Jason Fitzpatrick
The news of Logitech willfully bricking a product line has a lot of people nervous about their Logitech products. Here’s what’s happening, who it affects, and when it goes into effect.
Update: Logitech has reversed course, and is now giving out free upgrades to the Harmony Hub for anybody that is affected.
What’s all the chatter about? Logitech sent out an email to customers using the Logitech Harmony Link (a media center control product introduced in 2011) that as of March 2018, they’re pulling the plug on the project. The change doesn’t affect other Harmony remotes and only applies to the Link.
The Harmony Link is a hockey-puck like media center add-on designed to turn your tablet or smartphone into a universal remote and media dashboard. Although the product is already discontinued, it had a lot of fans still happily using the product to control their media centers, check TV listings, and so on.
Unfortunately for those people the system requires cloud access and Logitech has decided to simply stop supporting the project, allowing key certificates to expire.
There’s a small bit of comfort for consumers left out in the cold by the change. If you bought a Harmony Link in the last year (given how long it has been discontinued this is a very small number of people) then Logitech will replace your Harmony Link for free with the newer product, the Harmony Hub. If you have a Link but are outside the 1 year grace period, you can still get a 35% discount on the $99 Hub by purchasing it using your Logitech account through the Logitech store.
While we certainly can understand a company not supporting a product in perpetuity, products should be designed for gentle decommissioning. It would be one thing to tell Harmony Link users that the company would not be offering updates, support, or supplying TV schedule updates anymore, but it’s another thing to yank the plug altogether on a product customers are still happy with.
More: Techspot
