Hey capitalism, how’s it going?
But soon, none of those features will be available, making the pricey children’s toy virtually useless. According to Embodied, Moxie can’t perform core functionality without cloud connectivity. Worse, owners apparently have an uncertain and limited amount of time until the devices are bricked.
… oh 
Since Embodied marketed Moxie as a companion and development toy for children, there’s concern about kids potentially suffering an emotional toll after the robot abruptly becomes inoperable. Embodied has responded by promising to provide a guide for telling children about Moxie’s demise. Online, however, customers are already sharing videos of their sad kids learning that their robot friend will stop playing with them, as Axios pointed out.
“Good. Kids should learn young not to expect things can’t be taken away in a moments notice and that in the real world they should be spending less time forming emotional attachments to things and more time working!”
The sad part is this thing supposedly helped autistic kids.
Thankfully people are trying to open source it’s programming before it bites the dust.
Just out of curiosity, how would you expect a hardware eye company that goes out of business to keep current customers replacements working?
IIRC they didn’t go out of business, they were bought by a larger company that discontinued the program because they didn’t think it was profitable enough.
Of course the real solution is nationalize them all and set up a bureau to provide permanent maintenance services for any defunct-but-still-used medical devices or to handle their replacement with new ones. Anything less is at best a bandaid that shouldn’t be considered anything more than an emergency stopgap solution.
Require them to retain a sufficient number of support staff. If they “don’t have enough money” for it, take it from the board, executives, and vc firms who backed it. Imprison and/or execute them if they fail to do so.
I’d suggest a law that companies providing medical equipment should reveal all their blueprints, code, etc. to some national regulator. If the company goes belly up, the regulator releases these into the public domain so other manufacturers can provide spare parts, maintanence, etc. The inventors / programmers can be given a reasonable compensation for their work being nationalised.
your question is fundamentally wrong on a systemic level
we are not expecting an out-of-business company to support any products.
ON THE CONTRARY WE WANT THE EXACT OPPOSITE:
When a company dies its corpse should be seized by the population and graphically ripped open so all its proprietary organs get dumped into the public domain
SO WE CAN DO THE WORK OURSELVES.
since they’re incapable
That’s also like saying a company can never sell any of their patents, ip, or anything it helps develope or co-develope in order to even try and stay in business. It would pretty much halt anyone from investing or creating any new technology that could help people. If a situation such as that would have always been in place, people without a foot in the US would still be using wooden peg legs if they weren’t able to pay cash and fly overseas to buy something better. No one would find backers to develope new tech for people’s handicaps if they couldn’t ever sell anything off if they needed or wanted to.