I'm waiting for some FOSS developers to hack this thing and run custom firmware on it. Or someone who creates their own "Car Thing" using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi.
I use a combo of streaming stuff I bought on Bandcamp with their app and playing local files. In addition to albums and EPs, I have bought a lot of singles on Bandcamp. I put all the singles in a giant constantly growing playlist on the Bandcamp app and then set it to random shuffle. It takes more effort than using something like Spotify, but I personally like it a lot more because it's only full of music I know I like and I feel satisfied because I supported the artists I like.
This was predictable. Everyone has a phone. Phones have CarPlay and Android Auto.
The fact that they named it “Car Thing” made it clear that it didn’t have much of a valid use and that they didn’t really have a lot of confidence in it.
It’s annoying that they even created it in the first place. It’s more annoying that they now predictably are not supporting it anymore. It should be illegal.
Holy shit: "The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware."
So they're not offering to dispose of it, or even giving any advice on how to dispose of it responsibly. Just suggesting
people should probably do that.
If companies are allowed to behave this way we're all screwed. Any efforts by the average person to avert the environmental damage caused by the waste they produce is completely futile and any politician who claims that they're doing their best to try to hold companies accountable is a liar.
We need new laws y’all. All these companies should be forced to collect all their e-waste as part of their products lifecycle.
If a company produces any product and the company has a market cap over $1billion, then they should be responsible for collecting and recycling all their trash.
I don't know how accurate this is or if it's still true but I remember hearing like twenty years ago that Germany has laws like that, including dealing with waste packaging, with the result that companies suddenly found ways to use more sustainable packaging
They should at least release data sheets and any bootloader signing keys, allowing people to reuse the devices for other purposes. If you could replace the firmware, I’m sure you could use it for controlling your home automation setup or displaying the weather/news/train times/other info (or possibly other tasks depending on what’s in the SoC). Now, alas, it’s just e-waste.
Datasheets are copyrighted by the silicon manufacturer, not the product manufacturer, and usually covered by an NDA. Spotify probably couldn't release them even if they wanted to.
I bought this for my old Cadillac that only had a tape deck and it was amazing (with a Bluetooth cassette). I haven't used it since I got rid of that old Cadillac about two years ago now. Pretty limited use case but it still sucks to kill shit for no reason.
The sound is honestly not bad, better and less hassle than an FM transmitter. There are 3.5 mm ones too that work pretty well but I had a few of them and they fail where the cable meets the cassette. I passed it on to a friend with a whole house cassette system when I got my new Cadillac
These fuckers disabled car mode in the android app to make you buy one of those and now they're killing it. I used car mode in my car and the moment it stopped working was when I cancelled my subscription.
What did car mode do? Was it when it switched to big old buttons? Mine used to do that until I got Android Auto in my new car...so up until about a year ago
so many comments here about adding regulations and "this should be illegal" and, yes, those may be a valid way to curb this behavior
but customers willing to leave a company for bad behavior, customers wary of new products without asdurances they wont just become useless, non-reusable e-waste could also effectively curb this behavior
just because you want to outsource all of your product and company research to a law or regulation, and want to be able to blindly buy products and just hope the company doesn't make bad choices in every regard but quartly profits doesn't mean it is the only effective check & balance
I downvoted the comment above because in the original comment they already mentioned that they are no longer subscribed to Spotify, which makes the "stop being a customer" comment exceedingly stupid and pointless.
The bastards barely started selling it a few years ago. I feel like some responsibility should exist. It isn't a company that is going under, so it shouldn't be able to just casually kill the devices tied-service it only recently sold.
Anything discontinued should stop being protected by copyright law, and the manufacturer should be forced to give every piece of information they have on that product.
Both. Buy physical media, rip the audio files and put them on your selfhosted music server (e.g. Navidrome). Or pirate the music and buy some merch to compensate the artists.
If it is what I think it is then they are intentionally being vague about what the app does so they don't draw attention from the service that it works with. If you put that in context with the article then the answer to your question is clear.
