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Scharon Harding, Ars Technica
Owners of Spotify’s soon-to-be-blocked Car Thing device are pleading with the company to open the devices to prevent some from ending up in landfills. Spotify did not respond to requests to retrieve the hardware, which was originally meant to connect to the car. Auxiliary boards and jacks to allow drivers to pay attention and navigate Spotify.
Spotify announced this week that it will shred all car parts purchased on Dec. 9 and will offer no refunds or trade-in options. On one page, Spotify says:
We are discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to optimize our product offering. We understand that this could be disappointing, but this solution allows us to focus on creating new features and innovations that will eventually provide a greater experience. for all Spotify users.
Spotify doesn’t have any recommendations for the device other than asking them to factory reset the device and “safely” dispose of the locked device “following local e-waste guidelines. “
The company also said it has no plans to make a sequel to Car Thing.
Car Thing was released to a limited number of subscribers in October 2021 before being released to the general public in February 2022.
This article was originally published on Ars Technica, a trusted source for tech news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED’s parent company, Condé Nast.
In its second-quarter 2022 earnings report released in July, Spotify revealed that it had stopped making Car Things. In a verbal exchange with TechCrunch, he cited “several factors, in addition to problems with product demand and the origin chain. “A Spotify representative also told the post that the devices will continue to “work as expected,” but that this is a transitory situation.
The production halt is a harbinger that Car Thing is in danger. However, at the time, Spotify had also reduced the value of the device from $90 to $50, which may have prompted other people to buy a device that would be dead a few years ago. Later.
However, the usefulness of Car Thing has been questionable. The device has a 4-inch touchscreen and a button for easy navigation, plus help for Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and voice control. But it also required users to subscribe to Spotify. Premium, which starts at $11 per month. Even worse, Car Thing requires a phone with data or a Wi-Fi connection via Bluetooth to work, making it redundant.
In its first-quarter 2022 report, Spotify said that the discontinuation of Car Thing hurt gross margins and that it took €31 million (about $31. 4 million at the time) to fund the venture.
Spotify’s announcement sent some Car Thing owners to online forums to share their sadness with Spotify and beg the company to open source the device or, at best, condemn it to recycling centers. At the time of writing, more than 50 posts on Spotify network forums have explicit considerations about shutting down, and many are not easy to refund and/or call for open source. Similar discussions are taking place elsewhere online, such as on Reddit, where users have used words like “totally unacceptable” to describe the news. .
Aaron MickDee, a member of the Spotify network, for example, said:
I wouldn’t just throw the device away. I think there’s a network out there that would love the idea of having a device that we can customize and use for purposes other than betting songs.
Would Spotify be willing to follow the formula and allow users to write/update third-party firmware on the device?
By Carlton Reid
By Joe Ray
By Scott Gilbertson
By Scott Gilbertson
A Spotify spokesperson declined to answer questions from Ars about why Car Thing is open source and considerations about e-waste and wasting money.
Instead, a corporate representative told Ars, in part, “The goal of our exploration of Car Thing in the US is to become more informed about how other people pay attention in the car. In July 2022, we announced that we would prevent production and Now it’s time to say goodbye to those devices completely. I contacted the Spotify representative to ask how to make the device open source, but got no response.
At this point, encouraging consumers to spend about $100 on a soon-to-be-obsolete device hasn’t led to any groundbreaking innovation or classes on “how other people pay attention in the car. “In his initial response, the Spotify representative pointed me to a Spotify site that searches Spotify’s newsroom for “how to pay attention to Spotify in the car. “One of the most productive articles is from 2019 and states that “if your car has an AUX or USB socket, a cable is probably one of the fastest tactics for connecting your phone. “
As for Spotify, cash-per-learning reports from customers at the service of the company isn’t the most productive business plan. And for normal users, it’s more productive to avoid making an investment in an unproven hardware task presented through a software company.
As editor Wemie1420 says:
It doesn’t seem smart that there is still no other option to destroy it. We have the impression that we are being punished for having supported them. This dissuades me from buying anything Spotify offers in the future. I feel like there would be a way to technique this without saying “yes, we’re done. “Throw it away, now it’s a waste of money.
This short story was originally published in Ars Technica.
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