Peloton bricks its treadmills
Your kids are dead because you didn’t buy the subscription.
“Tread,” a $3000 “smart” treadmill from Peloton, is a deathtrap. 125,000 Treads have been recalled after the devices injured 72 people and killed a child.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56993894
Say what you will about Peloton’s safety engineering, but never fault the evil genius of its strategists. The company responded to the news by bricking the Treads in the field and demanding $40/month “subscriptions” from owners to continue using them.
The pretense here is that the subscription comes with safety software that means that you treadmill will not maim you or murder your children.
This raises an obvious question: why not just put that software into all the existing Tread devices for free?
But the answer is obvious. Because a free software update will cost the company money, and charging $40/month will make the company money — $480/year/customer, free net revenue for software that they’ve already written.
You might as well ask, “Why don’t ransomware gangs just tell pipeline owners about the…
