It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.
So I bought one of Spotify’s Car Things when they were flushing them after realizing nobody knew fuck all about them.
The device itself works alright for it’s purpose, but is basically just a fancy way to change tracks or answer your phone. There’s no GPS or messaging integration that you’d get with CarPlay. It doesn’t even tell the time. Still, it works and is useful.
A few months ago, Spotify sent out emails that, as of December, they will be bricking all of them and to dispose of them via whatever recycling service you have.
Pretty shitty that we’ve entered an era where companies can just destroy something you paid for because they want to… There need to be laws against this.
This is a good reason not to buy a kindle, or another one if you have one already. If they’re doing this they’ll just as easily steal the books I bought when they randomly decide to.
There was a bunch of noise over a book that they rescinded from Kindles a couple / few years ago. I don’t recall the details, but it made headlines.
A $2/mo subscription for a fucking screensaver?!
Digital photo frame as a service. Wow thanks big tech, so innovative, I can ask it about the weather.
“Now fetching the weather, but first a word from our sponsors!”
We have an older Echo Show in the kitchen. I hate it. It’s genuinely one of the single most ill-conceived, user-unfriendly products I’ve ever experienced. It’s straight up dog shit.
My wife originally picked it up because Amazon were flogging them for something like £30 as a loss-leader. Figured it would make a useful bedside clock and smart speaker in one. It’s a shitty clock, and absolutely fucking useless on the bedside because it keeps flashing shit up in the dark. You can’t load any photos on to it, so you’re stuck looking at whatever artwork/“tips”/ads it wants to show you.
I don’t understand how Amazon created a device that looks like a little picture frame, that would be an ideal bedside clock, and apparently at no point did they consider that people might want to use it like that.
We since got a Google thing that’s essentially the same device (free with an energy tariff), and y’know, Google did a good job with that thing. Just sits in the bedroom being a clock and smart speaker, dimming nicely when the lights are out, never advertising shit at us.
I use it as a Bluetooth speaker, which also sucks because it’ll randomly refuse to disconnect from my phone even though I did it through my phone’s settings. It’ll be disconnected, then I’ll be sat in the lounge and I’ll hear it reconnect, like some kind of cunt.
And they’ve programmed it to talk ALL THE FUCKING TIME. “NOW CONNECTED TO YOUR PHONE”. Yes, I fucking know it is, I just told you to do that.
It is legitimately the worst bit of tech I’ve ever used, and I’ve used a Virgin Media cable TV box.
for what it’s worth you can “alexa turn off the screen” to help when it’s dark
Thanks for this tip. I had no idea this was an option.
The description of that device and subscription is so fucking stupid I’m not even mad. If you fell for it that hard, you deserve whatever they throw at you.
“You’re stupid so you deserve to be screwed over by massive corporations”. What a shitty take.
