Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it.
“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website.
“We understand it may be disappointing, but this decision allows us to focus on developing new features and enhancements that will ultimately provide a better experience to all Spotify users.”
The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware.
Car Thing was initially made available on an invite-only basis in April 2021, with Spotify later opening a public waitlist to buy the accessory later that year.
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Idk who needs to hear it, but stop buying this shit. If it has a computer inside, but you can't flash your own software onto it, just pass. If you're unsure, look around, find the nearest Linux user and ask for help.
I am ashamed to say I'm an ex-Arch user. I really liked Arch, but if you go long periods without updating it it becomes really painful when you do eventually apply updates. I got tired of finally booting some system I hadn't touched in a year to work on something or other attempting to apply updates to it, and then spending the next 6 hours fixing everything that broke because one of the updates from last week applied before one from 10 months ago that it depended on, or some config file I touched once 3 years ago changed and needs manual fixing now.
Yeah I was a Gentoo user a long time ago so when I finally installed Arch I had a little mental note in the back of my head to update every week unless I wanted to sort out things I shouldn't have to sort out.
Got any tips or tidbits for Nobara? I'm heavily considering installing it onto my new PC when I build it in a week. I'm a noob at Linux but it seemed perfect for everything I'm looking to do on my PC.
To be fair, next to no one bought this. And the people that payed $90 for this are probably not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
This is basically a dumb android device with one app - an auto friendly version of Spotify. To use it, you need to pair it to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, it assumes you have a phone in your car with Spotify on it.
Also it costs about as much as a cheap externally mounted CarPlay or Android auto screen. So, yeah. Not great.
If you want to put auto friendly app UIs in an older car, go get a cheap CarPlay or AA display. Those are platforms that have been around for a decade, and Apple & Google have long partnership agreements with automakers that are likely to ensure those platforms will be supported for years to come. Hell, Apple is still supporting ancient iPod connection protocols 20+ years later.
This thing was the Rabbit R1, but for a music streaming app.
Nope, I'm fed up with stupid people getting rewarded for their stupidity.
I knew that PPI was a scam years ago and I payed higher interest rates because of refusing to sign up to it. Years later all the stupids got their money back. So fuck 'em, fuck them all.
Also the stupids keep voting for Nazis
Yes I'm pissed.
Honestly this thing solved a very specific problem for me: My car has no good way to mount a phone for car usage so I've always kept it in the center console. Car Thing just put a remote on my dash for that with buttons for presets and easy song skipping.
I only got it for $10 though, and that was two years ago. It has convinced me to get a new head unit with Android Auto support on it for sure
Well ok, an electronic picture frame is not much of an investition and works without internet. Well, most of them. Ok, you have to research it before buying.
It's a little annoying how the article only gives much of a hint as to what exactly a Car Thing is, beyond a "dashboard accessory", in the last paragraph of the article:
the product was more of a remote control for Spotify on your mobile phone than any kind of standalone player
Car Thing is basically the Rabbit R1, but for music. In other words, a cheap Android device, with one app (a car dashboard variation of Spotify), a scroll wheel, and a some shortcut buttons.
It works by connecting to your phone via Bluetooth. So, yeah, instead of using the phone for the auto friendly UI, it pipes that UI to a second cheaper mobile device.
It’s truly stupid, and it cost about the same as an external CarPlay / Android Auto screen… which could display an auto friendly Spotify UI, and much much more.
Am I the only one who finds it super annoying, that "detection through sound waves" (Sonar) does video things while "detection through light" (lidar) does the sound things?
I wish list stuff until a Bandcamp Friday comes around where artists get all the money. I've stopped buying physical media, so waiting on a digital purchase isn't an issue for me.
For now, they still provide DRM free downloads in FLAC. And they still pay the artists on the Fridays. I'll continue using it till they inevitably fuck it up.
Dude Bandcamp had been sold twice and the product has not changed from a user experience and I only use Bandcamp at this point...I will say you NEED to download anything you buy to archive your collection but at the moment Bandcamp still pays bands, still allows unlimited streaming and still amazing.
Do I expect it to remain amazing...nope, but for now it's still amazing.
Absolutely. Even if you pirate from some, and buy whole albums from a few when you can afford it, you're supporting artists instead of the shareholders of tech goon overlords.
My concert ticket stack is thicc though, and I have SOOOOO MANY hoodies, t-shirts, cups, and random bullshit. I’m not paying for DRM, but you can’t DRM a comfy zip-up!
Yeah most people don't care to maintain a local music library. It's a lot of work and compared to streaming services that do it for you this offers no real benefit. If you listen to lots of new/different music all the time, streaming is actually far cheaper.
"It is a lot of work"? I don't know, for me it always seemed far more convenient than being locked to a single service, single player app and following restrictions.
For me, discovery is the entire reason to use streaming services. I have a ton of hard drive space, and know how to find anything I want to download. I have a fairly large music collection from before the days of streaming. But streaming services help me discover all kinds of things I'd likely never hear otherwise. They still suck, as in they're greedy as hell and the quality is mid, but I don't know what I'd do if I had to listen to the same stuff all the time.
iTunes was an unhappy medium. I liked how you can actually buy albums, but they gave the MP3s weird filenames to make it more difficult to move to another device. I did it anyway, but I had to find the right folder, figure out what track it was, and rename the track. I'm against it but it's still better than streaming.
You can still buy songs on iTunes and load them to an iPod, MP3 player, or in my case to my Navidrome instance for my own personal self-hosted streaming.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
