I don’t understand what you mean when you say the whole smart speaker industry is crooked.

Every company that makes smart speakers is crooked? Or, the making and selling of smart speakers is inherently unethical?

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.

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.