Anyone who knows me well will be aware of my dislike of planned obsolescence and with regards to Avid hardware the deliberate killing of the Pro Control Surface for Pro Tools 11 onwards was one particularly painful experience Avid dealt at 11's release.
Along with Avid's announcement for the discontinuation of support for Pro Control came the EOL (End Of Life) for the HD TDM DSP cards and EOS (End of Of Support) for any blue front fronted hardware including the HD 192 io, 192 Digital io, 96 io, 96i and Sync (not including Sync HD).
Avid have offered a discounted trade in from HD TDM systems and "Legacy Blue" interfaces up to the newer HD Native or HDX with HDio interfaces and Pro Tools 12 but the best value deals for the upgrades finish at the end of December 2015.
From the 1st of January 2016 the deals are less attractive and only a Core TDM card and blue interface can be used for a trade in and at a much higher cost (Accel cards will not be able to be used in the trade in).
This has no doubt put Avid dealers under a fair amount of stress coping with last minute upgrades both in the supply of new hardware and the logistics of dealing with the traded in items, so much so that one dealer in Germany "SMM - modernste Studiotechnik" have taken to posting on social media that they simply cannot cope with storing any more trade in hardware and anyone wanting to trade in must contact them first before attempting to return trade in gear.
This does also beg a question as to what happens with all that hardware when the upgrades are done ?
Its surely not in any condition to be reused by anyone considering how the TDM cards in the pictures are being stacked with no protection or anti-static precautions and I'm sure Avid would not want it back on the open market otherwise if would be fairly pointless offering the trade in at all.
The only other obvious alternative would be landfill / destroying the items which seems like an awful waste of what would be a high percentage of perfectly usable hardware only hindered by the fact that Avid will no longer support its use or allow the ownership transfer of the HD software licenses needed to use it.
Planned obsolescence is a pretty sad thing especially on a grand scale, but it feels even worse when its being carried out by manufacturers close to our hearts.
Here's some more pictures of all that (once very expensive) hardware now sadly rendered useless by planned obsolescence.
How do you feel about this and how can we stop this from being the norm and "acceptable" ? - Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.
