI accelerated the pattern without being its cause. Every product launch in the last two years has the same slide: “Powered by AI”, which usually means an API call to a cloud LLM the vendor pays for, the user does not control, and the headline feature does not work without. Cut the connection and the feature is gone. Often the basic feature is gone too, because the product team built the whole flow assuming the cloud would always answer.

The same dynamic plays out at every floor. The vendor depends on the open source it ships on top of, and gets squeezed when upstream changes direction (the supply-chain story). The engineer using AI tools depends on a token economy that is currently subsidised, and will get squeezed when investors want their money back (the 100x story). The buyer of the smart speaker depends on the vendor staying alive long enough to keep the cloud running. Three floors, one shape. Dependency on something you do not own is the constant. The label on the box changes.

A worse mainframe, with prettier hardware

The easy version of this argument is “we are going back to the 70s mainframe.” It misses what got worse. The 70s deal was structurally better than what is shipping now in three specific places.

The 70s mainframe sat in your building. You owned it, or your employer did, and the cable to the terminal ran through the walls of a building you had keys to. Today’s mainframe is offshore, owned by a company whose name you did not choose, reachable only over a TLS pipe whose certificates you do not control. The “central operator” is not down the hall. It is in someone else’s jurisdiction.

The 70s terminal was honestly dumb. A keyboard, a screen, a serial line, no pretence. You knew what you had. Today’s terminal is shaped like a real computer and behaves like one until you cut its connection. The dishonesty of selling a thin-client as a personal device is the part that did not exist before.

The 70s mainframe came with a service contract you signed. SLAs, support, a vendor who could be sued. Today’s “service” is a TOS the vendor can change weekly, with a clause letting them brick a device they do not like, and you signed it without reading because the alternative was that the box you paid for did not turn on.

Three ways the deal got worse: location, honesty, accountability. The mainframe analogy understates the regression.

What “complete” used to mean

You thought I was going to channel the Woz. Trying to be a bit more original.

The Casio F-91W has been in continuous production since 1989. It tells the time, runs a stopwatch and an alarm, lights up when you press the button, and lasts about seven years on a battery. That is the entire feature set. There is no companion app. The watch will keep doing exactly what it was sold to do until the LCD fails or the case cracks, on a part nobody is going to deprecate, against a service nobody operates.

A complete machine, in the sense I care about. Not “open” in the GPL sense, not “user-modifiable” in the kit-computer sense. Honest about what it is. The design refused to add things. Forty years later the refusal looks like prescience.

The iPod 5.5g is the same kind of object on a shorter timeline. Music on the disk, codec in the firmware, click wheel and headphone jack with no server in the loop. If iTunes vanished tomorrow, syncing becomes annoying, but the device still plays. Communities are already keeping that path open: Rockbox, libimobiledevice, third-party sync tools. The world where you sync an iPod without Apple exists because the device is honest about what it does.

A streaming-only speaker is the inverse. The codecs may live locally, but the catalogue does not, the auth does not, the discovery protocol does not. None of those parts belong to the buyer. The day any one of them goes away, the speaker stops being a speaker.

The Casio and the iPod 5.5g are the floor the rest of the catalogue should be measured against. Most of what is shipping in 2026 fails the comparison and sits closer to the streaming speaker.

Linux is real, and not enough

“Use Linux” is a real answer for laptops, servers, single-board computers, and a handful of phones. It is not an answer for the smart oven, the robot vacuum, the doorbell, or the infotainment system in your car. Most appliances ship as the vendor decided or they do not ship at all. The escape hatch exists. The long tail of household objects is outside it.

Practical advice for non-technical buyers: pick devices whose core function does not depend on the cloud. Pick the dumb version when the dumb version still exists. “Smart” in 2026 mostly means “rented.”

What I actually do

I work on AI tooling and run cloud services for a living. The tension is real and I am inside it.

On the personal side I lean local-first. Higgins runs a 7B model on my laptop with a local SQLite. If the cloud disappears, the assistant still answers. Costs capability, gains independence. There is also a side benefit nobody prints on the box: running the thing yourself teaches you a thing or two about how it works. The cloud version abstracts away the parts you would otherwise be forced to understand. I value both more than I used to.

The iPod will keep playing. The list of products I could say the same about in 2045 is shrinking every year.