"Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!"
This gave me a good laugh. With lowering interest rates and quantitative easing not pumping up the economy as expected, any bets on long before this becomes a reality?
It sounds silly, but these things happen! Just ask anyone who has worked in a Fortune-500 company for at least a few years. Things in good condition get replaced because there's a budget for replacing them, with asking the employees actually using those things (and sometimes despite asking and getting a response on the lines of "please don't touch my stuff, I like it the way it is").
Planned obsolescence is already a thing.
But there isn't really any reason to disable them in the software. Especially since they can be reenabled.
Just like if you have fully depreciated an office desk, that doesn't mean you march into that person's office and take it away. Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!
So I think it is an attempt at scraping more money out of their users.