Sunset

I've been using the same MacBook Pro for ten years. It does everything I need. I run my software updates when they arrive, and the updates panel always told me I was current.

Then I tried to install the Muse app for Mac. The installer told me I needed a newer version of macOS. That's how I found out what 'current' meant. The panel had never lied, exactly: I was on the latest version of Monterey. Nobody had told me Monterey was no longer the latest anything.

No email. No banner. No notice that my OS was sunsetting. I don't expect a ten-year-old laptop to run everything. I expect to be told when it stops. I found out through an error message, at the moment something I wanted wouldn't run. That's what a sunset looks like when nobody designs it: it arrives as a rejection.

Every service ends. The ending is the last experience a user has of it — and the one nobody designs, not for lack of knowing how. Companies plan the launch, the onboarding, the growth loops. The dying gets what's left over — usually nothing: no notice, no export, no goodbye. Just an installer error, one day, for something that worked yesterday.

Psychologists found that when people look back on an episode, their memory is dominated by its most intense moment and its end — the duration barely registers. A service that ends badly doesn't just end badly. It rewrites how you remember everything that came before it. Ten good years with a laptop, and the thing I'll remember is the afternoon it told me I was obsolete. Design the ending and you protect the memory of the whole relationship. Skip it and the ending does the designing for you.

Three kinds of ending. Then there's the law, which has tried twice.

The hostile kind: Revolv. Google bought the smart-home startup in 2014, stopped selling its $299 hub immediately, and when the news broke in April 2016, the announcement was stark: as of May 15 the hub and its app would simply stop working — a total brick, eighteen months after the acquisition, with every warranty already expired. One customer's line travelled everywhere: "I own a Commodore 64 that still works." Apple dropping iPad support leaves you a working device. Revolv's shutdown reached into people's homes and switched things off: it didn't stop supporting what you owned, it disabled it.

The designed kind: Stadia. Google announced the cloud-gaming shutdown in September 2022 and then did the thing almost nobody does — refunded every hardware, game and add-on purchase; pushed a final firmware update that unlocked standard Bluetooth on the controller, giving a cloud-tethered device a second life; built save-data transfer tools; and released Worm Game, the internal test game, as a farewell. The verdict, as Dot Esports put it, was "sad but honorable."

The contested kind: The Crew. Ubisoft shut the game's servers on March 31, 2024, and twelve million lifetime players lost access to something they'd paid for — then the company started revoking licenses without refunds, on the basis that customers had bought "limited access," not ownership. The backlash became Stop Killing Games and a European Citizens' Initiative with 1.3 million verified signatures. Three months earlier, France's consumer group UFC-Que Choisir had sued Ubisoft — with no ruling or settlement reported as of this writing. In June 2026 the European Commission declined to propose mandatory legislation, calling it "disproportionate," and offered a voluntary industry code of conduct instead. The question at the centre of it — can a company erase something you paid for? — is still open.

In 2019, researchers filed 230 real portability requests under the GDPR's right to data portability. Only 172 came back complete — formats that failed the GDPR's own requirements, controllers confused by the rights themselves. The legal answer to "what happens to my stuff" exists, and it malfunctions.

In France, planned obsolescence is a crime — up to two years' imprisonment and fines of up to 5% of turnover. France also built the world's first repairability score, the little /10 on the shelf edge — self-assessed by manufacturers, already being superseded by a durability index.

That memory finding has a name: the peak–end rule. Kahneman's team showed it in 1993 with short, controlled episodes. Stretching it across ten years is my extension, not settled science. The claim I'll defend is smaller: nobody remembers the middle. They remember the best of it and the last of it — and the last is the part nobody designed.

The documented deliberate case is almost a century old: the Phoebus cartel of 1920s lamp manufacturers, agreeing on a 1,000-hour life. Some deaths are designed; others just drift. But the dying is never designed — the exit experience is an afterthought either way. My Monterey panel is that in miniature: the death (Monterey being replaced) was decided years ago; the dying (telling me) was never designed at all.

There's an engineering principle that transfers neatly: graceful degradation. A system keeps working partially when components fail. A sunset with graceful degradation keeps the core functions alive — local control, data export — when the cloud dies. Stadia's Bluetooth unlock is graceful degradation: the cloud died, the controller didn't. Revolv's brick is its absence. My laptop is the in-between case: the hardware degrades gracefully, the software relationship doesn't.

The practitioner move is a checklist, not a philosophy. No hardware? Translate: settle what's owed, leave the thing working as far as you can, hand over records in a format that opens — the malfunctioning half of the story is why it's on the list — tell them yourself. With hardware it's literal — refund the money, free the hardware, hand back the data, say goodbye properly. Most sunsets fail on at least three of the four — hardware or not.

And the smaller, cheaper move is the one my story is really about: announce the sunset before the error does. Find the error your users will hit on the last day. Write the notice that should reach them first. Where there's no last day — only drift — label it honestly instead: say what 'up to date' means. Somewhere in Apple's update panel there is a string that says "Your Mac is up to date." There could have been a string that said "Your Mac is up to date on Monterey, which is no longer the current macOS — here's what that means for you." That string was never written. The ending I got was designed by whoever wrote the Muse installer's error message, which is to say it was designed by accident, by someone else, at the worst possible moment.

The fair objection: most endings aren't plots. The Phoebus cartel was deliberate; plenty of endings are just undesigned — companies run out of money, priorities shift, the team leaves. But "we didn't plan it" is the indictment, not the defence. The death was always coming. The dying was almost always designable. Choosing not to design it is still a choice — it's just one the user discovers through an error message.

What was the last thing a dying service said to you? Paste the message in a reply. I read everything.

Next week: Did it go through? The receipt, the reference number, the spinning wheel — what a service owes you in the gap between acting and knowing.