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.
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.