Your $1,495 Oven Is a Toaster Now ↗

Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, for The Verge:

Weber shut off the June Oven’s app and cloud this week. Owners of a $1,495 smart oven now have a sleek toaster with no updates, no parts support, and a factory reset that can brick what’s left.

Weber told me it considered open-sourcing the technology for someone else to keep it alive, but decided against it, citing the fact June’s IP is part of its Weber Connect platform.

Read that again. They thought about letting customers keep what they paid for, then chose the platform moat instead. June is not a freak accident. Nest Secure, WeMo, Neato, Brava, SoundTouch, Sengled: the graveyard is a product category.

The business model wrote the ending on day one. Cloud was cheaper than a local hub when these things shipped. Servers keep costing money after the SKU stops selling. Once a bigger company buys the shiny thing and discovers the P&L, the funeral is just a cost-cutting slide. Matter, Zigbee, Thread, Home Assistant: the only durable smart home products are the ones that still work when the mothership ghosts you.

A gadget that only talks to the cloud was never finished. It was a subscription you didn’t know you bought, billed in obsolescence.