End-of-life (product)

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End-of-life (EOL) is a term used with respect to a retailed product, indicating that the product is in the end of its product lifetime and a vendor will no longer be marketing, selling, or promoting a particular product and may also be limiting or ending support for the product. In the specific case of product sales, the term end-of-sale (EOS) has also been used. The term lifetime, after the last production date, depends on the product and is related to a customer's expected product lifetime. Different lifetime examples include toys from fast food chains (weeks or months), cars (10 years), and mobile phones (3 years).

Product support during EOL varies by product. For hardware with an expected lifetime of 10 years after production ends, the support includes spare parts, technical support and service. Spare part lifetimes are price-driven due to increasing production costs: when the parts no longer can be supplied through a high volume production site (often closed when series production ends), the cost increases.

In the computing field, this has significance in the production and supportability of software and hardware products. For example, Microsoft has marked both Windows 95 and Windows 98 for end-of-life; hence its new software, such as Office 2007, is not supported on Windows 95 or 98. Depending on vendor, this may differ from end of service life, which has the added distinction that a system or software will no longer be supported by the vendor providing support.

With hardware products, the term has come to incorporate the disposal and recycle-ability of an article. Many companies are now charging a "recycling" fee up front to cover the cost of disposal at end of life. Many hardware products are now engineered with end of life in mind.