Not the OP, but IMO as soon as a company becomes successful, the leadership becomes focused on making money and not making a good product.

Sometimes making a decent product is part of making money, but that's never a motivation in itself. We have enough examples showing that if it makes more money to enshittify (and usually it does), then they will gladly enshittify.

I wouldn't say it's just the smart speaker industry.

A little of both.

speakers used to be something that would last a lifetime. I still have the same active monitors that I bought quarter of a century ago when I was producing techno. And I still used those speakers daily for listening to the radio. I used them for a NYE house party. They’re used often and still perform as well today as they do when they were new.

smart speakers is just a way of introducing forced obsolescence into the market.

So these EOL guarantees are nice, but EOL for speaker used to mean 50+ years later or when someone idiot inflicted physical damage onto the hardware. And even then, it was often still repairable.

This conversation reminds me of how predatory _all_ of the big players ToS were when I was shopping for a large (think for outdoor use) BT speaker. Every single one of the mainstream speakers had terrible data collection allowed by their "privacy" policy. I ended up ordering one from Monoprice that did not even have a ToS.