End-of-life (product)

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End-of-life is a term used with respect to a retailed product, indicating that a vendor will no longer be marketing, selling, or promoting a particular product and may also be ending or limiting support for said product.

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.