Discontinuing Spotify’s Car Thing
Chris Welch (via John Gruber):
Spotify’s brief attempt at being a hardware company wasn’t all that successful: the company stopped producing its Car Thing dashboard accessory less than a year after it went on sale to the public. And now, two years later, the device is about to be rendered completely inoperable. Customers who bought the Car Thing are receiving emails warning that it will stop working altogether as of December 9th.
Scharon Harding (via Hacker News):
Spotify will refund owners of Car Thing, its Spotify-playing device that mounts to car dashboards, Ars Technica confirmed today.
[…]
As reported by Billboard, on May 28, three people filed a lawsuit [PDF] that seeks class-action certification (and cites Ars) against Spotify. It claims that people “would not have purchased a Car Thing if they knew that Spotify would stop supporting the product within just a few months or years of purchase.” It also states that “Spotify has stated that it will not refund, or replace, the Car Thing.”
First, the company could have updated the devices it didn’t want to support any longer to open them up to third-party firmware so that these paid-for pieces of hardware had some sort of use other than taking up room at your local landfill, but Spotify is apparently unwilling to do so.
[…]
In fact, the company told tech publications days ago that the whole point of the Car Thing was to serve as market research for the company as to how people listen to content in their cars. In other words, those who bought the devices were paying for the pleasure of serving as Spotify’s lab rats, which is a horrible look for the company when it decided refunds wouldn’t be a thing.
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"First, the company could have updated the devices it didn’t want to support any longer to open them up to third-party firmware"
They did: https://github.com/spsgsb/
