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Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

support.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#61

Post by crazygringo »

ClarityJones wrote: post #13

It's one thing to discontinue selling the product. It's another to discontinue service (i.e. Music) to the product. Did the hardware generate a lot of support requests? Does it require too much engineering to keep secure with updates, etc.?

Seriously.

I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this.

If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#62

Post by whycome »

Nextgrid wrote: post #31

What's most disgusting is the tone and wording of the e-mail linked in the Reddit post. It reads like they're outright delighted to be breaking your 90-dollar piece of hardware. Not even a fake apology. Tech bros are getting more and more brazen. That email would be fine if they were just discontinuing a feature of their ongoing service - it's disappointing, but you got value out of it while you were paying for it an…

I would love to have a "real language" version of these corporate press releases. They sold a product, got your money, and now aren't just stopping updates but are actively bricking the device in 6 months. And telling you to throw it out 'safely' too.

I wanna sell something that I can just disable a year or so after I've sold it.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#63

Post by esafak »

crazygringo wrote: post #61
ClarityJones wrote: post #13

It's one thing to discontinue selling the product. It's another to discontinue service (i.e. Music) to the product. Did the hardware generate a lot of support requests? Does it require too much engineering to keep secure with updates, etc.?

Seriously. I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this. If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).

That's like a minimum wage law. The flip side is that companies will be more guarded about releases. Can you live with that?

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#64

Post by esafak »

ejj28 wrote: post #25

Really upset by this, I love my Car Thing and the voice control Spotify built into it is second to none - it's quick, always hears me perfectly even with noise in the car, and most importantly, it actually plays what I want it to play. It seems like it's integrated with my music history, so if I ask it to play a song that I listen to a lot but it has a very common name, it'll still get it right - it's like magic. Goo…

The Spotify app used to have great speech recognition built in. I'm not sure but a furor over its privacy aspects might have played a part in its removal :(

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#65

Post by crazygringo »

esafak wrote: post #63
crazygringo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this. If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).

That's like a minimum wage law. The flip side is that companies will be more guarded about releases. Can you live with that?

Absolutely, just like I can live with minimum wage.

And companies can still stop selling the thing. They just need to keep the cloud servers running and maintaining their integrations with the rest of their code.

If maintaining servers for 5 years is the tipping point for them to judge that the product won't be profitable and therefore won't release it, then yeah it doesn't sound like it should be worth selling in the first place.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#66

Post by inkcapmushroom »

esafak wrote: post #63
crazygringo wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I can't repeat this enough: there needs to be LEGISLATION against this. If a product needs cloud functionality to operate, there needs to be a legal minimum number of years (5?), and the company should be required to prominently advertise the length of time (so they can compete to guarantee for longer periods of time, like 10 years).

That's like a minimum wage law. The flip side is that companies will be more guarded about releases. Can you live with that?

I can live with companies not turning my 2-year-old device into a doorstop, yeah.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#67

Post by Elfener »

probably_wrong wrote: post #9

> What should I do with the device? > We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. It's not everyday that the manufacturer of a working product tells you "throw it in the trash". I wish someone would force them to make a recall instead.

That is ridiculous. At least they're not forcing people to throw away batteries.

Re: Spotify Car Thing will be discontinued

#70

Post by [deleted] »

neilv wrote: post #57
AlexandrB wrote: post #43

> Thank you for being on this journey with us, safe travels. I miss the era when I was a customer paying for a product. Now I'm apparently some kind of traveller that's on a journey with dozens of companies as they try to find local maxima of profit.

One benefit of LLMs is that you can now get copy like that without driving a poor human writer to alcoholism.

[deleted]
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