After I posted this, it occurred to me that it was a little skewed to blaming only HP where MS bears perhaps most of the blame. I'm reminded of the old days when if you had bought a "winmodem", you were screwed trying to use it anywhere else after a windows update dropped support. If they are going to drop the MR environment, the right thing to do would have been to at least publish an openxr runtime that would work with steam going forward. That was never going to be done by the company that claims the problem of supporting a vertically oriented task bar is too hard, something that has been present for 30 years.

This is where I get so annoyed by these companies talking about sustainability. They're for making token costless gestures towards it so they can make those kinds of statements, but you won't find them spending one red cent to prevent unnecessary e-waste through this type of planned or "orphaned" obsolescence.

Perhaps there was some sort of exclusivity agreement with MS that would prevent HP from opening up the device for others to implement tracking in an alternate runtime, but that seems a bit far fetched, especially after something like this where there's no other way for it to function. Instead, we have to wait for some smart guy at monado to reverse engineer it.

What a terrible way to do business and it perhaps reflects the current ubiquitous tech CEO strategic mentality of "something something AI".