I despise this too, but it seems to be a viable strategy. Personally this completely destroys any trust and semblance of brand loyalty when a company does this

I despise this too, but it seems to be a viable strategy. Personally this completely destroys any trust and semblance of brand loyalty when a company does this because it's so openly adversarial. The message is always "nice hardware you bought there, shame if it were to suddenly stop working." The big question for me is why people continue buying products with this cancer in them. If enough people are willing to buy elsewhere this could conceivably be fixed.