The writer Cory Doctrow coined the term enshittification to describe the way that services decline in quality as their users become the product. He was talking about online services when he came up with the word, but the same is very much true when it comes to hardware. Items which once just worked now need apps and online services, with marginal benefit to the user if any. It’s one thing when it’s your soundbar or your washing machine, but thanks to Lemmy user [@win95] from the Netherlands we’ve seen a far more egregious example. People with disabilities are being provided with new powered wheelchairs through their medical insurance, but are then discovering that unaffordable in-app purchases are needed to use their features.
The chairs in question come from the German company Alber, and it seems their defence for the practice is that an Alber chair can be used without the paid-for software upgrades. Reading the many comments attached to the thread linked above it seems this is not a view shared by the people with disabilities who have the chairs, so we’d be extremely interested to know more from both the company and its customers. Either way, selling a very expensive mobility aid and then demanding hundreds more Euros for its features via the app seems to us if it’s as described, to be at least rather questionable. We hope therefore that it attracts some publicity, and the company is shamed into abandoning the practice.
It would be tempting here to exhort the hacker community ..
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