It’s pretty cool how things we purchase can just lose functionality at the drop of a hat.
Man, Amazon is giving Google a run for their money on enshittification and product cancellation.
This is more hilarious because the spy device not only cost more for the ability to show you photos, but it ALSO had a subscription fee to do so on top of that.
I’m completely befuddled as to what the hell they were thinking, and why they think replacing family pictures with more ads is somehow going to make people do anything other than Ron Swanson these stupid things into the nearest dumpster.
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.
In case you didn’t know, you can contact support. D get a credit to your Spotify subscription, usually in the amount that you paid for the Car Thing. You’ll just need your receipt.
Yes. And also be careful when you’re shopping.
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!”
Some people really are that dumb. I guess the silver lining is that there weren’t enough dumb people to keep this dumb service alive.
Don’t forget the spyware
Samsung already did this for their Frame TV, and charged around $5.99/month
Samsung Art Store | Art For The Frame TV | Samsung US - https://www.samsung.com/us/televisions-home-theater/tvs/the-frame/digital-art-store/
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.
There really should be a Bluetooth setting for “do not auto connect me.” My car does this too, I wear bluetooth headphones a lot and for short to medium car trips it’s not worth it to have to connect and put my headphones back only to pull them back out and reconnect after I arrive, I’d rather just listen to headphones the whole time, but my car waits until I’ve turned on the car and pulled out of the driveway to auto connect against my wishes.
Sadly I don’t think bluetooth was really designed for how interconnected it has become. I’m still annoyed bluetooth multi-point is so broken :/, rather than interviewing multiple audio sources to the same speaker it just force mutes one when the other comes and at least for my momentum 4s I don’t see an option to set the priority or suppress this.
Bluetooth is definitely due for an overhaul.
The way multiple connections are managed at the moment is woefully inadequate (when the devices even support it).
Hah mine too. Playing a game on my laptop. Pull up my phone. Browse to a webpage. My headphones “OH YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO THE AD ON THIS PAGE ON YOUR PHONE OK SURE RIGHT NOW ONLY AD ONLY AD”
Fuuuuckkkk
I’m really sorry you have to share a home with that shitty device. Maybe break a window, mess up the place, and throw it away and pretend it was the only item stolen.
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.
All of which is to say, once I finally get around to picking up a half way reasonable Bluetooth speaker for the kitchen I’m putting a fucking hammer through that fucking show. Useless lump of crap.
i remember when virgin media first used tivo boxes. was a simpler time
In September of 2023, Amazon announced the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition. It looked just like the regular Echo Show 8 smart display/speaker but cost $10 more. Why? Because of its ability to show photos on the home screen for as long as you want—if you signed up for a $2 monthly subscription to Amazon’s PhotosPlus. Now, about a year after releasing the Echo Show 8 Photos Edition, Amazon is announcing that it’s discontinuing PhotosPlus. That means Echo Show 8 Photos Edition users will be forced to see ads instead of their beloved pics.
i’m sorry but if you were enough of a rube to sign up for a $2/mo subscription for that then this might be darwinistic capitalism
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Clearly not enough people were. I’m taking this as a W for the common man
Oh look, more e-waste.
Companies should be forced to pay per pound of their shit that people throw away before a certain time
time to open fraud complaints with your credit card company
Now you’re talkin’.
I’ve noticed that threatening to do that works extremely well with Amazon. they recently started charging $8 for a UPS pickup when you do a return, and all I have to do is tell them that I will initiate a fraud complaint if they actually charge me for it and they just refund me
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.
They already did. 1984 of all books, too.
I only buy authors that refuse to DRM their work.
Jokes on them, i actually own my epubs
Gotta love Calibre.
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Agreed. Its really annoying since i love the Paperwhite. But I just don’t trust Amazon as a company.
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.
It was 1984. Surprise!
Just as a little tip, in the US if you switch your Echo’s language to US-CAN it displays way less ads :)
Those things have ads? Why would you intentionally buy an advertisement billboard for your house?
It’s a toss up, but it pretty much only shows just photo/link ads. The one that they’ve really been pushing recently is that Disney platformer game on the Switch for some reason.
Yea but you still willingly put a little billboard in your house and you even paid them to do it 🤷♂️
I love paying a faceless corporation that hates humans to remind me everyday that capitalism is killing me!
Sorry, what I meant was that the ads are extremely easy to ignore, and you can immediately swipe through them if you want to. I use mine exclusively as an alarm clock anyways.
Ah, similar trick works with some viruses. If you set the keyboard layout or timezone to Russian, the ransomware will not encrypt your files.
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.
You shouldn’t need a fucking subscription to display your photos on your hardware.
The subscription is for the 25gb cloud storage space… Of course a 64gb USB Stick would be cheaper and doesn’t rely on an online connection.
A picture frame with ads? My god Jim
Crap like this is why I stopped buying things.
Here’s to hoping the development of a good local replacement from Home Assistant. Like the Lenovo teams screen thing.
mhm, is there a way to root the echo show?
I kinda doubt it, since Fire TVs can’t be. Then again, FireOS is just a remux of Android. Edit: it seems like Echo Shows can in fact be rooted, but it’s a difficult process. Side-loading seems to be the easier option in this case. XDA Forums link: https://xdaforums.com/f/amazon-echo.6148/
oh nice, thanks for the link. I gonna scourge that forum now.
