People in the internet-connected car device world have known this has been coming for a long time, so I don’t think this is exactly shocking news to most people, but as of yesterday, Spotify’s Car Thing music-playing device is now a useless chunk of plastic. The device was designed to allow cars without CarPlay or Android Auto or other such systems to easily access and play Spotify music in the car, in a way that’s easier than fumbling with the phone interface. It even included an actual knob! But it’s dead now. And everyone who bought one is now kind of screwed. But there’s hope!
Spotify introduced the device in February of 2022, and discontinued it in July of that same year, due to low demand, supply chain issues, and, I suspect, some executive’s whim, though they remained for sale. Here’s what Spotify told TechCrunch at the time:
“Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to stop further production of Car Thing units. Existing devices will perform as intended. This initiative has unlocked helpful learnings, and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio.”
Well, the part about the devices performing “as intended” ended yesterday, leaving many customers who actually liked using a device they paid $90 for out in the cold.
(image: Spotify)
Plenty of people are, of course, pissed, and seeing notices like these on their Car Thing screens isn’t helping:
As far as Spotify is concerned, here’s what you can do: throw it out.
From Spotify’s support site:
We recommend resetting your Car Thing to factory settings and safely disposing of your device following local electronic waste guidelines. Contact your state or local waste disposal department to determine how to dispose of or recycle Car Thing in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.
That’s great, thanks, Spotify, bang-up job. Way to go. You made the perfect product! Sell it, then tell people to throw it away! There is a way to apply to get a refund, but you only have until January 14, 2025 to do it. So, if you have one, you have about a month to not be screwed out of $90.
What’s especially maddening is that this thing didn’t have to be this way. Fundamentally, the Car Thing was just a Bluetooth device, and as such could have been something that just connected to the existing and still functional Spotify phone app and offered a new way to control that. The fact that this Car Thing has to access the internet independently seems absurd, in hindsight.
Inside, the Car Thing is a Linux-based computer and happily, people have been hacking them for some time now, so if you have one, there is hope. Here’s a video showing some of what can be done:
The Car Thing isn’t an especially capable computing platform, and it was definitely enough for the job it was intended to do, playing music. Clever people have developed entirely new software that restores all of its previous capabilities and beyond, but even with all this it’s not easy to restore its ability to run in a car, at least not with some supplemental computing help via a Rasberry Pi or something, because Spotify has not opened up any means for the Car Thing to connect to a phone running Spotify, which they could have. The bricking of all these devices was a design choice that Spotify made, and not necessarily an inherent limitation. It’s like this because that’s what Spotify wanted.
There’s a big takeaway here, a lesson that we’d do well to learn: don’t trust hardware that needs to call home to some server to work. At least not if you’d like to be the one who decides how and how long you get to use that hardware. This goes for systems built into car infotainment and other systems, too, and all those car feature-subscription services nobody wants.
We’ve already seen issues from Subarus that keep trying to access now-defunct 3G cellular networks and draining their own batteries in the process, and the future may certainly reveal more and more situations like these, where all manner of functionality is lost because some form of handshaking to a remote computer is no longer available.
Now is the time that we, as car owners, users, and lovers need to speak up and make it clear that we don’t want to buy things that some company can just suddenly decide won’t work anymore. The Spotify Car Thing is just a very public example of how this can happen, and I think we can all agree that it, you know, sucks.
“don’t trust hardware that needs to call home to some server to work.”
ONE MORE TIME FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
I despise smart devices for this reason. They’re more expensive initially and can be bricked on a whim.
I’d rather get punched in the nuts than have to think about the firmware on my light bulbs.
I am so tired of the outrage I should muster daily. This trend started post dot.com boom when companies realized that saas was a gold mine. The days when I would buy professional software on a cd / dvd / betamax, pay once and use it forever, are now gone. Adobe, Autodesk and so on continue their subscription model and the frustration is daily. For example when Pantone and Adobe had their falling out and decided not to play together anymore leaving professionals stranded worldwide. The Car Thing is nothing compared to having to rebuild pantone to cmyk conversions for hundreds of color documents, that costs a fortune in labor costs. Or not being to repair your damn tractor, etc. and yet I don’t see outrage on social media or people in the streets.
There are so many examples of companies trying to erode the very concept of owning things. In my industry we had so many CAD users holding onto very old hardware because it’s where their last fully owned AutoCAD was installed and working. As our software for engineering ceased being supported on Win XP, they pitched a fit because they couldn’t get a newer computer and run their AutoCAD which was arguably more important to their business.